Art gangs 'looted Iraqi museums'
Professor Gibson said gangs had exported artefacts since 1991
Organised gangs of international art traffickers were behind the looting of the most important exhibits at Baghdad's national museum, experts believe.
Thousands of ancient artefacts dating from the birth of civilisation were stolen and damaged in the wake of the entry of US forces to the city.
Professional smugglers joined opportunist civilians to take advantage of the lawless vacuum, a group of archaeologists has been told.
About 30 of the world's leading experts on Iraqi heritage gathered to discuss the situation at the Paris headquarters of the United Nations' cultural arm Unesco on Thursday.
Professor McGuire Gibson from Chicago University told the group that some thieves obviously knew what they were looking for and where to find it.
PRESUMED MISSING
80,000 cuneiform tablets with world's earliest writing
Bronze figure of Akkadian king - 4,500 years old
Silver harp from ancient city of Ur - 4,000 years old
Three-foot carved Sumerian vase - 5,200 years old
Headless statue of Sumerian king Entemena - 4,600 years old
Carved sacred cup - 4,600 years old
"It looks as if part of the looting was a deliberate planned action," he said.
"They were able to take keys for vaults and were able to take out important Mesopotamian materials put in safes."
Some artefacts from the museum have already turned up in Paris and Iran, he said.
"Probably [it was done] by the same sorts of gangs that have been paying for the destruction of sites in Iraq over the last 12 years and the smuggling out of these objects into the international market," Prof Gibson said.
Among the items known to have been lost were 80,000 cuneiform tablets that were some of the world's earliest examples of writing, he said.
US soldiers have started guarding Baghdad's museum
Unesco's director general Koichiro Matsuura called for an immediate ban on the international trade in Iraqi antiquities and a "heritage police" to protect Iraq's cultural sites.
"I believe it is necessary to take emergency measures, such as the setting up... of a nationwide 'heritage police' entrusted with the task of watching over cultural sites and institutions," he said.
Also announced was a special fund for Iraqi cultural heritage, to which Italy, France, Britain, Germany, Egypt and Qatar have already contributed.
"It is always difficult when communities are facing the consequences of an armed conflict to plead the case for the preservation of the cultural heritage," according to Mr Matsuura.
"It is as if we were more interested in stones than in people. But nothing could be further from the truth, of course."
Unesco, which called the loss and destruction a "disaster", will soon send a team to Iraq to find out what is missing and damaged.
The experts were told that some of the country's most prized treasures were hidden in the vaults of the national bank before the war.
But there is still confusion over whether those vaults were looted.
Internet plea
Mr Matsuura said he would press for a UN Security Council resolution to impose a provisional embargo on the acquisition of Iraqi cultural items.
A website with information and pictures of the missing antiquities is also to be set up.
Among those attending Wednesday's meeting were several archaeologists who said they warned the United States Government about the possibility of looting, including Prof Gibson.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell has already pledged to "recover that which has been taken and also participate in restoring that which has been broken".
More pictures from the ransacked museum
Iraq is described as a "the cradle of civilisation" and the Baghdad museum contained thousands of irreplaceable artefacts dating back 10,000 years.
The development of abstract counting, the wheel and agriculture were all charted in its exhibitions.
The collections from the Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian periods were particularly prized.
As well as the Baghdad museum, the National Archives Centre and a museum in Mosul were looted and the capital's Islamic Library, which housed ancient manuscripts including one of the oldest surviving copies of the Koran, was ravaged by fire.
There are fears that many of the stolen items may be taken out of the country and lost forever.
news.bbc.co.uk
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Experts to Send Team to Iraq in Wake of Museum Looting
By ALAN RIDING
ARIS, April 17 ?An international group of archaeologists and museum directors decided today to send an emergency fact-finding mission to Iraq to measure the damage done to the Baghdad Museum and other cultural institutions in the looting that followed the end of open hostilities.
Meeting at the Paris headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the 30 experts also called on coalition forces to protect threatened cultural sites and institutions. In addition, they backed an appeal by Unesco's director general, Koichiro Matsuura, for the United Nations Security Council to impose a temporary embargo on the acquisition of all Iraqi cultural objects.
But the experts, who included Iraqi scientists as well as American, European and Japanese archaeologists with extensive experience in Iraq, said that even moves to prevent the illegal export of looted objects from Iraq required detailed information on what was stolen from museums in Baghdad and Mosul as well as from libraries, monuments and archeological sites.
