TINAF 7:36 -- Memories of Nazi Art Looting in Iraq 1/2
Paul Kneisel
do bad things."
-- Donald Rumsfeld
Secretary of Defense
United States of America
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The Internet Anti-Fascist: Friday, 18 April 2003
Vol. 7, Number 36 (#769)
Memories of Nazi Art Looting in Iraq
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01) Carl Hatman (AP), "Art advisers quit to protest Iraq looting," 18 Apr
03
02) Dexter Filkins (New York Times), "'This is Our American Liberation!'
An Art Center Left in Ashes," 17 Apr 03
03) ABC News, "Too Late? Critics Say United States Should Have Prevented
Iraqi Looting," 17 Apr 03
04) Dennis B. Roddy (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), "Archaeologists' pleas to
protect Iraq antiquities heard, not heeded," 18 Apr 03
05) Jack Ewing, Joseph Weber, and Michael Shari (Business Week), "Were
Baghdad's Antiquity Thieves Ready? They may have known just what they
were looking for because dealers ordered the most important pieces
well in advance," 17 Apr 03
06) GoMemphis, "FBI joins search for stolen art," 18 Apr 03
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01) Art advisers quit to protest Iraq looting
Carl Hatman (AP)
18 Apr 03
WASHINGTON D.C. -- Three members of the White House Cultural Property
Advisory Committee have resigned to protest the looting of Baghdad's
National Museum of Antiquities.
Martin E. Sullivan, Richard S. Lanier and Gary Vikan, each appointed by
former President Clinton, said they were disappointed by the U.S.
military's failure to protect Iraq's historical artifacts.
"The tragedy was not prevented, due to our nation's inaction," Sullivan,
the committee's chairman, wrote in his letter of resignation.
Noting that American scholars had told the State Department about the
location of Iraqi museums and historic sites in Iraq, he said the president
"is burdened by a compelling moral obligation to plan for and try to
prevent indiscriminate looting and destruction."
Lanier criticized "the administration's total lack of sensitivity and
forethought regarding the Iraq invasion and the loss of cultural
treasures."
Vikan said in a separate interview that he saw "a failure on the part of
the United States to interdict what is now an open floodgate."
White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said the United States "in liberating
Iraq worked very hard to protect infrastructure in Iraq and to preserve the
valued resources of Iraq for the people of Iraq."
"It is unfortunate that there was looting and damage done," she said.
Looters made off with statues, golden bowls, manuscripts and other
treasures in the museum's collection chronicling ancient Mesopotamia,
considered the cradle of civilization and modern home to Iraq.
The American Anthropological Association said Thursday it sent letters to
President Bush and the Defense Department urging Bush to "use all means" to
protect Iraqi cultural sites and institutions. The group also wants plans
in place immediately to recover artifacts and reconstruct Iraq's
collections -- including offering amnesty and monetary rewards to encourage
the return of items.
President Bush in January appointed nine new members to the commission and
they are undergoing background checks.
Sullivan heads a historic commission in St. Mary's, Md. Vikan is director
of Baltimore's Walters Art Museum. Lanier is director of a New York
foundation, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, that deals with relations
between the U.S. and Eastern Europe.
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02) "This is Our American Liberation!" An Art Center Left in Ashes
Dexter Filkins (New York Times)
17 Apr 03
BAGHDAD -- Amal al-Khedairy stood amid the ruins of her elegant waterfront
home and cursed the people who had rained the bombs on her.
This was a full-throated, almost lunatic fury, sharpened by the Western-
educated voice that carried it. For years, Ms. Khedairy ran Baghdad's most
luminous artistic center, one that flourished in the face of the dictator,
a place dedicated to bringing the worlds of Occident and Orient together.
Today, in the rubble and shattered windows of Ms. Khedairy's home and the
ransacked remains of her cultural center, the aspiration seemed all lost.
Amal al-Khedairy in the library of her home Wednesday in Baghdad. The once
elegant house was badly damaged by bombs. (NYT Photo/James Hill)
"This is our American liberation!" spat Ms. Khedairy, 70, as she waded
through the half-burned books of her second-story library. "I never thought
you would do it. I went to the American School. I believed in your moral
values. And every night you bombed. Every night, I ran through the streets,
an old woman in my nightgown. Look at my library!"
