E.T. you may be interested in this articles about the looting of the Baghdad museum.
gulfnews.com
Plunder of museums began a decade ago
Mosul | By Paul Watson | 28/04/2003
The mystery of who looted Iraq's archaeological treasures is rich with suspects and clues, such as the belly dancer who many believe became Saddam Hussain's mistress or the skeleton of a man who was thrown down a well almost 3,000 years ago.
Taken together, Iraqi archaeologists say, the evidence convinces them that the very people entrusted with protecting some of history's most significant relics are responsible for some of the worst plundering of ancient artefacts.
Thieves left a long trail, with many twists and turns, which runs back at least to 1991, when Saddam's defeat in the Gulf War reduced Iraq's antiquities to booty for his cronies to steal, the archaeologists charge.
"The gang started in the early 1990s, with the support of Saddam Hussain himself," said Junayd Fakhri, an archaeologist who claims the 1990 discovery of a royal Assyrian treasure buried in a palace well, perhaps in 8th century B.C.
Priceless relics of gold and ivory were uncovered with about 400 skeletons, one shackled in irons at the wrists and ankles, Fakhri said. He thinks it was an Assyrian king executed and buried with his retinue at Nimrud, 20 miles southeast of Mosul.
It was an extraordinary find, and a controversial theory, one that international experts would normally study in great detail, examining the bones and the jewellery and vigorously debating their meaning.
But Fakhri and several other Iraqi experts say Saddam's culture and information minister during the 1980s and early '90s, Latif Nusayyif Jasim, ordered about 160 pounds of Nimrud's golden treasures, including a queen's crown and jewellery, shipped to Baghdad.
The treasure was stored in a vault at the national bank, which was looted along with the national museum in the early hours after Saddam's fall.
"They can say the museum was looted and nobody knows the truth," Fakhri said. "The truth is they sold all the pieces."
Similar but sketchy accounts of what Nimrud's Iraqi guards now call "The Killing Well" and its skeletons have seeped out of Iraq, and experts abroad don't yet know what to make of them, said John Russell, professor of art history and archaeology at the Massachusetts College of Art.
It will take the digging of an archaeological detective to piece together the truth, Russell said in a telephone interview.
Russell warned about the looting of Iraq's antiquities in 1995, when he noticed that a piece of Assyrian art for sale was from the Nineveh palace, near Mosul.
The next year, a lawyer contacted Russell to ask whether 10 Assyrian sculptures that a client wanted to buy were legal. They had been looted too, nine of them from the middle of separate wall slabs, by thieves who apparently knew what would bring the best price.
At least one of the pieces was retrieved after a private collector in England tried to ship it to Israel, Russell said. It was returned to the Baghdad museum, where it apparently survived the recent looting, he added.
But the world market for stolen antiquities is still very large, and supported by havens such as Switzerland, where the law favours buyers of stolen property, Russell said. "If you buy it and don't show it for five years, and claim you didn't know it was stolen, it's yours," he added.
There wasn't much of a market for ancient Assyrian art until the 1990s, Russell said except for some private collections.
An English private school inherited one of those sculptures and put it up for auction in 1994. It sold for $12 million, the highest price ever paid for an antiquity, Russell said.
Two days after Iraqi troops surrendered Mosul this month, looters scared off the guards at the Nimrud museum and entered by breaking a small hole in the mud brick wall, said Shehab Ahmad, a policeman at the site.
He bowed on one knee, and raised his right hand open to the sky to demonstrate the alabaster bas relief sculpture of a woman, about three feet high, that the thieves stole.
One of the guardians of Iraq's ancient culture, which dates to the birth of civilisation, was Mansiyah Khazer. Saddam met her during a tour of Hatra, 55 miles southwest of Mosul, capital of the first Arab kingdom, said Mamoun Ghanim, a veteran archaeologist at Mosul's museum.
Ghanim and others say Khazer, a singer and belly dancer, stole the visiting president's heart. Saddam took Khazer as a lover and, to make her life more comfortable, appointed her general director of the Hatra ruins and museum in 1994, Fakhri said.
The year after she took charge of Hatra, the United Nations education and cultural organisation, UNESCO, put out a global alert warning art dealers and governments that artefacts were being looted from the ancient walled city.
Khazer's brother was the top bodyguard to Hussein Kamel Majid, the president's son-in-law.
Majid was also a trusted member of Saddam's inner circle until he defected to Jordan in 1995 and revealed Iraq's biological weapons programme.
Majid was executed after returning to Iraq in 1996. "No ordinary man can take these things," said Hikmat Bashir Alaswad, a scientific researcher in the archaeology department of Mosul's museum. "There is some organised gang behind it. It can only be someone important in the (deposed) regime."
Alaswad has been too afraid to make that charge for a long time. He has devoted most of his more than 25 years as an archaeologist to understanding and protecting Hatra, and he almost sacrificed his life for it.
In 1994, he noticed that part of a stone statue, a woman's head more than two feet tall, was missing from the wall. Thieves had hacked it off sometime in the night. Alaswad quickly wrote a report and submitted it to his superiors. Then the police came and arrested him.
"They kept me in jail for 22 days and they tortured me," he said. "They handcuffed my arms behind my back and attached them to a chain hanging from a hook in the ceiling. Then they stood me on a table and suddenly kicked it out from under me.
"I was flying in the air for about 10 minutes. When I fell down, both of my arms were paralysed."
Alaswad said it took a year of hospital treatment, with electrical stimulation, before he could move his arms properly, and even now they hang at odd angles.
Three months ago, the statue that he discovered missing from Hatra was spotted in a London shop and returned to Iraq with the help of Interpol, Alaswad said. Iraqi police apologised for their mistake, he added.
But no one mentioned what the London dealer paid for the artefact. "I paid the price," Alaswad said.
Ghanim says he worked closely with Khazer, was often a guest at her house and heard from a mutual friend that she admitted that her brother stole a statue of the Roman god Bacchus from Hatra in late 1994. "Saddam threatened her personally and ordered her to make her brother return the piece," Ghanim said. "But it is now in Britain."
Ghanim thinks that the statue was smuggled out of Iraq by diplomatic pouch when Khazer travelled to Cuba with Jasim, the culture minister, and a cousin of Majid. |
