TINAF 7:37 -- Memories of Nazi Art Looting in Iraq 2/2
Paul Kneisel
do bad things."
-- Donald Rumsfeld
Secretary of Defense
United States of America
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The Internet Anti-Fascist: Tuesday, 22 April 2003
Vol. 7, Number 37 (#770)
Memories of Nazi Art Looting in Iraq: Part 2
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01) LootingL American Style!
02) Al Jazeera, "Advisor resigns while US reacts to limit damage," 18 Apr
03
03) The Hindu, "Civilisation stripped of history," 17 Apr 03
04) Jane Shilling (The Times [of London]), "Iraq's looting of its own
past," 18 Apr 03
05) Robert Fisk (The Independent), "Islamic library burned to the ground,"
15 Apr 03
06) Ole Rothenborg [Swedish] Dagens Nyheter) trans. K. Rasumsson, "US
Forces Encourage Looting," 11 Apr 03
07) Rod Liddle (The Spectator), "The day of the jackals," 19 Apr 03
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01) LootingL American Style!
http://www.markfiore.com/animation/looting.html
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02) Advisor resigns while US reacts to limit damage
Al Jazeera
18 Apr 03
Under mounting pressure after the looting of Baghdads main museum,
Washington announced it sent FBI agents to Iraq to help recover the
priceless artifacts.
But the chairman and two members of President George W. Bushs cultural
advisory committee have stepped down in protest over what they say is the
United States failure to stop the looting of the museum.
US soldiers guard the national Iraqi museum in Baghdad, which was
ransacked by looters last week in the upheaval following the entry of US
troops into the city.
FBI Director Robert Mueller said agents had been sent to Iraq to
investigate the looting and help in improving security in cities where
widespread troubles have been reported since the fall of Saddam Husseins
regime.
"We are firmly committed to doing whatever we can to secure these treasures
for the people of Iraq," Mueller told a news conference, without specifying
how many agents were involved.
But in a letter addressed to Bush and dated on Monday, Martin Sullivan said
he was resigning as chairman of the Presidents advisory committee on
cultural property, a position he had held since 1995.
"The reports in recent days about the looting of Iraqs National Museum of
Antiquities and the destruction of countless artifacts that document the
cradle of Western civilization have troubled me deeply, a feeling that is
shared by many Americans," he wrote.
Describing the looting a "tragedy," Sullivan said that it was not prevented
"due to our nations inaction."
Baghdads museum was home to the worlds great collections of artifacts
from early Mesopotamian civilizations. It was ransacked by looters in the
upheaval following US troops entry into the city.
A source close to the advisory committee said two other members, Gary Vikan
and Richard Lanier were also quitting.
Sullivan is executive director of the historic Saint Marys city
commission, dedicated to one of the first British colonies in the state of
Maryland. Vikan is director of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore,
Maryland. Lanier is director of the Trust for Mutual Understanding in New
York.
The 11-member committee is comprised of experts and professionals from the
art world who are appointed three-year terms.
Critics have blamed US forces for failing to prevent the ransacking of the
capital and other cities.
The US government has offered rewards for the return of the items of
assistance in their recovery.
Among the lost items is a collection of around 80,000 cuneiform tablets
that contain examples of some of the worlds earliest writing. A 5,000
year-old Sumerian alabaster vase, known as the Warka vase, also
disappeared.
At a United Nations conference in Paris, experts said much of the looting
was carried out by organized gangs.
"It looks as if at least part of the theft was a very deliberate, planned
action," said McGuire Gibson, of Chicagos University Oriental Institute,
President of the American Association for Research in Baghdad.
Students at the University of Chicagos Oriental Institute, a centre of
research on the regions antiquities, transferred images of antiquities in
old Iraqi museum catalogues to the web, to enable border guards, art
dealers and others to more easily identify them
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02) Civilisation stripped of history
The Hindu
17 Apr 03
NEW DELHI -- On a day when UNESCO met in Paris to moot measures to salvage
what remains of Iraq's cultural treasures, archaeologists and historians
gathered here today to condemn the destruction of "the world's cultural
heritage'' in the wake of the occupation of Baghdad by the coalition
forces.
