For those who haven't seen today's New York Times and/or don't mind reading
opinion pieces on ARLIS-L! I apologize to the rest of you!
A Job for Unesco
By WILLIAM J. VANDEN HEUVEL
How do we repair the damage done? The meeting to be convened today by
Unesco, the United Nations' cultural arm, is a good start. But it is only a
start. The United States should ask the secretary general to give Unesco
temporary responsibility for the historic sites and museums of Iraq. The
United Nations should also convene a meeting of donor nations to establish a
fund to deal with the crisis.
Other actions are necessary. Qualified art restoration experts should be
sent to Iraq immediately. An amnesty on criminal charges should be announced
to allow the return of the looted property, most of which is probably still
in Baghdad; the United Nations should consider offering rewards for the
return of stolen treasures. Private sales of works taken from the museum and
other historic sites should be nullified and new transactions should be
regarded as serious criminal offenses.
The United States has a duty to lead and the United Nations should welcome
the opportunity to respond. Our government knew that something like this
could happen. Iraqi museums were plundered after the 1991 gulf war. An
American call for United Nations involvement would be a major first step in
repairing our relationship with old allies, in recognizing our
responsibility as an occupying power under the Geneva Conventions and in
showing the Iraqis that we respect their heritage as well as their
contemporary aspirations for a democratic country respectful of law and
order.
William J. vanden Heuvel is former deputy permanent representative of the
United States to the United Nations.
An Army for Art
By CONSTANCE LOWENTHAL and STEPHEN URICE
The looting of Iraq's national museum in Baghdad could have been prevented.
The American and British forces are clearly to blame for the destruction and
displacement of its cultural treasures. In fact, late last year, experts and
scholars started working with the State and Defense Departments to identify
key Iraqi cultural and archaeological sites and to have them removed from
lists of potential bombing targets. While the museum was not bombed, troops
failed to protect the building and its priceless contents from the chaos
that engulfed Baghdad last week.
At another time, in another war, the United States and its allies realized
that cultural property would be endangered by an invasion and acted to
minimize that damage. In the spring of 1943, when victory over Nazi Germany
was far from assured, the American military created what would become known
as the monuments, fine arts and archives section.
Art historians and scholars in the military worked throughout Europe to
prevent damage to cultural sites and art and to protect them after
hostilities ceased. Members of the section followed troops into war-torn
areas to find, collect and repatriate art stolen by the Nazis. They
continued their efforts until 1951.
In the wake of the Baghdad disaster, the Pentagon should reconstitute the
monuments section to advise on cultural property matters and assist local
museum personnel and site administrators in postwar Iraq and future
conflicts. As an integral part of the military, this group will help the
United States rebuild its reputation for respecting cultural property in
time of war.
This new force should be deployed to Iraq as soon as possible. The
collections at Iraq's national museum, vital to the return of tourism,
present a record of the region's ancient pre-eminence and comprise an
irreplaceable part of the heritagworld's cultural heritage. If recovered,
they would play a central role in building a vibrant future for Iraq.
Constance Lowenthal is a consultant on art-ownership disputes. Stephen Urice
is visiting lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs at Princeton.
Missing in Action
By BENJAMIN R. FOSTER and KAREN POLINGER FOSTER
When looters descended upon the Iraq Museum in Baghdad last week, they
despoiled one of the world's pre-eminent collection of artifacts from the
Tigris and Euphrates Valleys. Founded in 1923, the museum displayed
thousands of objects in a score of galleries, from prehistoric stone tools
to medieval manuscripts. The most important finds from archaeological
excavations in Iraq in the last 80 years were housed there, plus their
records and photographs. Tools and painted pottery bore witness to the
beginnings of human agriculture and settled life. Indeed, the whole range of
human productive endeavor for 5,000 years was there: sculpture, metal work,
glass, ceramic, ivory, textiles, furniture, jewelry, and parts of ancient
buildings. Inscriptions and documents told the story of peoples, states,
empires, and civilizations every school child can name: the Sumerians,
Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Parthians, Jews,
Sassanians and Arabs.
Only a few of the most famous objects and inscriptions in this enormous
collection have been published. The rest of a collection of more than
170,000 objects awaited study and publication, including a Babylonian
library whose cuneiform tablets told a creation and flood story closely
related to the one found in the Bible. That library is now scattered or
destroyed. And it was only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of
unread documents stored in the Iraq Museum.
We can only hope that Unesco and the Mesopotamian scholars meeting today in
Paris can find ways to recover artifacts like the ones on this page. For
now, we mourn both the loss of the treasures we knew and those we will never
know, all once painstakingly preserved in this great museum for us and for
future generations.
Benjamin R. Foster is professor of Assyriology and Babylonian literature and
curator of the Babylonian Collection at Yale. Karen Polinger Foster is a
lecturer in art history and Near Eastern civilization at Yale.
__________________________________________________________________
Mail submissions to [log in to unmask]
For information about joining ARLIS/NA see:
http://www.arlisna.org//membership.html
Send administrative matters (file requests, subscription requests, etc)
to [log in to unmask]
ARLIS-L Archives and subscription maintenance:
http://lsv.uky.edu/archives/arlis-l.html
Questions may be addressed to list owner (Kerri Scannell) at: [log in to unmask]
