Posted on 04/14/2003 2:40:24 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
BAGHDAD, 15 April 2003 So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then came the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sack of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents including the old royal archives of Iraq were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the Islamic Library of Qurans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze. I saw the looters.
One of them cursed me when I tried to reclaim a book of Islamic law from a boy who could have been no more than 10 years old. Amid the ashes of hundreds of years of Iraqi history, I found just one file blowing in the wind outside: Pages and pages of handwritten letters between the court of Sherif Hussein of Makkah who started the Arab revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia and the Ottoman rulers of Baghdad.
And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy yard they blew, letters of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands for ammunition for Ottoman troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks on pilgrims, all of them in delicate hand-written Arabic script. I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraqs written history. But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Quranic library of the ministry, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased.
Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed? When I caught sight of the Quranic library burning there were flames 100 feet high bursting from the windows I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines civil affairs bureau, to report what I had seen. An officer shouted to a colleague that this guy says some Biblical (sic) library is on fire. I gave the map location, the precise name in Arabic and English of the fire, I said that the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasnt an American at the scene and the flames were now shooting 200 feet into the air.
There was a time when the Arabs said that their books were written in Cairo, printed in Beirut and read in Baghdad. Now they burn libraries in Baghdad. In the National Archives were not just the Ottoman records of the caliphate, but even the dark years of the countrys modern history, hand-written accounts of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, an entire library of Western newspapers bound volumes of the Financial Times were lying on the pavement and microfiche copies of Arabic newspapers going back to the early 1900s.
I live is Washington DC and was wondering if the museums on the mall would be pass up by thieves (Ali-Baba's) if all events were the same.
Well, I dont think so! The Hope Diamond would be the first item to go.
I believe evil people are the same all over the world now because of air travel and communications.
Good Luck...Hmmmmm...I wonder....
45.52 carats The Hope Diamond--the world's largest deep blue diamond--is more than a billion years old. It formed deep within the Earth and was carried by a volcanic eruption to the surface in what is now India. Since the Hope Diamond was found in the early 1600s, it has crossed oceans and continents and passed from kings to commoners.
It has been stolen and recovered, sold and resold, cut and recut. Through it all, the diamond's value increased. In 1958, Harry Winston donated the Hope Diamond to the Museum, and it now belongs to the people of the United States.
Visit the Museum to learn more about the dramatic interactions between people and this diamond, and about its natural history. Visit the Janet Annenberg Hooker Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals which opened in September, 1997.
I was wondering if the staff decided it was a good time to make a few bucks in the antiquities market. As someone pointed out, the staff had months to pack up the valuables and put them in a safe place. Curious they didn't do it.
In "normal" wars the victors burn down the losers' towns, steal their valuables and rape their women. When it's an American war the loser's do all of the above, and the victors catch hell for not stopping them. If it wan't so sad, it would be funny.
If anything good is to come out of this, I hope that events like this inspire curators and scholars and librarians the world over to review the events and try to draw up some more effective procedures to follow when war seems to be on the horizon to get these kinds of materials to safe shelter.
LOL
But the image of Fisk silhouetted against the flames, howling dismally like a kicked dog over the loss of the sacred written treasures of his beloved Islam, is delectable enough to make me think it *might* be something for which it *would* be worth burning a library...
Waste of good toilet paper.
If you really mean that, now I know what Fisk meant when he made reference to "Year Zero." Most of the regimes in human history have been "oppressive and murderous," by American standards. Yet, if we burned all the records and writings from all those regimes, there really would be no written history or museums at all. It'd be as if there had been no earth, no men, no events prior to 1776 (Year Zero). Isn't that like Orwell's "memory hole" in his book _1984_?
I don't mean to come down on you, since I think you didn't really strenuously mean it, but I'm not sure I'd feel free if I knew that I wouldn't even be taught in school about "unfree" regimes of the past, or if I wanted to be a scholar or historian, I wouldn't be able to go to some archives and read those old documents for my research.
Yes, you're right that I didn't mean it strenuously. I wasn't advocating the destruction of libraries with ancient texts in them. As I said it's too bad this couldn't be done symbolically, like toppling statues and portraits of a brutal tyrrant.
But the slums of Baghdad are worse than Haiti and Calcutta. I was trying to get inside the head of one of these slum dwellers who might have had a friend whose tongue was cut out of his mouth and then the body dropped off in the neighborhood to bleed to death in a pool of blood. It was probably a liberating moment in their minds when they set fire to a library.
I am not condoning it. But I think the rage is understandable. I don't think some one from the slums is interested in sitting down to tea and discussing the niceties of culture. For them it is a moment of rage and revenge through destruction. Not nice, but history is full of things that are not nice.
That's true--that sort of rebellion happens in a lot of places. I didn't know about the comparison to Haiti and Calcutta--was it always that way, or just worsened by the sanctions over the last decade? I'd heard that before Gulf War I broke out a decade ago, the Iraqis were modernizing and on the path to breaking out of Third World status.
One of the things that surprised me watching these news reports from Iraq was how many of the Iraqis speak English, and someone told me when I asked about it that Saddam had invested a lot of money in education for the Iraqis (free college, etc.). Again, that probably changed after the sanctions started and services started dropping off in quality over the years.
If you were an Arab Sunni Muslim and supported the Ba'ath socialist party, you did well in Saddam's regime and had acces to education. The slums are composed mostly of Shiite Muslims.
Most of the money went into Saddam's pocket, hence 43 palaces around the country. The elaborate ones with 15-ft chandeliers, marble floors, and gold toilets. He stashed billions outside the country in foreign bank accounts. I have seen estimates of $30 billion. Anyway, there is an attempt to track down this money and return it to Iraq to rebuild the country.
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Note: this topic is from 2003. |
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