About the looting of the National Museum of Iraq

"But remember, US has troops securing all the valuable oil fields..."

New York Times
April 12   http://tinyurl.com/9e80

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 12 — The National Museum of Iraq recorded a history of civilizations that began to flourish in the fertile plains of Mesopotamia more than 7,000 years ago. But once American troops entered Baghdad in sufficient force to topple Saddam Hussein's government this week, it took only 48 hours for the museum to be destroyed, with at least 50,000 artifacts
carried away by looters.

The full extent of the disaster that befell the museum only came to light today, after three days of frenzied looting that swept much of the capital.

As fires in a dozen government ministries and agencies began to burn out, and as some looters tired of pillaging in the 90-degree heat of the Iraqi spring, museum officials reached the hotels where foreign journalists were staying along the eastern bank of the Tigris River. They brought word of what is likely to be reckoned as one of the greatest cultural disasters in recent Middle Eastern history.

A full accounting of what has been lost may take weeks or months. The museum had been closed during much of the 1990's, and like many Iraqi institutions, its operations were cloaked in secrecy under Mr. Hussein.

So what officials told journalists today may have to be adjusted as a fuller picture comes to light. It remains unclear whether some of the museum's priceless gold, silver and copper antiquities, some of its ancient stone and ceramics, and perhaps some of its fabled bronzes and gold-overlaid ivory, had been locked away for safekeeping elsewhere before the looting, or seized for private display in one of Mr. Hussein's ubiquitous palaces.

What was beyond contest today was that the 28 galleries of the museum and vaults with huge steel doors guarding storage chambers that descend floor after floor into darkness had been completely ransacked.

Officials with crumpled spirits fought back tears and anger at American troops, as they ran down an inventory of the most storied items that they said had been carried away by the thousands of looters who poured into the museum after daybreak on Thursday and remained until dusk on Friday, with only one intervention by American troops, lasting about half an hour, at
lunchtime on Thursday.

Nothing remained, museum officials said, at least nothing of real value, from a museum that had been regarded by archaeologists and other specialists as perhaps the richest of all such institutions in the Middle East.

As examples of what was gone, the officials cited a solid gold harp from the Sumerian era, which began about 3360 B.C. and started to crumble about 2000 B.C. Another item on their list of looted antiquities was a sculptured head of a woman from Uruk, one of the great Sumerian cities, dating to about the same era, and a collection of gold necklaces, bracelets and earrings, also
from the Sumerian dynasties and also at least 4,000 years old.

But an item-by-item inventory of the most valued pieces carried away by the looters hardly seemed to capture the magnitude of what had occurred. More powerful, in its way, was the action of one museum official in hurrying away through the piles of smashed ceramics and torn books and burned-out torches of rags soaked in gasoline that littered the museum's corridors to find the glossy catalog of an exhibition of "silk road civilization" that was held in Japan's ancient capital of Nara in 1988.

Turning to 50 pages of items lent by the Iraqi museum for the exhibition, he said that none of the antiquities pictured remained after the looting. They included ancient stone carvings of bulls and kings and princesses; copper shoes and cuneiform tablets; tapestry fragments and ivory figurines of goddesses and women and Nubian porters; friezes of soldiers and ancient seals and tablets on geometry; and ceramic jars and urns and bowls, all dating back at least 2,000 years, some more than 5,000 years.

"All gone, all gone," he said. "All gone in two days."

An Iraqi archaeologist who has participated in the excavation of some of the country's 10,000 sites, Raid Abdul Ridhar Muhammad, said he had gone into the street of the Karkh district, a short distance from the eastern bank of the Tigris, at about 1 p.m. on Thursday to find American troops to quell the looting. By that time, he and other museum officials said, the several acres of museum grounds were overrun by thousands of men, women and children, many of them armed with rifles, pistols, axes, knives and clubs, as well as pieces of metal torn from the suspensions of wrecked cars. The crowd was storming out of the complex carrying antiquities on hand carts, bicycles and in boxes. Looters stuffed their pockets with smaller items.

Mr. Muhammad said he found an American Abrams tank in Museum Square, about 300 yards away, and that five marines had followed him back into the museum and opened fire above the looters' heads. This drove several thousand of the marauders out of the museum complex in minutes, he said, but when the tank crewmen left about 30 minutes later, the looters returned.

