The Washington Post
Thursday, April 17, 2003
Bush Panel Members Quit Over Looting
Cultural Advisers Say U.S. Military Could Have Prevented Museum Losses
By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Citing "the wanton and preventable destruction" of Iraq's National Museum
of Antiquities, the chairman of the President's Advisory Committee on
Cultural Property has submitted his resignation to President Bush.
Another of the committee's nine members is also resigning over the issue.
"While our military forces have displayed extraordinary precision and
restraint in deploying arms -- and apparently in securing the Oil Ministry
and oil fields -- they have been nothing short of impotent in failing
to attend to the protection of [Iraq's] cultural heritage," Martin E.
Sullivan wrote in the resignation letter that he sent Monday to the
White House.
Sullivan, 59, is the executive director of Historic St. Mary's City
Commission in Maryland. Since 1995 he also has chaired the advisory
committee, which seeks to harmonize U.S. import regulations with
the export restrictions of nations seeking to protect their cultural
patrimony. Acknowledging that his successor would soon be named,
Sullivan wrote, "From a practical perspective my resignation is simply
symbolic."
"The tragedy was foreseeable and preventable ... ," he wrote. "The
tragedy was not prevented, due to our nation's inaction."
Asked about the looting of antiquities at his press briefing Tuesday,
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said, "Looting is an unfortunate
thing. ... No one likes it. No one allows it. It happens, and it's
unfortunate. ... The United States is concerned about the museum in
Baghdad, and the president and the secretary of state and I have all
talked about it, and we are in the process of offering rewards for
people who will bring things back or to assist us in finding where
those things might be."
The second committee resignation came from Gary Vikan, director of
the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore -- who calls his action "similarly
symbolic." He said yesterday, "I had to do something." Armies have
been marching through the Fertile Crescent for several millennia,
and Baghdad has been sacked before. "But it hasn't been this bad,"
says Vikan, "for 700 years."
When the Mongols attacked in 1258 they put to the sword most of the
city's inhabitants. Perhaps as many as 2 million were slaughtered.
The killing took 40 days. It is said that so many manuscripts from
Baghdad's unequaled libraries were hurled into the Tigris that
the river ran black with ink.
Many provincial museums and Iraqi archaeological sites were also looted
during the 1991 Gulf War. Museums in Kuwait City were looted as well.
With this history in mind, Richard Moe, president of the National Trust
for Historic Preservation, wrote to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
to urge the United States to "safeguard" the "collection of the
National Museum of Iraq."
Yesterday, on behalf of the National Trust (motto: "Protecting the
Irreplaceable"), Moe wrote again, this time to Rumsfeld, to "strongly
urge the Coalition Forces to take full responsibility for safeguarding
Iraq's remaining museum collections and monuments."
"Officials at UNESCO estimate that about 150,000 items, with a total
value in the billions of dollars, [already] have been taken," Moe wrote.
"Losses include 4,000-year-old Sumerian gold jewelry, 5,000-year-old
tablets with some of the world's earliest known writing, and thousands
of other objects."
The United Nations cultural organization, UNESCO, is convening a meeting of
European and American antiquities experts today in Paris to discuss the
losses. UNESCO is also sending a team to Baghdad to assess the damage.
Meanwhile, an anonymous British benefactor has agreed to pay for six
conservators and three curators to start work restoring damaged artifacts
as soon as it is safe.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
________________________________________________________________________
Los Angeles Times
April 17, 2003
COMMENTARY
Method to Madness in Museum Looting
By Eleanor Robson
Eleanor Robson is a professor at All Souls College, Oxford, England,
and a council member of the British School of Archeology in Iraq.
It is now almost certain that at least some of the shocking despoliation
of the museums in Mosul and Baghdad was organized by Iraqi gangs taking
orders from foreign collectors.
The thieves knew what they were looking for. The breathtakingly
beautiful, 5,000-year-old Uruk vase has vanished, while a convincing
plaster-cast replica of the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (king of
Assyria 858-824 BC) remains unscathed in a sea of empty, shattered
display cases.
