[National Library and Archives in Baghdad Looted and Burned]
Robert Fisk: Library
books, letters and
priceless documents are
set ablaze in final chapter
of the sacking of Baghdad
argument.independent.co.uk
15 April 2003
So yesterday was the burning of books.
First came the looters, then the arsonists.
It was the final chapter in the sacking 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historical documents, including the old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
library of Korans 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 of no more than 10. Amid
the ashes of Iraqi history, I found a file
blowing in the wind outside: pages of
handwritten letters between the court of
Sharif Hussein of Mecca, 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 troops,
reports on the theft of camels and attacks
on pilgrims, all in delicate hand-written
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 Koranic library, the cultural
identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what
insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?
When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning flames 100 feet high
were bursting from the windows I raced to the offices of the occupying
power, the US Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau. 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. I said 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 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, with personal
photographs and military diaries,and microfiche copies of Arabic
newspapers going back to the early 1900s.
But the older files and archives were on the upper floors of the library
where petrol must have been used to set fire so expertly to the building.
The heat was such that the marble flooring had buckled upwards and the
concrete stairs that I climbedhad been cracked.
The papers on the floor were almost too hot to touch, bore no print or
writing, and crumbled into ash the moment I picked them up. Again,
standing in this shroud of blue smoke and embers, I asked the same
question: why?
So, as an all-too-painful reflection on what this means, let me quote from
the shreds of paper that I found on the road outside, blowing in the wind,
written by long-dead men who wrote to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul or to
the Court of Sharif of Mecca with expressions of loyalty and who signed
themselves "your slave". There was a request to protect a camel convoy
of tea, rice and sugar, signed by Husni Attiya al-Hijazi (recommending
Abdul Ghani-Naim and Ahmed Kindi as honest merchants), a request for
perfume and advice from Jaber al-Ayashi of the royal court of Sharif
Hussein to Baghdad to warn of robbers in the desert. "This is just to give
you our advice for which you will be highly rewarded," Ayashi says. "If you
don't take our advice, then we have warned you." A touch of Saddam
there, I thought. The date was 1912.
Some of the documents list the cost of bullets, military horses and
artillery for Ottoman armies in Baghdad and Arabia, others record the
opening of the first telephone exchange in the Hejaz soon to be Saudi
Arabia while one recounts, from the village of Azrak in modern-day
Jordan, the theft of clothes from a camel train by Ali bin Kassem, who
attacked his interrogators "with a knife and tried to stab them but was
restrained and later bought off". There is a 19th-century letter of
recommendation for a merchant, Yahyia Messoudi, "a man of the highest
morals, of good conduct and who works with the [Ottoman] government."
This, in other words, was the tapestry of Arab history all that is left of it,
which fell into The Independent's hands as the mass of documents
crackled in the immense heat of the ruins.
King Faisal of the Hejaz, the ruler of Mecca, whose staff are the authors of
many of the letters I saved, was later deposed by the Saudis. His son
Faisel became king of Iraq Winston Churchill gave him Baghdad after
the French threw him out of Damascus and his brother Abdullah
became the first king of Jordan, the father of King Hussein and the
grandfather of the present-day Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah II.
For almost a thousand years, Baghdad was the cultural capital of the
Arab world, the most literate population in the Middle East. Genghis
Khan's grandson burnt the city in the 13th century and, so it was said, the
Tigris river ran black with the ink of books. Yesterday, the black ashes of
thousands of ancient documents filled the skies of Iraq. Why?
15 April 2003 09:48 |