Brought together by SAHMAT, they issued an appeal; stating that "if there
are no courts yet to punish the real perpetrators of this crime, let us all
so act that the criminals will remain ever bound to the pillory in the eyes
of the civilised world despite all the state-of-the-art weaponry that they
might possess''.
The desecration of antiquities in Iraq, according to the ancient Indian
historian, D. N. Jha, was tantamount to obliterating the history of
humanity. "Iraq is often called the cradle of civilisation'', and the
coalition forces, he said, turned a Nelson's eye to large-scale looting of
the very institutions housing some of the most valued treasures of
humankind.
Also, according to Prof. Jha, the coalition forces had not only damaged the
history of humanity, but also struck at various religions by attacking Uruk
-- one of the oldest cities of the world -- as it was the birthplace of
Abraham who is revered by Christians, Muslims and Jews alike.
Of the view that humanity -- irrespective of national identities -- should
protect history and protest such pillaging of world heritage, the former
Secretary to the Union Department of Culture, Kapila Vatsayayan, wondered
why international conventions providing for the protection of the patrimony
of humanity had not been invoked in anticipation of such plunder.
Stating that the National Museum of Antiquities, Baghdad, was one of the
biggest repositories of culture, Ms. Vatsayayan warned against the
artefacts disappearing from circulation for a while and resurfacing in the
market for smuggled antiquities years later. To prevent this from
happening, she suggested that instead of penalising the marauders, they
should be encouraged to return them and assured amnesty.
While Ms. Vatsayayan maintained that the plunder of the National Museum,
the National Archives and the National Library did not appear to be a
spontaneous response to the overthrow of the Saddam regime, the former
Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, M. C. Joshi, went a
step further and said the looting could have been the conspiracy of antique
dealers.
Chipping in, the contemporary artist, Vivan Sundaram, said the cultural
institutions were such monolithic structures that the coalition forces
could have easily protected them had they the will to do so. Evidently, the
archaeologists and historians argued, the coalition forces were intent upon
stripping the ancient civilisation of its history.
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03) Iraq's looting of its own past
Jane Shilling (The Times [of London])
18 Apr 03
The theft and destruction of Iraq's museum treasures by the Iraqi people
may be their half-conscious attempt to hurt us, their assailants, in the
only way remaining to them
There is an awkward sort of moral accounting going on in the post-victory
sadness about Iraq. All of us, I suppose, are gripped with a sense of
dismay and an urgent feeling of wanting to do something about the frightful
scenes of human pathos that rise from the pages of our morning paper and
hover so disturbingly above the toast and marmalade and the lovely spring
sunshine slanting across the coffee cups: the ruined, stoic children; the
premature babies curled as though still in the womb; the angry, weeping
adults. Then again, most of us feel the same mysterious sense of doom --
as though this isnt merely something we are watching, but in some way our
shared loss -- when we read about the ruined treasures of Iraqs museums:
the 26 statues of Assyrian kings who had kept their intricately carved
heads on their shoulders for 2,000 years but now are all decapitated; the
gold bison-headed harp of Ur, the marble head of a woman from Warka, carved
3,000 years ago with the blank gaze of a tragic mask and the soft,
ambiguous mouth of a French film star -- Juliette Binoche, say, or
Emmanuelle Seigner.
Where are these things now? Smashed and ruined like the human debris of the
war, or spirited away to be sold to rich, acquisitive collectors, the proxy
thieves who can never share them with anyone, on account of their tainted
past, but must admire them -- gloat is probably the proper term -- in
private, with a furtive joy that must surely compromise the beauty of
something made, as art generally is, to give pleasure freely to whoever
happens to look at it.
Still, they are only things, these things. The loss of their heads may be
ruinous to their looks and their value, but it doesnt affect their
sensibility because they havent got one. Unlike the dismembered children,
they are not inconsolable with grief and bitterness at the loss of their
extremities and their companions. They return unmoved to the chaos from
which they were formed.
Dust to dust, they dont care.