"At this point, none of us knows anything," said Salma El Radi, an Iraqi scholar associated with New York University.
Unesco officials said that a multidisciplinary mission, comprising five or six experts, would leave as soon as it could safely enter Iraq. They said they were awaiting word from John W. Limbert, the American official named by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to coordinate efforts to recover artifacts stolen by looters. Mr. Limbert, a senior adviser to the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs, has reportedly now arrived in Kuwait.
Mr. Matsuura, who before the war urged coalition forces to protect museums and archeological sites, has deplored the damage done to Iraq's unique heritage, but he has stopped short of accusing the United States military of negligence. In a step toward improving communication with Unesco, Mr. Powell sent a special envoy, Bonnie Gardiner, a senior State Department cultural analyst, to meet with Mr. Matsuura on Wednesday.
Today's meeting of experts, which was held behind closed doors, focused on exchanging information, developing a strategy to deal with the crisis and setting in motion the fact-finding mission. A note of urgency was added when Dr. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, said he had received unconfirmed reports that some looted objects were already on sale in both Paris and Iran.
"It looks like part of the theft was a very planned action, probably by the same gangs that have exploited and destroyed sites in Iraq over the past 12 years," Dr. Gibson said at a news conference.
"Baghdad Museum should have been the safest place. It was the main repository of Mesopotamian artifacts. Many regional museums had sent objects to Baghdad for safekeeping because during the 1991 gulf war 9 of Iraq's 14 regional museums were looted."
He added that these gangs had become very organized since 1991.
"All this has happened since the embargo," he said, referring to United Nations sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein's regime. "I have a suspicion it is organized from outside the country by people who pay those in the country to loot the sites. People have no money and will do anything to feed their family. But once it was organized, there were 300 or 400 people working on a site."
The experts said that to date their information about damage to Baghdad Museum had come from the occasional satellite telephone call, press reports and what they can interpret from photographs and television news footage. Donny George, director of research for the Iraqi Board of Antiquities, told The New York Times in Baghdad on Wednesday that "major masterpieces" were missing, but he added, "It's not a total loss."
Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, which has perhaps the richest collection of Mesopotamian art outside Iraq, said that he had heard that some treasures had been stored in the vaults of Iraq's Central Bank. "The bank was looted, but we don't know if those safes were opened," he said. "We don't know if the treasures are still there."
Even with little information available, however, an emergency action plan is taking shape.
Along with efforts to persuade coalition forces to look out for stolen art objects, Unesco has alerted the World Customs Organization and Interpol to tighten controls on trafficking of stolen art. Mr. Matsuura has also set up a special fund to be spent only inside Iraq for the purpose of buying back stolen art from looters.
This week Italy donated $400,000 toward protecting Iraq's heritage and it has since raised its contribution to $1 million. Mr. Matsuura said he had also received offers of financial aid from Qatar, France, Britain and Egypt. Unesco officials said that it had so far received nothing from the United States, which last year announced it would rejoin Unesco after an 18-year absence.
Museums and archeological associations across the world are also mobilizing. On Wednesday Germany's Archeological Institute offered expertise and personnel to help restore Iraq's museums.
Mr. MacGregor said that the British Museum, which is to act as host to a gathering of experts on Iraqi culture in London on April 29, has offered six conservators and three curators to help in the crisis, and was coordinating its response with the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and Berlin's museums.
nytimes.com
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UNESCO Proposes 'Heritage Police' to Guard Iraqi Museums
VOA News
17 Apr 2003, 17:52 UTC
AP
Civilians inspect Torah scrolls stored in the vault of the National Museum in Baghdad
The head of the United Nations cultural organization, UNESCO, is calling for creation of what he called a "heritage police" force to try to reclaim artifacts looted last week from Iraqi museums.
UNESCO director Koichiro Matsuura issued his call at a Paris meeting of international experts considering emergency measures for documenting and reclaiming the pieces taken by looters after the fall of Baghdad.
The "heritage police" would watch over cultural sites during armed conflicts such as that in Iraq and prevent looters from stealing rare and valuable antiquities. Antiquities experts are criticizing the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq for not protecting the museums.
Iraq's National Museum contained numerous artifacts from Mesopotamia, a cradle of one of the earth's earliest civilizations located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq. Among the most important pieces missing is a harp from the ancient city of Ur.
UNESCO is calling on art collectors and international police to help stop the trade in the stolen items on the black market. A UNESCO delegation is expected to travel to Iraq soon and to develop a database detailing the losses.
Some information for this report provided by AP and AFP.
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