As this city of 4.5 million people grapples with the destruction all around
it, Ms. Khedairy's rage seems emblematic of a whole class of people who
might be expected to be more sympathetic to the American cause. Ms.
Khedairy spent a lifetime admiring Western culture, learning its English,
conjugating its French verbs, all the while trying to sustain her native
culture in an Iraq under the iron fist of Saddam Hussein.
But somewhere, in the cacophony of bombs and the orgy of looting that
followed, Ms. Khedairy and, it seems, others among Baghdad's cultural elite
became angry about the war, seeing in its destruction a vulgarity that only
pushed the country deeper into degradation. Even today, even in Baghdad,
there are people unused to chaos, and chaos now it is.
Ms. Khedairy's anger may seem odd in a country where people were routinely
tortured to death by Saddam Hussein. She is in fact a neophyte to politics
in a land where everything long ago became political, and her anger is by
no means confined to Americans. She is equally angry with Iraqi looters.
But what seems clear in her confused emotions is that the war has dragged
her from a comfortable way of life under Mr. Hussein. Of the compromises
involved in that, she did not speak. She had, she said, refused all
invitations to join parties or committees. Art and culture provided her
refuge during the Hussein years. But they were no refuge against bombs and
the chaos that followed, and so her anger spills over.
"I want you to come and see what they have done to my institute," she said
to an American visitor, desperate, tugging. "It's all gone: the paintings,
the piano, the carpets, the music. All looted by these animals. Our
liberation!"
Ms. Khedairy's house is in the Suleik neighborhood, one of the Baghdad's
wealthier enclaves, known for the intellectuals who inhabit it.
In a city of flat, squat buildings spare of trees and greenery, her home is
a luxurious island: two levels, floor-to-ceiling windows, a garden full of
jasmine and bougainvillea and date palms. The Tigris River meanders past
her backyard.
The house is full of culture, or it was. There are recordings of Beethoven
and Wagner among the antiquated LP's, and collections of Turkish and
Arabian music as well. A handcrafted wooden grille forms one of the walls
of the sitting room, and the books range from Oriental architecture to
French literature.
But the house's curse, and Ms. Khedairy's, is its proximity to the
headquarters of the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret police, which lies just
across the river. Night and day, for weeks, the bombs fell here, most of
them finding their target, some of them not.
The result is that the entire back end of the house is splayed open to the
world. The windows are shattered, the rain has come in, and the LP's and
books have been blown apart and scattered.
For weeks, Ms. Khedairy said, she often left her house when the bombing
started, dashing to a friend's house blocks away, where she felt safer.
Every day, she said, she would return to her garden to water her palms and
plants, so determined was she to preserve something in the ruins.
This was not the first time Ms. Khedairy had returned to her home, not the
first time she had seen the wreckage. Perhaps it was the unexpected
entrance of an American into her home that set her emotions tumbling. Today
was the day of her rage: she ranted and wept amid the ruins of her house,
picking up a tattered book here, a record album there.
"We will kill them all one day, Rumsfeld and every one of them," she said,
referring to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. "Look at what they have
done to my library."
Her ransacked cultural center, she railed at passers-by and potential
looters. (NYT Photo/James Hill)
Like many residents of Baghdad, Ms. Khedairy has now spun any number of
conspiracy theories about the intentions of the Americans. She is
convinced, for instance, that the bombing of her house, the ransacking of
her cultural center and the looting of the national museum are evidence of
an American plan to deface Iraq's culture and carry its treasures out of
the country. This, from a graduate of London University, a professor who
taught the literature of Britain and France.
Such theories are rampant even among the city's educated elite. Today, for
instance, the chief doctor at one of the Baghdad's larger hospitals spoke
about the presumed designs of the Americans on the Iraqi nation.