This being the case, does the loss of them really matter? This week, the
Times recorded that Professor John Russell, of the Massachusetts College of
Art in Boston, shed tears over the devastation of Iraqs lost treasures,
mourning as though over lost souls. Is that all right? Is the loss of a
marble head as sad as the loss of a set of arms made of flesh? And is, say,
the theft this week of a couple of bits of Marilyn Monroes jewellery -- a
gold bangle and a ring with an initial "M" in diamond chips -- from an
exhibition at the County Hall gallery in London as sad, or sadder, or less
sad than any of the above?
What makes all this even more complicated is that the sack of Iraq was
carried out not by the invading hordes, who seem as far as one can tell to
have adhered both to the spirit and the letter of Lieutenant-Colonel Tim
Colllinss poetic pre-conflict admonition to his troops to respect the
ground on which they trod. Obviously, we all mind hugely if invaders smash
an indigenous culture -- vandals arent called that for nothing. But
perhaps there is a certain shift in entitlement if the smashing is done by
locals?
It is perfectly obvious that no one in the coalition, with its high moral
tone and its explicit claim to be the forces of civilisation, thought the
things at all important. The Times reported Eleanor Robson, of the
Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, as saying that the British School of
Archaeology in Iraq wrote repeatedly to the British Government, prewar,
expressing concern, and received no answer. Now the Culture Secretary,
Tessa Jowell, insists that the Government could not have predicted the
destruction.
Perhaps some of this ambiguity exists because of the uneasy relationship
that prevails in all cultures about the power of things. Even on the
frivolous level of the lifestyle pages there exists a disquiet about
possession. "Get rid of your clutter" is the axiom of feature-page
spirituality. It isnt just a media quirk. There was a report this week
describing the ring-road hermit of Wolverhampton, Josef Stawinoga, an 83-
year-old Polish war veteran who lives in a tent on the central reservation,
where he is tolerated with unusual humanity by Wolverhampton City Council,
and venerated by some of Wolverhamptons Asians, to whom his distancing
himself in old age from material goods and reliance on the kindness of
strangers is a natural spiritual progression.
But even Josef Stawinoga collects litter. Which brings us back, in the
maddening loop often described by moral conundrums, to things and their
significance. One of the lost treasures of Iraq is a small stone sculpture
of a birds head, from 8000 BC. It was found in the hand of a skeleton in a
burnt building. That is, someone identified so strongly with the beauty of
the stone bird that in the moments before he died, it seemed as valuable as
his own life.
In The Story of the Amulet, E. Nesbits Edwardian childrens story of time
travel, she sends her four young heroes back in time to Babylon, where one
of them takes the cheap bangle off her arm and gives it to a Babylonian
girl, whose eyes light up with the "joy of possession". That joy of
possession is a universal human desire. Two weeks ago I opened my birthday
presents and found among them a pair of spurs and a netsuke carving in the
shape of a mouse. Before April 3 I didnt know that these objects existed.
Now the loss of them would cause me real pain.
The British Museum has offered to go to the rescue of Iraqs ravaged
museums. Its own recently opened 250th birthday exhibition on the themes of
memory and identity anatomises the conundrum of possession in exquisite
detail. One of the things we may learn from it, perhaps, is that in the
looting of their own past, the Iraqis may be, half-unconsciously, seeking
to hurt us, their assailants, in the only way remaining to them. Which
might be rough justice, of a kind, if only it didnt hurt them more.
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04) Islamic library burned to the ground
Robert Fisk (The Independent)
15 Apr 03
BAGHDAD -- So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters,
then came the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sack of Baghdad.
The National Library and Archives--a priceless treasure of Ottoman
historical documents including the old royal archives of Iraq--were turned
to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat.
Then the Islamic Library of Qur'ans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment
was set ablaze. I saw the looters. One of them cursed me when I tried to
reclaim a book of Islamic law from a boy who could have been no more than
10 years old. Amid the ashes of hundreds of years of Iraqi history, I found
just one file blowing in the wind outside: pages and pages of handwritten
letters between the court of Sherif Hussein of Makkah--who started the Arab
revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia--and the Ottoman rulers of
Baghdad.
And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy yard they blew, letters
of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands for ammunition for
Ottoman troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks on pilgrims, all
of them in delicate handwritten Arabic script. I was holding in my hands
the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history.