Card index files and computers were smashed and burned beyond repair
in a seemingly deliberate move to frustrate curators' attempts to
catalog the missing objects.
Around this central theft of high-profile objects was a huge penumbra of
opportunistic looting and violence. Storage cases were dragged out into
the street and passersby helped themselves. Objects on shelves were
wantonly smashed.
It is to be hoped that many of the smaller, less-valuable items will
be handed over to mosques and community centers as part of the general
amnesty on stolen goods. Many others will change hands for a few dollars
needed to buy food, water or medicine.
Cylinder seals, cuneiform tablets and ancient coins will leave the country
in suitcases and backpacks. The standard route out of Iraq is through
Israel to Switzerland and then to London, Paris and New York.
These items will appear for sale for $50 or $100 in antiques stores
all over the Middle East, Europe and North America or on EBay. The
unsuspecting or the unscrupulous will buy them as novelty Christmas
presents or coffee-table pieces.
In the years since the 1991 Gulf War, tens of thousands of small
antiquities left Iraq this way. About 4,000 were stolen from
Iraq's provincial museums during the uprisings in 1991, but most
were excavated illicitly from a handful of ancient sites that the
Iraqi archeological service was not able to protect.
As for the high-profile, high-value items taken by the organized thieves,
we may never see them again. They are too well known for anyone to risk
taking them to a reputable dealer or auction house. They will become
collateral in drug deals or remain hidden in bank vaults. Some of
the thefts may have been commissioned directly by collectors and will
go straight to their new "owners."
Other artifacts may be deliberately damaged so that they no longer
resemble their published photographs. Looters may chip off the nose
of a statue, for instance, so that it is different but still valuable.
Or they may use a hammer and chisel to erase the inscription from a piece,
much as a more mundane criminal might remove the serial number from a gun.
When these altered pieces are offered for sale on the open market, it
will be almost impossible to identify them and therefore to confiscate
and repatriate them.
The risks are worth it to criminal gangs. Ten years ago, a legally owned
Assyrian relief from 850 BC was auctioned at Christie's in London for
$11 million, at that time the highest price ever paid for an antiquity
at auction.
We need effective import and export bans on all antiquities, and we
need them now. Obviously that won't help with all the antiquities that
have been looted from Iraq. But it could prevent such contract looting
in the future.
Countries must abide by the 1970 Paris Convention of UNESCO, the
United Nations cultural organization, on prohibiting and preventing
the theft and exporting of cultural property.
In addition, countries should immediately pass laws providing for
confiscation at any national border. Customs and excise officers should
be trained in identifying and handling art objects to avoid such mistakes
as when British customs agents seized some Afghan statues last year
that they suspected carried drugs. There were no drugs, but the holes
the agents drilled to check for them mutilated the statues.
We can't completely restore Iraq's antiquities, but we can repatriate
some of them and prevent future crimes against the world's artistic
heritage.
______________________________________________________________________
Los Angeles Times
April 17, 2003
EDITORIAL
Restoring a Treasured Past
The hundreds of looters who smashed ancient ceramics, stripped display
cases and pocketed gold and other antiquities from the National Museum
of Iraq pillaged nothing less than records of the first human society.
Archeologists and art experts must strive for the best odds that some
of the treasures will be recovered and preserved. An unusual meeting
in Paris today is a start in that direction.
The looting, which began soon after American troops took control
of Baghdad, is considered one of the greatest cultural disasters in
recent Middle Eastern history. Mobs ransacked the museum's 28 galleries
along with vaults behind huge steel doors.
Gone are 80% of the museum's 170,000 priceless objects, including
5,000-year-old tablets believed to bear some of the earliest writing,
a 10,000-year-old calendar and a gold and ivory harp from Ur, the
birthplace of Abraham.
Reports of Iraqis stuffing gold coins and bracelets into their pockets,
smashing the heads off statues and piling ivory figurines and cuneiform
tablets into carts were as sickening as the loss was incalculable.
Recriminations swirl through the empty, hot galleries. Before the
war began, international researchers and art experts had beseeched
U.S. officials to protect museums and archeological digs with the same
vigilance they later directed toward Iraq's oil fields. In hindsight,
the Pentagon should have taken more care, expected more trouble. But
the real blame lies with the looters themselves, some of them said
to be part of well-organized gangs.