"Tell me," said the doctor, who asked that he not be identified, "Why do
the American troops allow the looting? These people are cowards, the
looters. All the soldiers have to do is fire one shot, and the looters will
go away. They are cowards. And the Americans do not do this. Why?"
Ms. Khedairy's neighborhood has not yet been looted, but she thinks the day
is near. Since the bombing ended, a group of her neighbors has stood guard
over the houses, armed with guns, keeping the thieves away. But the
Americans have begun to move closer to the neighborhood, and Ms. Khedairy
is convinced that the looters will be allowed to roam freely through her
home.
"They follow the tanks," Ms. Khedairy said. "The Americans come in and they
let the looters do as they wish. That is what they did at the museum. That
is what they did at my institute. My neighborhood is next."
Not all of Ms. Khedairy's anger is directed at foreigners; she has saved a
good deal for her fellow Iraqis. As she arrived at the steps of her
cultural center, she surprised a half dozen Iraqi men picking over the last
of the artifacts and paintings that had not been stolen.
"My God, I'll kill you!" she growled, and the young men scampered out the
door. In her anger, Ms. Khedairy picked up a piece of broken pottery and
hurled it into the back of one of the men. "How could this nation produce
such sons?" she wailed.
The devastation wrought by the looters is indeed complete: the books and
sheet music lay scattered across the floor, the lamps and fans torn from
the ceiling. Upstairs, a recent exhibit of artwork by Iraqi and Japanese
children lay in tatters.
Ms. Khedairy paused before a decorative wrought-iron door, one of the few
things left that still appeared intact. She fingered it, studied it, swung
the thing on its hinge.
"I will have to save this," she said, "before someone takes it."
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03) Too Late? Critics Say United States Should Have Prevented Iraqi Looting
ABC News
17 Apr 03
In Baghdad today U.S. Marines took charge of what was left of a looted
bank, hauling bags of cash away for safekeeping. Elsewhere in Baghdad, it's
too late.
Hospitals have been ransacked, irreplaceable antiquities have been stolen
or destroyed and valuable intelligence documents have been trashed. Angered
that the U.S. military didn't work to prevent the looting of Baghdad's
national Museum of Antiquities, three members of the White House Cultural
Property Advisory Committee have quit in protest.
"The tragedy was not prevented, due to our nation's inaction," said Martin
E. Sullivan, one of the advisers. He said that American scholars had given
the State Department information on the location of Iraqi museums and
historic sites, and the president has a "compelling moral obligation to
plan for and try to prevent indiscriminate looting and destruction."
In Washington, the FBI announced today it had sent agents to Iraq to assist
in recovering stolen antiquities.
"We are firmly committed to doing whatever we can to secure these treasures
to the people of Iraq," FBI Director Robert Mueller told a news conference
at the Justice Department. One official said there will be about 25 FBI
agents in Iraq on that task.
Art Thieves Sneak In
Iraq boasts an estimated 10,000 ancient archaeological sites, and the
region, known 6,000 years ago as Mesopotamia, is valued among
archaeologists as the cradle of civilization. The government-owned Iraq
National Museum hosted some of the world's most prized collections of
ancient and Islamic art.
Art experts and historians say that professional thieves have used the
looting as cover to steal irreplaceable items from the Babylonian, Sumerian
and Assyrian collections in Iraq museums and libraries. Already, the items
are appearing on the black market.
"It looks as if part of the theft was a very, very deliberate planned
action," said McGuire Gibson, president of the American Association for
Research in Baghdad. "It really looks like a very professional job."
Gibson was among 30 art experts and cultural historians who were
commissioned by the United Nations to assess the damage to Iraq's heritage
after the war.
Too Little, Too Late?
But critics are wondering why nothing was done to protect the sites from
looters to begin with. The former director of operations at the Pentagon
says the speed of the regime's collapse made protecting national treasures
more difficult.
"In hindsight, we would have put more military police units and more civil
reconstruction units into the flow," said retired Marine Lt. Gen. Gregory
Newbold, now an ABCNEWS consultant. "It was not predictable at the time we
were putting the plan together.