But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in
the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National
Archives and then the Qur'anic library of the ministry, the cultural
identity of Iraq is being erased.
Why? Who set these fires? For what purpose is this heritage being
destroyed? When I caught sight of the Qur'anic library burning--there were
flames 100 feet high bursting from the windows--I raced to the offices of
the occupying power, the US Marines' civil affairs bureau, to report what I
had seen.
An officer shouted to a colleague that "this guy says some Biblical (sic)
library is on fire." I gave the map location, the precise name--in Arabic
and English--of the fire, I said that the smoke could be seen from three
miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour
later, there wasn't an American at the scene--and the flames were now
shooting 200 feet into the air.
There was a time when the Arabs said that their books were written in
Cairo, printed in Beirut, and read in Baghdad.
Now they burn libraries in Baghdad. In the National Archives were not just
the Ottoman records of the caliphate, but even the dark years of the
country's modern history, handwritten accounts of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq
war, an entire library of Western newspapers--bound volumes of the
Financial Times were lying on the pavement--and microfiche copies of Arabic
newspapers going back to the early 1900s.
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06) US Forces Encourage Looting
Ole Rothenborg [Swedish] Dagens Nyheter) trans. K. Rasumsson
11 Apr 03
MALMOE, Sweden -- April 11, 2003 -- Khaled Bayomi looks a bit surprised
while watching the American officer on TV express his regrets that they
don't have any resources to stop the looting in Baghdad.
"I happened to be there just as the US forces told people to commence
looting."
Khaled Bayomi departed from Malmoe, Sweden to Baghdad as a volunteer 'human
shield', and arrived on the same day the fighting began. About this he is
able to tell plenty, and for a long time, but the most interesting part of
his story is his eyewitness account about the great surge of looting now
taking place.
"I had visited a few friends that live in a worn-down area just beyond
Haifa Avenue, on the west bank of the Tigris River. It was April 8, and
the fighting was so heavy I couldn't make it over to the other side of the
river. In the afternoon, though, it became perfectly quiet, and four
American tanks pulled up into position on the outskirts of the slum area.
From these tanks we heard anxious calls in Arabic, which told the
population to come closer.
"During the morning, everyone who tried to cross the streets had been fired
upon. But during this strange silence people eventually became curious.
After three-quarters of an hour, the first Baghdad citizens dared to come
forward. At that moment the US solders shot two Sudanese guards posted in
front of a local administrative
building on the other side of the Haifa Avenue.
"I was just 300 meters away when the guards where murdered. Then they shot
the building entrance to pieces, and their Arabic translators in the tanks
told the people to run 'for grabs' inside the building. Rumors spread
rapidly, and the offices were cleaned out. Moments later tanks broke down
the doors to the Justice Department, which was located in a neighboring
building, and the looting was carried forward into there as well.
"I was standing in a big crowd of civilians that saw all this together with
me. They did not take any part in the looting, but were to afraid to take
any action against it. Many of them had tears of shame in their eyes.
"The next morning, the looting spread to the Museum of Modern Art, which
lies another 500 meters to the north. There as well, two crowds were
present -- one that was looting, and another one that saw this disgrace
happen."
Do you mean to say that it was the US troops that initiated the looting?
"Absolutely. The lack of scenes of joy had the US forces in need of images
of Iraqis who in different ways demonstrated their disgust with Saddam's
regime." But people in Baghdad tore down a big statue of Saddam ...
"They did? It was a US tank that did this, close to the hotel where all
the journalists live. Until noon on the 9th of April, I didn't see a
single torn picture of Saddam anywhere. If people had wanted to turn over
statues, they could have gone for some of the many smaller ones, without
the help of an American tank. Had this been a political uproar then people
would have turned over statues first and looted afterwards."
Back home in Sweden, Khaled Bayomi is a PhD student at the University of
Lund, where for ten years he has been teaching and researching conflicts in
the Middle East. He is very well informed about the conflicts, as well as
on the propaganda war.
Isn't it good that Saddam is gone?
"He is not gone. He has dissolved his army into tiny, tiny groups. This is
why there was never any big battle. Saddam dissolved Iraq as a state
already in 1992, and since then has had a parallel tribal structure going,
which has been altogether decisive for the country. When the USA began the
war, Saddam completely abandoned the state, and now he depends on this
tribal structure. This is why he left the big cities without any battle.
