Dear ARLIS colleagues,
We must make some kind of statement in protest to this wanton destruction of
Iraq's cultural heritage. Our government should not be in the business of
burning libraries and looting museums, or causing them to be burned and
looted. As librarians, we have a duty, I believe, to make a stand.
Individually, please write to your congressmen/women. Jointly... what can
we do? I don't feel we should stand by and do nothing.
Lauren
From a John Burns' article, NY Times:
Among other buildings afire or still smoldering in eastern Baghdad today
were the city hall, the Agriculture Ministry and - so thoroughly burned
that heat still radiated 50 paces from its front doors - the National
Library. Not far from the National Museum of Iraq, which was looted on
Thursday and Friday with the loss of almost all of its store of 170,000
artifacts, the library was considered another of the repositories of an
Iraqi civilization dating back at least 7,000 years.
By tonight, virtually nothing was left of the library and its tens of
thousands of old manuscripts and books, and of archives like Iraqi
newspapers tracing the country's turbulent history from the era of
Ottoman rule through to Mr. Hussein. Reading rooms and the stacks where
the collections were stored were reduced to smoking vistas of blackened
rubble.
Across the street, a lone American tank roared out of the monumental
gates of the Defense Ministry, untouched by the looters presumably
because they knew that the ministry, at least, would be under close
guard by American troops.
Almost as much as the civilian casualties from American bombs and tanks,
the destruction of the museum and the library has ignited passions
against American troops, for their failure to intervene. How far these
passions offset the widespread jubilation at the toppling of Mr. Hussein
is impossible to tell, in part because of the differing views within the
population. Along looters, many but not all of them from the
impoverished underclass, and especially from the slums of Saddam City,
the end of Mr. Hussein's government appears to have been greeted as an
absolute good.
But a different view emerges among Baghdad's professionals. Many of them
managed to elude the worst brutalities of Mr. Hussein, either because
they were members of the Baath Party, or were Sunni Muslims, or because,
as doctors, lawyers, engineers and university teachers, they made
themselves useful to the government and offered few challenges to its
survival. Among those people, the common view in recent days has been
the one expressed by protesters who gathered in the heat outside the
Palestine Hotel today, shouting abuse at the marines: that the cure has
proven worse than the disease - that having many of the city's principal
institutions laid to waste by looters has been too high a price for
freedom.
One exponent of that view is Gailan Ramiz, a Princeton-educated
political scientist at Baghdad University, who sought out reporters at
the hotel.
Dr. Ramiz, 62, had bitter words for Mr. Hussein, but he added: "I
believe the United States has committed an act of irresponsibility with
few parallels in history, with the looting of the National Museum, the
National Library and so many of the ministries. People are saying that
the U.S. wanted this - that it allowed all this to happen because it
wanted the symbolism of ordinary Iraqis attacking every last token of
Saddam Hussein's power."
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