Yet, Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinsheki warned in February that stabilizing
Iraq could require several hundred thousand troops, something the civilians
at the Pentagon scoffed at.
When the United States intervened in Haiti in 1994, planning had been under
way for months to police the cities and train local police in peacekeeping.
New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, was in charge of reorganizing
Haiti's police department.
"We did have a structure that was able to go into Haiti fairly quickly
after the military entered Haiti," Kelly said. "Obviously that is not the
case right now in Iraq."
In fact, the administration is only now getting around to recruiting law
enforcement professionals to work with local Iraqi police officers.
So far, the State Department has only 26 people training to go to Iraq, and
they will not be there anytime soon. The first two law enforcement
professionals from the United States will not be there until the end of
next week.
Pentagon Defensive on Looting
In the meantime, the Pentagon is confident that the violence in Iraq will
abate, and officials are defensive about what has already occurred.
"We didn't allow it to happen," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "It
happened."
His advisers agree.
"I think there is a natural period of conflict, this chaos often following
the collapse of a regime, and when it was a regime as brutal and sadistic
as this one, it's likely to be worse," said Richard Perle, a member of the
Defense Policy Board who recently announced his resignation as chairman.
Whether the worst is over still has many Iraqis concerned.
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04) Archaeologists' pleas to protect Iraq antiquities heard, not heeded
Dennis B. Roddy (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
18 Apr 03
Late last week, Patty Gerstenblith sat down at her keyboard at DePaul
University Law School and sent out a final plea to the Army to save Iraq's
National Museum.
For three months, Gerstenblith's colleagues at the Archaeological Institute
of America had warned anyone they could find - the Department of State,
Department of Defense, the office of the president - that irreplaceable
archaeological treasures could be pillaged by looters they were sure would
target the museum.
"We do ask and beg once again that some military presence be placed at the
museum as soon as possible to protect its collection," Gerstenblith wrote
to Army Maj. Christopher Varhola, a cultural affairs specialist in the
Army's civil affairs office stationed in Kuwait.
Quickly, Varhola e-mailed back:
"Unfortunately, I do not have immediate good news for you," he wrote. He
assured her he would try to get her message across: "I am stressing this
hard to the ground commander via my staff section."
It was too late.
After three months of warnings so specific that teams of archaeologists,
historians and diplomats gave specific addresses and sent lengthy, detailed
messages explaining what they feared could happen, the U.S. military
barreled into Baghdad and stood by as looters rampaged.
Teams armed with glass cutters and even keys to the national museum, opened
vaults and ran off with treasures that date to the dawn of history. What
they could not steal, they destroyed. A millennia-old bust of Sargon the
Great, one of the earliest rulers in Western history and a symbol of
Mesopotamia's glory, was smashed. The national library, repository to
scrolls that detail the first Caliphate, ancient Jewish and Christian
communities and the Ottoman era, were burnt.
The soldiers saved one building.
"They put people around the Oil Ministry. It was the one government
building in Iraq that was not sacked," said Malcolm Bell, an archaeologist
at the University of Virginia and part of the Archaeological Institute's
team that attempted to persuade the U.S. government to guard Iraq's
historic treasures.
In Washington, the FBI announced Thursday it had sent agents to Iraq to
assist in recovering the stolen treasures.
"We are firmly committed to doing whatever we can to secure these treasures
to the people of Iraq," said FBI Director Robert Mueller.
The impact of losing Iraq's artifacts and manuscripts was only beginning to
register Thursday on historians and archaeologists who study at history's
earliest fringes. Many of the manuscripts in the library had never been
copied.
"It is a horror. It means the loss of early history of Mesopotamia. To lose
those sources means that we will have no other means to learn from the
ancient history of humanity," said Amir Harrak, an Iraqi scholar at the
University of Toronto. Harrak is waiting to hear if manuscripts he has been
translating, which detail the early history of Christianity, written in
Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, were among those destroyed.
Part of the fallout came in the resignations of three members of President
Bush's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property. Martin Sullivan, who has
chaired the committee since 1995, resigned in protest, calling the looting
"foreseeable and preventable." Two other members, Richard Lanier, director
of a New York foundation, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, which deals
with relations between the United States and Eastern Europe; and Gary
Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, also resigned in
protest.
