Tuesday, April 29, 2003
'Iraqi loot greatest art disaster since WW II'
Associated Press London, April 29
Representatives of some of the world's great museums and UNESCO joined on Tuesday in an appeal to US authorities to seal the borders of Iraq to stop the flow of looted antiquities.
Delegates to the meeting at the British Museum also urged the UN Security Council to ban the trade in Iraqi artefacts. UNESCO, the UN cultural organization, said its director general, Koichiro Matsuura, would meet on Wednesday with Secretary-General Kofi Annan to press the case for a ban. "American control at the border is almost zero," said Donny George, research director of the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad. "Anyone can take anything and go out. They (the Americans) should control the border, they should check everything, because the bleeding of antiquities is still going on." George said he saw no US presence when he recently crossed the Iraqi-Jordanian border, but that Jordanian border officials said they had confiscated 12 boxes of objects and documents. He said that after US troops entered Baghdad earlier this month a staff member at the museum had begged them to park their tanks nearby to discourage looting.
"They told him they did not have orders for that. Was it done intentionally? I don't know," George said. "Moving a tank 50 to 60 meters (yards) to stand in front of the museum would have saved the world's heritage. You should ask them why they did not protect a place they knew contained the heritage of mankind."
The looting and vandalizing of Iraqi museums is the biggest disaster to affect any national art collection since the Second World War, the director of the British Museum said earlier. Neil MacGregor also told British Broadcasting Corp. radio it was "extraordinary" that American troops had been unable to prevent the pillaging of Iraq's priceless collections of Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian artefacts.
"This is without question the greatest disaster to a national collection since the Second World War, without question," said MacGregor. "Because Mesopotamia is the source of all urban civilization, it is a world disaster," he added.
MacGregor said after Tuesday's meeting that the British Museum had received "many offers of funding" from individuals and governments, and would oversee the training of experts to be sent to Iraq to help piece the country's archaeological heritage back together.
UNESCO said it would soon send a panel of experts to Iraq to begin compiling a database of the country's missing artefacts. The list would be shared with police around the world through Interpol, said the organization's assistant director-general, Mounir Bouchenaki.
Ancient Mesopotamia -- modern-day Iraq -- was the cradle of civilization, and Iraq's museums held priceless, millennia-old collections.
After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government earlier this month, looters stole and smashed priceless archaeological treasures from the National Museum in Baghdad. The museum in the northern city of Mosul also was pillaged, and Baghdad's Islamic Library, which holds one of the oldest surviving copies of the Quran, was set on fire. Many Iraqis criticized US troops for doing little to stop the theft, and MacGregor also questioned their apparent lack of action.
"It's very extraordinary ... that with American troops in Baghdad, American troops almost at the gates of the museum, this was allowed to happen," he said.
Experts from the Louvre in Paris, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Russia's Hermitage and the Berlin Museums also joined Tuesday's meeting to hear the report from the British Museum's Near East curator John Curtis, who returned Monday after a week in Iraq. MacGregor said it was unclear whether the looting had been carried out to order by thieves acting for private art collectors. "It's clear that there is a flourishing trade in illicit Mesopotamian antiquities, so I think a lot of it would have been stolen for the trade," he told the BBC. "That's not the same as for a specific collector."
US General Tommy Franks, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq, said Monday that Iraqis had begun to respond to American appeals to return the looted goods.
On Sunday the US-led coalition began broadcasting messages on radio offering rewards for the antiquities' return. The US Central Command said more than 100 items had been handed in, including priceless manuscripts, a 7,000-year-old vase and one of the oldest recorded bronze bas relief bulls.
© Hindustan Times Ltd. 2002. Reproduction in any form is prohibited without prior permission