Experts: Looters Had Keys to Iraq Museum

PARIS (AP) - Experts say that what seemed like random looting in Baghdad - the pillaging of treasures dating back 5,000 years in human history - was in fact a carefully planned theft, and the stolen artifacts may already be in the system that traffics in stolen artifacts to collectors in Europe, the United States and Japan.

FBI agents, meanwhile, have been sent to Iraq to help recover the stolen antiquities, while in Washington, three members of the White House Cultural Property Advisory Committee resigned to protest the looting, which they blamed on inaction on the part of the United States.

``It looks as if part of the theft was a very, very deliberate, planned action,'' said McGuire Gibson, president of the American Association for Research in Baghdad.

``They were able to obtain keys from somewhere for the vaults and were able to take out the very important, the very best material,'' Gibson said. ``I have a suspicion it was organized outside the country. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was.''

Gibson was among 30 art experts and cultural historians assembled by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to assess the damage to Iraq's heritage in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion.

The bandits were so efficient at emptying Iraqi libraries and Baghdad's National museums that reports have already surfaced of artifacts appearing on the black market, some experts said.

The FBI is putting alerts on the international police network about the stolen pieces and scanning the Internet to see if any are advertised for sale.

``We are firmly committed to doing whatever we can to secure these treasures to the people of Iraq,'' FBI Director Robert Mueller said.

But it remained unclear exactly what was gone and what survived the looting and thievery. With many museum records now in ashes and access to Iraq still cut off, it could take weeks or months to find out.

Establishing a database was a key to finding out what had survived, and tracking down what was stolen, the experts said.

Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, said some of the greatest treasures - including gold jewelry of the Assyrian queens - were placed in the vaults of the national bank after the 1991 Gulf War. There was no information on whether those items remained inside.

It was unknown whether one of its greatest treasures of the looted National Museum, tablets containing Hammurabi's Code - one of the earliest codes of law - were there when the looting began. The museum is one of the most important and largest repositories of antiquities in the Middle East.

Before the war, Iraq's antiquities' authorities gathered artifacts from around the country and moved them to Baghdad's museum, assuming it would not be bombed, Gibson said.

The network of antiquities dealing in Iraq is well-developed, escalating far beyond the ability of authorities to stop it after the 1991 Gulf War. Thousands of antiquities had disappeared from the country even before the current war.

The trafficking feeds off Iraqi poverty, said Salma El Radi, an Iraqi archaeologist. ``If you need to feed your family and the only way to do it is by looting a site, you're going to loot a site,'' El Radi said.

Much anger has been directed at U.S. troops, who stood by and watched as Iraq's treasures were carted off.

In Washington, the three members of the White House Cultural Property Advisory Committee said they resigned in disappointment that the U.S. military failed to protect Iraq's historical treasures.

``The tragedy was not prevented, due to our nation's inaction,'' Martin E. Sullivan, the committee's chairman, wrote in his letter of resignation.

The other two members who resigned were Richard S. Lanier and Gary Vikan. All three had been appointed by former President Clinton.

White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said the United States worked hard to preserve Iraq's resources.

Koichiro Matsuura, director-general of Paris-based UNESCO, called for a U.N. resolution imposing a temporary embargo on trade in Iraqi antiquities. Such a resolution would also call for the return of such items to Iraq, he said.

umour and Fact at Baghdad Museum
Free Britannia journal ^ | April 18, 2003) | Anat Tcherikover
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/895943/posts

Posted on 04/18/2003 11:46 AM PDT by quidnunc

Media outlets worldwide lament the fate of Iraq's National Museum at Baghdad, said to have been looted on 12 April. All refer to the important archaeological treasures, now nowhere to be seen, and quote museum officials on the horrors of the marauding mob. The Americans are generally blamed for failing to protect the museum. A petition in this matter, organized by Cambridge and Oxford scholars, has already gone to UNESCO (14 April).

Only a few reporters have detected some strange flaws in this story. In the Daily Telegraph (14 April), David Blair observes that the heavy steel doors of the vaults, about one foot thick, show no sign of having been forced open. He also reminds his readers that "Saddam's regime is thought to have removed some artefacts from the museum before the onset of the war". Similarly in the New York Times (12 April), John Burns notes that it remains unclear whether some of the museum's treasures "had been locked away for safekeeping elsewhere before the looting, or seized for private display in one of Mr. Hussein's myriad palaces."

A cursory check of older reports on the Baghdad Museum, published long before the war, in fact upholds these suspicions and more beside. An article by Alistair Lyon, published in www.museum-security.org on 2 December 1998, describes the state of the museum at that time: "Dusty showcases that once glowed with treasures from ancient Mesopotamian cultures now lie empty in the locked rooms of the Iraqi Museum. The Iraqi authorities removed the finest jewellery, statues, pottery and other prized artefacts and stored them in secret caches during the 1990-91 Gulf crisis. Even I don't know where they are, said Donny Youkhanna, assistant director of the museum'. Significantly, Mr. Youkhanna is described in more recent sources as Iraq's chief archaeologist, director general of Iraq’s Antiquities Research Department. If he did not know where the items were in 1998, who did?

On 11 May 2000, CNN's correspondent Jane Arraf reported on the reopening of Baghdad Museum on the occasion of Saddam's birthday. This is how the article concludes: "The museum had been infested with termites, and years of storage have damaged the artwork. … Some of the more spectacular pieces, treasures from the royal tombs in Ur and recent excavations from Nimrod, won't be on exhibit until summer." Ms Arraf was no doubt quoting the Iraqi authorities on the intention to exhibit these treasures, indirectly informing us that they were nowhere to be seen at the time.

With this information at hand, it is instructive to examine the precise sources on the supposedly total looting of 12 April 2003. Both the Telegraph and the New York Times articles say that the story came from a museum official, who may or may not be telling all. There is no corroboration from any other direct witness. It is equally instructive to examine the bulk of photographs taken in the museum between 12 April and 15 April. All show disarrayed storage spaces, which easily fit with CNN's description of the desolation incurred by May 2000. One photograph, reproduced here, shows empty glass showcases. The caption given to this photo by Agence France Presse claims "empty shelves after a mob of looters ransacked and looted Iraq's largest archeological museum in Baghdad". However, this cannot be true because the glass of the showcases is intact. Clearly, these showcases were emptied in an orderly fashion without being broken, which fits best the evidence of 1998, given above.

Surely, the misfortunes of the Baghdad museum are a matter for concern, but likewise the misfortunes of the press on this issue during the chaotic days of 12-15 April 2003.

Sources:

1. Alistair Lyon's article of 1998: http://www.museum-security.org/reports/07798.html#11

2. Sources mentioning Mr. Youkhanna's poistion as chief archaeologist: http://www.cairotimes.com/content/archiv06/iraq.html http://www.geocities.com/iraqinfo/index.html?page=/iraqinfo/sum/articles/graves.html

3. CNN's article of 2000: http://www.cnn.com/2000/STYLE/arts/05/11/iraq.museum/

4. Photographs of Baghdad museum 12-15 April 2003: http://search.news.yahoo.com/search/news/?adv=1&p=baghdad+museum&ei=UTF-8&c=news_photos&o=a&s=&n=20&2=3&3=

5. Academic petition to UNESCO, 14 April 2003, http://users.ox.ac.uk/~wolf0126/petition.html and its background website: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~wolf0126/index.html

6. NYT article of 12 April 2003: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/international/worldspecial/12CND-BAGH.html

7. Telegraph article of 14 April 2003: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2003%2F04%2F14%2Fwmus14.xml

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