"Now the USA is forced to do everything themselves, because there is no
political force from within that would challenge the structure in place.
The two challengers who came in from the outside were immediately lynched."
Khaled Bayomi refers to what happened to general Nazar al-Khazraji, who
escaped from Denmark, and Shia Muslim leader Abdul Majid al-Khoei, who were
both chopped to pieces by a raging crowd in Najaf because they where
perceived to be American puppets. According to the Danish newspaper BT,
al-Khazraji was picked up by the CIA in Denmark and then brought to Iraq.
"Now we have an occupying power in place in Iraq that has not said how long
they will stay, has not brought forward any timeline for civilian rule, and
thus far offers no date for general elections. What will ensue is chaos."
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07) The day of the jackals
Rod Liddle (The Spectator)
19 Apr 03
The Iraqi information minister, Said al-Sahaf, was still telling Western
journalists that the treacherous infidel jackals of the US army had, in
fact, killed themselves by swallowing poison, at the time the first looting
of antiquities in Baghdad took place.
For some Iraqis, clearly, it was not enough to celebrate liberation from
Saddams cruel and iniquitous yoke simply by throwing garlands of flowers
at advancing US marines. Far better, far more impressive, was the idea of
heading straight for the Iraqi National Museum in downtown Baghdad with a
pick-axe handle and a crowbar and a Kalashnikov or two.
Once there, this well-organised criminal gang reportedly threatened the
museum staff with their guns and demanded access to the vaults where the
important stuff was being stored for the duration of the war. They then
ransacked the place and rapidly made off to God knows where with their
fabulous bits of very old rock. Afterwards, the thugs and chancers and kids
came in and smashed the museum up a bit more. And then, later much later
the US soldiers arrived and everybody agreed that it was a terrible thing
that had taken place, and Colin Powell swore that all the stuff would be
bought back by the US government, somehow, if they can find it, which is
dubious, because theyve found nothing else of interest in Iraq except for
Saddams cousin.
Everybody should have been well prepared, really. The various Iraqi museums
have been looted countless times since the last Gulf war, and an estimated
4,000 objects have gone missing, presumably for good. Nobody, however,
seems to have been very well prepared this time around.
According to one of the museums archaeologists, Raeed Abdul Reda, who
greeted the worlds media in tears, the robbers made off with some 80 per
cent of the institutions most cherished possessions: jewellery and gold
and 100,000-year-old stone tools and sculptures and carvings, ivory
furniture, tilework, textiles and coins.
Indeed, they stole the worlds few remaining artefacts from the Sumerian,
Assyrian and Babylonian cultures those that had not already been
liberated, during earlier and rather more paternalistic times, by the
British Museum. These men knew where to look. They knew who had the key to
the basement, where the good stuff was kept.
So who were they? And where have they taken the stuff? And who would be
prepared to pay the sort of astronomical sums demanded?
Stealing a countrys physical history, its archaeological remains, has
become the worlds third biggest organised racket, after drugs and guns.
There are those who argue that it shouldnt need to be illegal at all.
There are those who say, look, the free market should operate here. Why
shouldnt a private collector be allowed to buy an antiquity and keep it in
his bathroom, maybe next to the bidet, or as a tasteful holder for the
Toilet Duck, if he wishes to do so, and if both he and the seller are happy
with the price?
You will not be surprised to hear that many of those who argue this way are
American. You may not be surprised, either, that shortly before the
invasion of Iraq, and with the spoils of war on their mind, some of these
people formed themselves into a lobbying organisation called the American
Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP). This group want a relaxation of
Iraqs tight restrictions on the ownership and export of antiquities. They
object to what they call Iraqs retentionist policy towards its
archaeological treasures. (I love the pejorative use of the word
retentionist in this context; Goddam sand-niggers want to retain all
their history!)
The treasurer of the group, one William Pearlstein, has said that he would
support a postwar government in Iraq that would make it easier to have
things dispersed to, er, for the sake of argument, the United States.