"I asked them to bring their tank inside the museum grounds," he said. "But they refused and left. About half an hour later, the looters were back, and they threatened to kill me, or to tell the Americans that I am a spy for Saddam Hussein's intelligence, so that the Americans would kill me. So I was frightened, and I went home."

He spoke with deep bitterness against the Americans, as have many Iraqis who have watched looting that began with attacks on government agencies and the palaces and villas of Mr. Hussein, his family and his inner circle broaden into a tidal wave of looting that targeted just about every government institution, even ministries dealing with issues like higher education, trade and agriculture, and hospitals.

American troops have intervened only sporadically, as they did on Friday to halt a crowd of men and boys who were raiding an armoury at the edge of the Republican Palace presidential compound and taking brand-new Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons.

American commanders have said they lack the troops to curb the looting while their focus remains on the battles across Baghdad that are necessary to mop up pockets of resistance from paramilitary troops loyal to Mr. Hussein.

Mr. Muhammad, the archaeologist, directed much of his anger at President Bush. "A country's identity, its value and civilization resides in its history," he said. "If a country's civilization is looted, as ours has been here, its history ends. Please tell this to President Bush. Please remind him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a humiliation."

http://tinyurl.com/9e5c
United States Department of Defense
News Transcript
Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers

....  . .  "Rumsfeld: Let me say one other thing. The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, "My goodness, were there that many vases?" (Laughter.) "Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?"

Looters Ransack Baghdad's Antiquities Museum

By Hassan Hafidh Sat Apr 12, 9:03 AM ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Looters have sacked Baghdad's antiquities museum, plundering treasures dating back thousands of years to the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia, museum staff said on Saturday.

They blamed U.S. troops for not protecting the treasures. Surveying the littered glass wreckage of display cases and pottery shards at the Iraqi National Museum on Saturday, deputy director Nabhal Amin wept and told Reuters: "They have looted or destroyed 170,000 items of antiquity dating back thousands of years...They were worth billions of dollars." She blamed U.S. troops, who have controlled Baghdad since the collapse of President Saddam Hussein's rule on Wednesday, for failing to heed appeals from museum staff to protect it from looters who moved into the building on Friday.

"The Americans were supposed to protect the museum. If they had just one tank and two soldiers nothing like this would have happened," she said. "I hold the American troops responsible for what happened to this museum."

The looters broke into rooms that were built like bank vaults with huge steel doors. The museum grounds were full of smashed doors, windows and littered with office paperwork and books.

"We know people are hungry but what are they going to do with these antiquities," said Muhsen Kadhim, a museum guard for the last 30 years but who said he was overwhelmed by the number of looters.

"As soon as I saw the American troops near the museum, I asked them to protect it but the second day looters came and robbed or destroyed all the antiquities," he said.

ARMED GUARDS

Amin told four of the museum guards to carry guns and protect what remained. Some of the museum's artifacts had been moved into storage to avoid a repeat of damage to other antiquities during the 1991 Gulf War.

It houses items from ancient Babylon and Nineveh, Sumerian statues, Assyrian reliefs and 5,000-year-old tablets bearing some of the earliest known writing. There are also gold and silver helmets and cups from the Ur cemetery.

The museum was only opened to the public six months ago after shutting down at the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War. It survived air strikes on Baghdad in 1991 and again was almost unscathed by attacks on the capital by U.S.-led forces.

Iraq, a cradle of civilization long before the empires of Egypt, Greece or Rome, was home to dynasties that created agriculture and writing and built the cities of Nineveh, Nimrud and Babylon -- site of Nebuchadnezzar's Hanging Gardens.


* This newly hatched "American Council for Cultural Policy" (ACCP) is the brainchild of an American  art attorney, Ashton Hawkins.  From Art News:

"Ashton Hawkins Forced Out As Chairman of DIA Trustees of the Dia Center threatened to withhold donations unless longtime chairman Ashton Hawkins, who is also vice president and counsel to the trustees for the Metropolitan, agreed to step down. Younger trustees, allied
with director Michael Govan, were dissatisfied with Mr. Hawkins because of the center's operating deficit. Dia is in the first phase of a capital campaign and several large donations were promised on the condition of his departure...(SOURCE: Roberta Smith, New York Times, 12/23/95, p. 13).