For months, archaeologists negotiated with officials from both the State
and Defense departments and attempted to outline ways to save artifacts and
sites.
Scholarly groups were especially fearful because of looting at regional
museums that followed the 1991 Gulf war.
"At least 4,000 objects of considerable art and historic importance were
stolen in the first Gulf War," said Steven Garfinkle, a specialist in
Mesopotamian history at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash.
Garfinkle said no more than a dozen of the items looted in 1991 have been
recovered, and said an absence of computerized inventory by the Iraqis make
it likely that many, if not most, of the artifacts looted in the current
war will be recovered.
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05) Were Baghdad's Antiquity Thieves Ready? They may have known just what
they were looking for because dealers ordered the most important
pieces well in advance
Jack Ewing, Joseph Weber, and Michael Shari (Business Week)
17 Apr 03
Whatever their tribal and religious differences, all Iraqis can be proud of
one thing: On their soil modern civilization was born. Cities were invented
in what is now Iraq. So was writing and even an early form of democracy. So
it doesn't sound overblown when Elizabeth C. Stone, a professor of
anthropology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, ranks the
looting of the Baghdad Museum with the burning of the Great Library at
Alexandria or the rape of Aztec and Inca cultures by the conquistadors.
Iraq, says Stone, is a country "whose past has been decapitated."
Putting the pieces back together won't be easy. Although most art dealers
publicly denounce the trade in stolen objects, many continue to buy and
sell works of dubious origin. There is a well-developed global network that
specializes in stolen antiquities, and while some objects have been
recovered in the past, most remain out of sight in private hands.
"There's always a market for greedy collectors," says Kenson Kwok, director
of the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore. "It doesn't matter to them
if they can't show it to anyone."
TARGETED THEFT. In this case, say experts, the sheer rarity of the objects
will almost certainly fuel demand. The collection at the Baghdad Museum
included one of the first representations of a human face, plus thousands
of cuneiform tablets and other objects that bear witness to everyday life
thousands of years ago.
Experts say that up to 170,000 objects were lifted and that on the black
market they could fetch from $5 for small items to $2 million for the best
stuff. "When was the last time any of us saw great Sumerian art come on the
market?" asks New York art dealer Andrew Kahane, who deplores the looting.
"It's extraordinarily rare."
That may explain why the thievery seemed so well-organized. It was almost
as if the perpetrators were waiting for Baghdad to fall to make their move.
Gil J. Stein, a professor of archeology at the University of Chicago, which
has been conducting digs in Iraq for 80 years, believes that dealers
ordered the most important pieces well in advance. "They were looking for
very specific artifacts," he says. "They knew where to look."
MURKY TRAIL. So where did the stolen art go? Knowledgeable dealers and
scholars say a few well-informed and unscrupulous Iraqis probably arranged
for poorly paid "mules" to truck the pieces through the trackless desert
and across the porous borders into Jordan, Syria, or Turkey.
From there, the objects can be easily shipped by air to shady international
dealers. Typically, the works are intentionally mislabeled, with their
museum ID numbers stripped off, to evade detection.
Over time, such pieces acquire what's known in the art world as "good
provenance," or seeming legitimacy. Initially, people who buy the objects
will make up histories for them. As the antiquities pass through several
more hands, the trail becomes increasingly murky.
COVERING THEIR TRACKS. Eventually, says Anna J. Kisluk, New York-based
director of art services at the Art Loss Register, a London-based
organization that tracks stolen and missing art, "a collector may end up
acquiring one of these works not knowing it was looted."
It probably helps the recovery effort that some of the pieces are too well-
known to find buyers. One is the Lady of Warka, an alabaster face that's
one of the earliest representations of the human form. The Art Loss
Register has offered to add information about the looted collection to its
database, allowing dealers, museums, and auction houses to check whether a
piece is stolen. "Everybody is going to shun this material," insists Ashton
Hawkins, president of the American Council for Cultural Policy, an advocacy
group for private collectors and museums.