The museum staff locked many objects in underground vaults and bricked up
the vaults. But thieves carrying rifles and axes broke through walls,
smashed glass cases, popped open metal boxes and torched what they couldn't
pry away. Iraqi police who were supposed to guard the building simply fled.
The priority now is to determine what's missing and recover as much as
possible. The British Museum is sending a team of experts to Baghdad
to literally help pick up the pieces, assess the damage and possibly
lend the Iraqi museum items from its large Mesopotamian collection.
Perhaps the ad hoc Baghdad citizen committees that are stopping cars
and checking for loot will turn up museum items. Consistent with
international conventions that obligate nations to stop the theft
or pillage of "cultural property," museums and auction houses have
called for a moratorium on trading in Iraqi art items.
Today's meeting of archeologists in Paris, sponsored by UNESCO, the
United Nations' cultural arm, aims at forging consensus on steps to
prevent black market profiteering. Proposals could include rewards,
amnesty or both for those who return objects and tighter border and
port patrols to stop objects from moving out of Iraq to millionaires'
curio cases.
It's too late to prevent the cultural catastrophe that happened
in Baghdad. But the world can make a concerted effort to remedy
at least some of the damage.
____________________________________________________________________
The Washington Times
April 17, 2003
House Editorial
The thief of Baghdad
President Bush's war to liberate Iraq was such a success that naysayers
are scrambling to find any angle of criticism they can muster. For the
past week, Mr. Bush's critics among Arabs, Europeans and congressional
Democrats have screamed to high heaven about looting across Iraq following
the fall of Saddam. Speaking on behalf of the Blame America First crowd,
one Baghdad schoolteacher indicted the United States for damage to
Iraq's National Museum and National Library: "The modern Mongols, the
new Mongols, did that. The Americans did that."
The histrionics are nothing more than a tempest in a patcha pot. And
the facts are all wrong, too. As Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, has pointed out, Pentagon military planners went
out of their way not to target Iraq's cultural sites, which were not hit
by coalition bombing raids. All the ransacking of museums, libraries and
markets was at the hands of the country's own people. Trying to mitigate
the losses, U.S. forces are delivering millions in food and medical aid
and have offered rewards for returned art and artifacts. Thanks to
widespread deployment of American troops, crime is quickly abating.
A couple days of spontaneous rambunctiousness after a long tyranny
should be kept in perspective -- especially when compared to the
systematic plunder of Iraq's riches by Saddam's inner circle. Because of
the centralization of the dictator's government, select Iraqi officials
and members of Saddam's family had the ability to empty bank accounts
of ordinary citizens for the leaders' benefit. Countless thousands of
Iraqis were robbed of their life's savings during the last gasps of
the old order.
As Britain's Guardian newspaper reported yesterday, between $5 billion
and $40 billion in Iraqi assets were transferred through European banks to
obscure Middle Eastern accounts in the days before the regime's collapse.
As hard as it may be to believe, this is a drop in the bucket compared to
what the Butcher of Baghdad stole over his entire reign.
In Douglas Fairbanks's 1924 silent-screen classic, "The Thief of Baghdad,"
magic armies descend on the city to depose a corrupt usurper and reinstall
the rightful sovereign. The indiscretions of the liberator -- a petty
thief made good -- are overlooked in light of the restoration of peace
he brought about. While the comparison is imperfect, as mannerly coalition
forces cannot be equated to Fairbanks's pickpocket, the old Hollywood
screenplay does offer some lessons for today. Getting rid of a tyrant
isn't easy, and it's certainly not pretty -- but the short-term problems
of regime change are worth the long-term comfort and security of freedom.
Recent looting is indeed regrettable, but Iraqis can rest assured that
life will be better, now that the modern Thief of Baghdad is gone forever.
Copyright © 2003 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
________________________________________________________________________
New York Times
April 17, 2003
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.
________________________________________________________________________
New York Times
April 17, 2003
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 world'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.
________________________________________________________________________
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