[Media-watch] IRAQI MUSEUMS, LIBRARIES, ETC.: INTERNATIONAL PETITION]

[Zahera Harb]

 Subject: IRAQI MUSEUMS, LIBRARIES, ETC.: INTERNATIONAL PETITION] 
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2003 16:49:45 +0300 
From: "Jens Hanssen" 
 
Dear friends, 
In the space of the past few days, the National Museum, the House of 
Wisdom where the National Library, the National Archives and the rare 
manuscript collection are housed, were obliterated by looters in 
Baghdad. As a historian of the Ottoman Empire I am truly shocked and 
awed at this kind of national mnemocide that has taken place under 
the barrel of US guns. The National Museum was looted of an estimated 
50,000 irreplaceable artifacts dating back thousands of years; the 
National library and 
the National archives torched and hundreds of thousands of documents 
burnt in a 
frenzy of looting. Most devastating in all of this is the realization 
that all it took for the Americans to stop the plunder was to place 
one tank at the front entrance and a platoon of soldiers around each 
building. Even after pleas by a journalist to stop the on-going 
carnage, US military command in Baghdad refused to act. This erasure 
of Iraqi, Arab and world heritage is on a scale of a destruction of 
La Bibliothèque 
Nationale and the Louvre in a single day. What happened in Baghdad 
over the weekend is cultural genocide and responsibility for it must 
lie with the US. The failure to protect an occupied country's 
national heritage is a war crime under the Geneva Convention. A 
colleague, Juan Cole, professor of Middle East history, at the 
university of Michigan, has written the following on the matter: 

"The US forces were perfectly capable of guarding the *Oil Ministry* 
buildings, just by stationing a tank outside them. At one point for 
two hours looting of the Museum was deterred in a similar manner, but 
then the tank was inexplicably called back. It was not that the US 
military could not have performed this task because of continued 
insecurity. Some sort of decision was taken about what was important 
and what was not. I personally cannot escape the conclusion that this 
monumental tragedy for Iraq's national history was the result of 
Rumsfeld's willful ignoring of all the warnings received and the 
unilateralism with which the Anglo-American forces proceeded. I put 
most of the blame on the civilians at the head of the Department of 
Defense. I do not think any American can fully understand the 
emotional shock of it. Not only are thousands of antiquities gone, 
but so too are all the manuscripts and archival documents on which 
early modern and modern Iraqi history writing could have been based. 
Nor do I think the Iraqi intellectual class will soon forget or 
forgive this travesty. I suspect for the US to allow the looting of 
Iraq's archeological and manuscript heritage was in fact a 
contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. The US was the 
occupying power when the looting occurred, even if there were pockets 
of resistance (none to my knowledge have been alleged at the Museum 
site). It is certainly is a contravention of the 1954 Hague 
Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of 
Armed Conflict (http://www.icomos.org/hague/ ). In short, we can say 
of the complete loss of Iraqi national history: It was foreseen; it 
was preventable; it was horribly stupid and tragic; it will have long-
term negative effects on the Iraqi perception of the US role; and it 
contravened international law." That having been said, what actually 
went on inside the National library? In a recent eye-witness account 
of the destruction of these world heritage sites in the Independent 
(http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=397350
), Robert Fisk has asked the question why? Why were these 
institutions of learning a national memory targeted and looted in 
such a systematic way? The museum artifacts will be of immense value 
in the shadowy world of art dealers and museum agents. Indeed, a 
colleague at the Royal Ontario Museum here in Toronto has told me 
that the first artifact from Baghdad's national museum has already 
been sighted at a Paris auction on Monday! 
The American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP) reportedly contacted 
the Pentagon and the state department in Washington prior to the 
start of the invasion of Iraq. This in turn has alarmed academics to 
who have followed this group's lobbying to facilitate the import of 
Iraqi and other Near Eastern antiquities into the United States since 
its inception in 2001. Liam McDougall of the Sunday Herald has 
researched the membership of ACCP. It counts among its members 
collectors and lawyers linked to 
collections and exhibitions of Nazi loot. The president of the 
Archaeological Institute of American (AIA), Patty Gerstenblith has 
commented: "The ACCP's 
agenda is to encourage the collecting of antiquities through 
weakening the laws of archaeology-rich nations and eliminate national 
ownership of antiquities to allow for easier export."  
The lootings so far do not point into the direction of this group. 
However, it is improbably that the looting of the museum was the work 
of an ignorant mob. Apparently, computer indexes of the museum's 
inventory were deleted during the looting. Now this is not the work 
of an irate mob but suggests that a plan was underlying the crime. 
Without an index, it will be impossible to trace the origins of 
artifacts as they appear at auctions and in private collections. 
Moreover, the high-security building's vaults were opened not by 
explosions but from what we hear by a key. Again, I have a 
strong suspicion that the network of wealthy art dealers has made 
contacts in Baghdad long before the city was evacuated by the Iraqi 
army and its leaders. 
But why the burning of Ottoman documents, worthless to art collectors 
and antiquity dealers? Why destroy the raw material of Iraq's social 
history? Why burn sixteenth-century correspondences between the 
Baghdad governors with the Sublime Porte in Istanbul, eighteenth-
century taxation statistics and nineteenth-century Arabic newspapers? 
Only years of Ottoman language training and historical research would 
be able to bring the vitality of five hundred year of history. This 
week, half a millennium of world history has been willfully 
destroyed! Says Charles Tripp from the School of African and Oriental 
Studies in London: 
 
"This is really a terrible thing for Iraq," he said. "One of the 
problems has been establishing an identity, a place in history and in 
the future. If you lose those documents you are subject to remolding 
of history which will be extremely dangerous." 
How did the Pentagon react to the first questions regarding the 
mnemocide in Iraq? Characteristically, Secretary of defense, Donald 
Rumsfeld, dismissed the possibility of a military error of judgment: 
Today's issue of the New York Times quotes him as saying: "To try to 
pass off the fact of that unfortunate activity to a deficit in the 
war plan strikes me as a stretch." 
Yet, while the Pentagon did head the urgent pleas of archaeologists 
to include these buildings in their off-target list, the US 
government insisted that it gave no directives to protect the 
buildings in question and that "We leave such decisions to commanders 
on the scene." 
 
I urge you to circulate this message and the petition below as 
widely as possible! 
 
For more information see two articles in the New York Times:  
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/16/international/worldspecial/16MUSE.ht
ml 
 
Please sign the petition below. 
 
Solidarity, 
 
Jens 


 An "Urgent petition of international scholars of Mesopotamia 
and the Near East to the United Nations and UNESCO for the 
>>safeguarding of Iraqi cultural heritage" was presented on 14 April. 
It mentions libraries and universities as well as museums and 
archaeological sites. Additional signatures are still sought. The 
text of the petition, list of signatories and address for recording 
new ones are at http://users.ox.ac.uk/~wolf0126/petition.html 
  While it is doubtful what influence the UN and UNESCO can have, 
given  the attitudes of those now in control of Iraq, it may still be 
worthwhile to add our voices to the outcry. 
 
Geoffrey Roper 
 Islamic Bibliography Unit 
 Cambridge University Library 

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