And, on 24 January this year, the ACCP met with the US defense department
to impress this point upon the politicians and the military. I tracked down
one of the people who attended this meeting, and asked what the
archaeologists had to say for themselves.
Hang on, said Maguire Gibson, from the Oriental Institute at Chicago
University, interrupting my first question, there was only one
archaeologist there me. The rest were artefact collectors and lawyers,
the people from the ACCP. I only went along to put my own point of view
across, which was to plead for a minimising of the bombing of known
archaeological sites. But I wouldnt have stood a chance of getting a
meeting with the defense department without the ACCP. But I was there
independently, OK?
Sure. So, who are they, then, the ACCP, and what do they want?
These are very, very well-connected people. They are able to get a meeting
with whoever they like, when they like. You know, I believe they met with
the President last week. They are very affluent people, too. One of the
leading lights is a former state department man, Arthur Houghton.
They sound terrific, I said. And Maguire replied, well, thats not all.
You have to understand that some of the members of their organisation are
among the biggest collectors and dealers of illegal artefacts in the
world....
So, heres what seems to be the deal. A very short while ago an
organisation was formed in the USA representing people who enjoy a
lucrative or aesthetically rewarding trade in stolen historical artefacts,
as well as artefacts traded legally and above board on the open market. The
organisation was formed in some haste precisely because of the forthcoming
war in Iraq. Thats before we, over here in Britain, knew for sure that we
were even going to war.
And this organisation had the power to demand a meeting at defense
department and even presidential level.
Howd the meeting go, Maguire?
Well, said Maguire. It was very cordial. My job was to raise the
consciousness of the military about being more careful, and I think it
pretty much worked.
And what about ACCP?
They were very straightforward. They didnt press the retentionism stuff.
They kept saying that they just wanted to help.
It almost goes without saying, of course, that people like Maguire Gibson
in fact, anybody who works closely with a legit museum is a little
suspicious of the weight and motives of the ACCP.
Here in Britain, Neil Brody is head of the Illicit Antiquities Research
Centre at Cambridge University. He told me: All the material looted from
Baghdad was highly saleable, both to unscrupulous institutional museums and
also to private collectors.
What country will it end up in?
Mostly the USA, without doubt. Some might go to Japan. The main museums in
the West are pretty ethical and all signed up to the Unesco charter from
1970, he added.
This charter, in effect, prevents museums from appropriating archaeological
artefacts from developing countries.
The thing with the ACCP is that they just burst on the scene a very short
while ago some kind of coalition of lawyers and collectors interested in
what was going on in Iraq. They said some things which maybe they regret
now. The spokesman, Pearlstein, has more recently begun to row back a
little on his earlier pronouncements, and made it clear that hes talking
from a personal point of view and isnt necessarily representing the
official view of the ACCP.
Brody believes the raid on the Iraqi National Museum was planned well in
advance, probably before the war had even started. Its not unlikely that
some members of Saddams regime were involved.
The whole thing is appalling, absolutely appalling. What we need to do now
is find out exactly how much has been stolen and whether or not the
remaining material is still safe. We need a system of embargoes to stop the
things being sold, he said.
Ideally, he reckoned, there should be an independent, non-profit-making
museum set up in a neutral country to keep safe the most valuable of the
artefacts. Theres a precedent material from Afghanistan has been stored
in a museum in Switzerland.
But this time, despite Iraqs far greater wealth of treasure, no such
provision has been contemplated by the USA. Why is that?
After mulling things over for a bit, I put the following point to Maguire
Gibson. Its just possible, isnt it, that those artefacts looted at
gunpoint from the Iraqi National Museum will find their way into the hands
of those private collectors who are so energetically represented by the
American Council for Cultural Policy? I mean, without the ACCP knowing
about it, obviously?
Well, I couldnt really say that, could I? I just couldnt say that.
I suppose its going way too far to say that the Americans are rapacious
crooks out to make as much money as they can corporately and individually
from a country which they have enthusiastically destroyed. But I wonder
if it isnt beginning rather to look like that, particularly if youre an
Arab.
* * * * *
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__________________________________________________________________________
FASCISM:
We have no ethical right to forgive, no historical right to forget.
(No permission required for noncommercial reproduction)
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