But it seems clear that most of the works will disappear into private
vaults. It doesn't help that the looters burned museum files. As a result,
a clear picture of what was taken may never materialize. And while some
pieces looted from other museums, including Kabul's main gallery, plundered
in 1993 when the Taliban seized power, are eventually recovered, most are
not. That's why the loss for Iraq -- and the world -- is incalculable.
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06) FBI joins search for stolen art
GoMemphis
18 Apr 03
More than two dozen FBI agents in Iraq will help conduct criminal
investigations into widespread looting at the National Museum of
Antiquities and other cultural sites, U.S. officials said Thursday.
FBI Director Robert Mueller told a Washington press conference the teams
would try to capture thieves, recover stolen artifacts and cooperate with
Interpol, the international law enforcement organization, to track sales
"on both the open and black markets."
"We recognize the importance of these treasures to the Iraqi people and . .
. to the world as a whole," Mueller said. "We are firmly committed to doing
whatever we can in order to secure the return of these treasures to the
people of Iraq."
The FBI's looting investigation comes amid the controversy over the
ransacking of Iraqi museums and libraries that went unchecked by U.S.
soldiers, resulting in the loss of countless artifacts from Mesopotamia and
other ancient civilizations.
Critics have said the U.S. military should have anticipated the looting of
ancient artifacts and moved to stop it. Pentagon officials have said their
first priority in the days after Baghdad fell was to eliminate dangerous
pockets of Iraqi resistance that threatened the lives of U.S. troops and
Iraqi civilians.
The loss of the antiquities, some of them priceless, was the subject of an
international gathering in Paris on Thursday. The UN Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization assembled about 30 art experts and
cultural historians to assess the damage to Iraq's heritage.
They agreed that the looting of the National Museum and other cultural
repositories was a professional job. The experts suspect that professional
thieves, likely organized outside Iraq, used the cover of widespread
looting in Baghdad - and vault keys - to make off with irreplaceable items.
The bandits were so efficient at emptying Iraqi libraries and museums that
reports have already surfaced of artifacts appearing on the black market,
some experts said. Certain thieves apparently knew exactly what they wanted
from the irreplaceable Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian collections, and
exactly where to find them.
"It looks as if part of the theft was a very, very deliberate, planned
action," said McGuire Gibson, president of the American Association for
Research in Baghdad. "It really looks like a very professional job."
"They were able to obtain keys from somewhere for the vaults and were able
to take out the very important, the very best material," Gibson said. "I
have a suspicion it was organized outside the country. In fact, I'm pretty
sure it was."
Many at the Paris meeting feared the stolen artifacts have been absorbed
into highly organized trafficking rings that ferry the goods through a
series of middlemen to collectors in Europe, the United States and Japan.
Ahead of the war, Iraq's antiquities' authorities gathered artifacts from
around the country and moved them to Baghdad's National Museum, assuming
the museum would not be bombed, Gibson said.
"They did not count on the museum being looted," he said.
The network of antiquities dealing in Iraq is well-developed, escalating
far beyond the ability of authorities to stop it. Thousands of antiquities
had disappeared from the country even before the current war.
The trafficking feeds off of Iraq's poverty-stricken people, said Salma El
Radi, an Iraqi archeologist. "If you need to feed your family and the only
way to do it is by looting a site, you're going to loot a site," El Radi
said.
The UNESCO group said it would send an emergency mission to Iraq to measure
the damage. The group called on the U.S.-led forces to protect threatened
cultural sites. And they backed an appeal by UNESCO's director-general,
Koichiro Matsuura, for the UN Security Council to impose a temporary
embargo on the acquisition of Iraqi cultural objects.
Some governments have already pledged to help rescue Iraq's heritage. Italy
has pledged to contribute $1 million and Matsuura said offers of financial
aid had also come from Qatar, France, Britain and Egypt.
* * * * *
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is
distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and
educational purposes only.
__________________________________________________________________________
FASCISM:
We have no ethical right to forgive, no historical right to forget.
(No permission required for noncommercial reproduction)
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