Iraqi museum exhibit — a public relations stunt
By Michael Jansen
TODAY THERE is a special exhibit at Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities.
Today and today only thousands of artefacts which have not been seen since 1991 will be on display. This event was organised by US marine reserve Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, the former head of the US military team engaged in the recovery of items taken by looters following the fall of Baghdad on April 9.
The collection of articles featured in today's exhibit, the gold jewellery of an Iraqi monarch known as the “Treasure of Nimrod,” has been taken from the vaults of Iraq's central bank where it has been stored for the past 12 years. Concerned over its safety, museum staff left it in the bank after the 1991 Gulf war. During the March-April US onslaught on Iraq, the bank's vaults were flooded and it was impossible to recover the hoard until the water was pumped out.
Today's event is a public relations stunt meant to project the notion that all is well at the museum and create the illusion that the collection is intact in spite of the reports of massive looting after US troops took control of the capital.
But nothing can hide the fact that at least 6,000 artefacts were stolen from the museum during eight days of pillage. On June 13, the US Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is cooperating with museum staff in inventorying the collection, told Dr McGuire Gibson of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago that this total had doubled in a week and was rising.
One of the most valuable pieces, the 5,000 year old “Warka vase” was returned, but another 32 major exhibits remain missing, including a unique alabaster head of a woman from same place and period. Also missing are a 300-kilogramme Akkadian copper statue of a youth from 2500 BC and 4,800 cylinder seals. Two ground floor storerooms were thoroughly looted. One contained the museum's study collection and the other 10 trunks of uninventoried material from recent digs.
One out of three basement storerooms was breached. This held important ceramic and ivory objects. According to Gibson, who took part in a UNESCO mission to Baghdad in May, there are also “thousands of things that are broken,” but not on the list of missing pieces. No full accounting can be made until the half million items, registered under 170,000 identification numbers, can be checked against the inventory.
Inflated claims of losses in the immediate aftermath of the looting have given a false impression of what happened and prompted allegations by defenders of the US that museum staff deliberately misled world public opinion about the extent of the pillage. The staff was also charged with being involved and permitting Iraqi soldiers to use the museum as a bunker and firing position.
The idea that tens of thousands of articles were stolen took hold because senior staff did not promptly correct the impression gained by journalists who entered the museum in the wake of the looting and reported that the trashed galleries had been stripped bare. The staff, concerned that the looters could return, did not wish to reveal that most of the artefacts had been moved to storerooms on the premises or sent to bunkers elsewhere. Staff feared that the looters could come back. Consequently, some journalists even reported that 170,000 pieces had been stolen, confusing total inventory numbers with plundered items.
Staff members had good reason to be angry over what happened at the museum. Having spent most of the war in the museum with the aim of protecting the collection, they left on April 8, during a particularly heavy bout of fighting in the street just outside the gate. They returned to the premises on the 13th, while looters were carrying away artefacts. All the offices had been broken into and stripped of equipment and other valuables, most of the galleries had been wrecked, statuary from the Roman era site of Hatra had been beheaded or smashed. Glass and broken pottery littered the floors of three storerooms and artefacts pulled from boxes and shelves were buried in the mess on the floor. Horrified staff genuinely believed the museum had suffered massive, comprehensive looting. Shocked and angry, senior spokesmen declared that thousands of items in the collection had vanished and that amongst the looters were professionals stealing specific pieces to order for wealthy foreign collectors. It was fortunate that they took this line. If they had been less alarmist, the US would not have deployed tanks round the museum on April 16 and the looting would have continued.
The impression that tens of thousands of items were missing was not corrected after the tanks were in place for some time. The US military's Civil Affairs team arrived only on April 22. A proper assessment of what had been taken from the storerooms could not be made until the end of the first week in May because until then the museum had no electricity to light the storerooms. The first task of the US team was to get the museum's generator repaired. This took some time. Once the sorting out began, it went forward at a snail's pace as women employed in making the inventory refused to work for more than a few hours a day because they were afraid to leave their homes as long as lawlessness prevailed.
Instead of being involved in the theft, museum staff did their best to preserve the collection by emptying the galleries during the three weeks before the war. There is, however, some suspicion that one or more staff members might have informed professional art thieves where certain items were to be found.
The US military at one time apparently claimed senior staff permitted the museum to be used as a bunker by 150 Iraqi troops and that the museum was employed as a defensive position. There was no evidence that such a large number of troops was based in the museum or its grounds or of fighting between these troops and the US invaders. The museum's outer walls are not pockmarked by incoming fire and shellcasings were not found in the building or garden. In any case, museum officials could not have stopped the Iraqi military from deploying at this site if orders had been issued to do so.
A watchman on the premises throughout the war reported that a feday came over the wall on April 8, attempted to fire an anti-tank weapon from atop an external archway, but was shot and killed by US troops. While evidence was found that someone set up a firing position at a window in one of the storerooms, this post was abandoned because nothing could be targeted from that particular place. A shallow bunker dug in the garden in front of the museum was not a defensive position but a protection for guards posted at the museum. They ran away when US forces entered Baghdad.
The US military's claims, like today's exhibit, are meant to exculpate the Bush administration which was, ultimately, responsible for the looting of the world's main collection of Mesopotamian historical and cultural artefacts.
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld summed up the administration's attitude when he said that such “stuff” is usually lost during wartime. He was in fact the person most at fault because he was responsible for the dispatch of only 160,000 troops to the theatre of war. This “light” deployment has created most of the administration's post-war problems with looting, anarchy and destruction of Iraq's infrastructure. In spite of this, Rumsfeld has clearly not learnt his lesson. He continues to find ways and means to “bring the boys home” as soon as possible. What is happening on the ground in Iraq is not his concern now that US troops have overthrown Saddam Hussein, the man who had the audacity to survive the onslaught perpetrated by the first Bush administration.
Thursday, July 3, 2003
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