Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 2003, pages 14-15

Special Report

 

The Tragic Saga of Iraq's National Museum

 

By Richard H. Curtiss

I had almost completed a year and a half of Arabic studies in 1963 when I was asked to go to Baghdad "for a few days." My task was to assess the need for a U.S. Information Agency officer there. After a long period of quiescence, the Iraqis were suddenly interested in having such an officer present for informational exchanges.

Baghdad had just emerged from a period of tumultuous upheaval in which the young King Faisal II had been murdered by an army officer named Abdul-Karim Kassim. Kassim had seized the opportunity to move a large part of the Iraqi army from the east of the country to its western border with Jordan, which was also in a state of upheaval at the time.

Kassim had his own political agenda, but it seemed virtually unintelligible to anyone but himself. After four years of turbulence, Kassim was murdered and Iraq's political parties seemed to lean toward Ba'athist and leftist elements. It became quickly apparent that there was plenty of work to do and, after two months of determining that another upheaval was not imminent, I went to Beirut and spent a month preparing my family to move to Iraq.

Astonishingly, in the month I spent away from Baghdad, amazing transformations had already begun to take place. Shi'i residents had been forced from locales all over the country back into the marshes in southern Iraq from whence they originally came. All of the mud and straw houses they left behind had been bulldozed away.

To my surprise, soon after re-entering Baghdad another coup began. Or, more accurately, two coups began. This time the Ba'athists were deposed, and rumor had it that several hundred of them were put in railroad cars and left in the blazing Baghdad sun until virtually all had died.

While this was going on, a total curfew was imposed from nightfall until morning, over a period of at least two weeks. Even in the daytime only members of Baghdad's diplomatic corps were allowed to move back and forth. Other citizens were simply forced to stay at home. I found that, since I had an office car, I could pick up my essential staff members and we could work for about half a day before everyone had to be driven home to meet the nighttime curfew.

During the days this curfew was in effect, I witnessed some startling changes. Each day I noticed that more and more of the young saplings in the city had been uprooted, for no apparent reason. I could only guess that the population, fearful of traveling outside the city to gather firewood, had resorted to using these young trees until the curfew was lifted.

By the end of the curfew period, although it was not very long, most of these trees had been destroyed. It was just a small taste of how quickly disorder followed political upheaval in such a strictly controlled atmosphere.

Another occurrence in the midst of these political events was the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. Baghdad diplomats and citizens concerned with American events held a public memorial service, filling a very large auditorium.

A day or two later, my wife was on the way to visit an American friend, but was halted when a large Iraqi tank, engaged in firing across the river, moved forward to block her car's path. A very young tank officer clambered down and walked over to my wife's car. Donna, scared out of her wits, sat there frozen—until the officer spoke.

"We are all so sorry to hear about your young president," he told her. "Let me please offer my condolences."

He then climbed back up into the tank, moved out of her way and resumed firing at his unseen enemy. My wife broke into tears, and couldn't stop until reaching her destination. This was the sort of unexpected event—sometimes touching, sometimes alarming, and sometimes both—that frequently took place in my two years in Baghdad.

Even before arriving in Iraq I was interested in archeology, and sometimes wrote feature stories related to the subject. During each winter's two major archeological digs—in one of Iraq's 10,000 ancient sites—I generally came along to watch the scientists divide their findings into two roughly equal groups.

The Iraqi director of antiquities would then examine the groups and pick one to be enshrined in the National Museum. The American archeologists would take the other group back to the University of Pennsylvania or the University of Chicago for research. If an item was one-of-a-kind, it automatically went to the Iraqi Museum. This sharing of excavation finds has since ended, with everything sent to Iraqi museums.

Eventually the museum obtained much grander quarters. Given the inherently unstable political situation, moreover, the archeological treasures were sometimes taken to safer locations, such as bank vaults, for protection.

I returned to Baghdad several times before the 1991 Gulf war. The Iraqi treasures were so unique that I could never get enough of them.

As the most recent American attack on Iraq began, I suppose I should have been able to predict the tragic dŽnouement. In fact, individuals in museums and universities around the world were deeply concerned about safeguarding Iraq's cultural heritage. A formal warning was prepared by concerned archeologists, but apparently fell on deaf ears.

Baghdad's museums, galleries and libraries are now empty shells, gutted in a wave of looting that also encompassed government ministries, schools and hospitals. Although the open looting lasted only two days, the looters came in unending waves. Somewhere in that time period—probably almost immediately after the shooting had begun to die down—the worst damage was done in the National Museum.

At least 28 of the museum's galleries were completely ransacked. The thieves had keys to vaults where some of the most important artifacts were stored. Said Prof. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago, "the most important, best material" was taken by pros who "knew what they were doing." Then entered the mobs, who "just marauded."

"All gone, all gone," lamented one Iraqi museum employee. Looting and thefts also caused losses elsewhere in Baghdad. At the Saddam Center for Manuscripts, Arabic texts from 900 to 1200 A.D. were stolen or burned, as were archives of the Awkaf religious center.

The losses include texts inscribed with the story of peoples common to every classroom: Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Parthians, Jews, Sassanians and Arabs. At Baghdad's Museum of Fine Arts, 20th-century paintings were also burned. A museum in Mosul, in northern Iraq, was also looted, but the losses there were not as significant.

"It didn't have to happen," said Martin Sullivan, former chair of the 11-member President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property, who resigned after the results of the looting were known. Two other committee members, Gary Vikan and Richard S. Lanier, also resigned over the looting. "In a pre-emptive war," Sullivan asserts, "that's the kind of thing you should have planned for."

Despite that, said William R. Polk, director of the U.S.-based W. P. Carey Foundation, upon entering the museum on the eve of the American invasion, it was evident that "little had been done to protect the collected works."

In the words of New York Times correspondent John F. Burns, the looting of Baghdad's museums is "to be reckoned as one of the greatest cultural disasters in recent Middle Eastern history."

This cultural catastrophe will indeed live in infamy long after the relatively transitory events of Iraq's recent history. But the blame is shared by all who should have known better.

Why weren't the statues, reliefs and manuscripts safeguarded as the American attack seemed imminent? Why weren't U.S. authorities prepared to ensure the museum's safety? Why didn't Iraqi archeologists stay on duty even as the fighting began? And, finally, why didn't American troops stop the assailants, whether professional thieves or casual looters?

According to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, agents have been assigned in teams to capture thieves, recover stolen artifacts and track sales "on both the open and black markets." In addition, UNESCO has established a special fund for the Iraqi Cultural Heritage to help pay for emergency measures, with pledges in the millions of dollars from Italy, Qatar, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Egypt. In a somewhat heartening development, many Iraqis have begun returning stolen items to local mosques following appeals by imams to do so.

There is really nothing that one can say after the damage has been done. Nor is there any universal lesson to be learned from this unique catastrophe. The damage has been done, and the entire world is immeasurably poorer because of it.

Richard H. Curtiss is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

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