Ashton Hawkins re-emerges,
http://tinyurl.com/9dq8
The Art Newspaper.com

"The future of Iraq's heritage"

The American Council for Cultural Policy takes no position on whether or not the US should invade Iraq, but the group is offering assistance in an eventual rebuilding of Iraq's cultural institutions.

Founded by former Metropolitan Museum of Art lawyer Ashton Hawkins, the ACCP is also asking other groups to join it in its efforts.

The ACCP talks about working with the Iraqi Antiquities Service to rebuild cultural institutions after any new invasion. The Antiquities Service lost one generation in the 10-year Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and another to the purges and scarcity of the 1990s. But Saddam Hussein does see the nationalistic benefits of an antiquities policy, and has been funding the department more generously in recent years. US archaeologists see restoring control of cultural sites to Iraqi specialists as a sign of US willingness to allow at least some autonomy for a conquered nation that George Bush says needs "de-nazification". ...

More..

http://www.artforum.com/news/week=200315

UNESCO has asked the US military to spare archaeological sites in the war on Iraq, but bombs may not be the only threat to the country's cultural heritage. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung's Sonja Zekri reports, the period after the war could see more significant losses in the form of plundering.

As Zekri reports, at the close of the first Gulf War, crowds rummaged through Iraq's museums, either destroying works or stealing them to sell on the black market. This time around, the plundering may simply be legalized by a US-backed regime.

Citing an article in the review Science, Zekri reports that a group of sixty American art dealers, lawyers, researchers, and museum directors formed the American Council for Cultural Policy last year to defend the interests of private and institutional collectors. "Their goal is to loosen up the Iraqi antiquities laws under an American-controlled postwar regime," writes Zekri.
"In short, it's the legalized plundering of Mesopotamian culture by Americans after US bombs have already destroyed the land, and US companies have profited from reconstruction."

According to the council's treasurer, William Pearlstein, who was interviewed by Science, the group supports a "reasonable post-Saddam administration for culture" with new laws that would permit "some objects to be certified for export."

Ashton Hawkins, the council's president and a former executive vice-president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, denies that the council is attempting to change laws and adds that antiquities are not the organization's primary focus.

The Archaeological Institute of America's Patty Gerstenblith is not convinced. "The stated goal of the council is to make countries with rich archaeological resources relax their antiquities-export laws while encouraging the United States to loosen its laws on importing cultural
objects," Gerstenblith told the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

For Hawkins, the practice of keeping archaeological finds in the country is "retentionist." He believes that newly discovered objects should be bought from "local people at local prices" in order to avoid plundering and export to international black markets.

"Poor countries with rich history sell their cultural heritage to rich lands with better researchers and nicer museums," concludes Zekri. "Even if the council does not succeed in influencing the Iraqi laws, a 'power, money, and conquest' strategy is clearly visible here."
-Jennifer Allen

Dear list,
this aggression is getting worse. Whatever US/UK-media and Bush & Blair may tell us. The inevitable has happend. One of the most famous archeological museums in the world has been looted. And surely these people know very well to who they can sell the stolen artefacts. Now this aggression is not only depriving the Iraqi's from the right to live, their culture is also being stolen. It will be replaced by McDonalds and Coca-Cola. How much lower can the US/UK barbarians sink?
We're back in the dark ages of the conquistadores.
Resistance against this fourth Reich is necessary. How do we explain this to our children? What kind of world do we leave for them, if all this is possible?
Greetings (from a very sad)
Dirk.

Baghdad archeological museum looted.

On the Bagdad Museum,

    I have great suspicions about this. People representing the museum had visited Washington recently ( it was reported) as they were very concerned about the museum. They were given assurance  at some high level that the museum would not be bombed and would be protected.

    During W.W.II this was a practice followed by the American military who had special units of people who were actually fine art historians, always officers and a squad of troops.  Except in the Civil War nothing like this has ever happened before in Am. military history. I am positive that commanders are trained in this very standard procedure.

    There has already been some official on CNN who has implied that they suspected the artifacts were on their way to Israel.  My having been around the art world for 40 years and having to always be aware of transactions of stolen art there are some things I know. ( I also attended a very expensive seminar on Art Law which dealt with stolen art)

       The collection of ancient artifacts is an extremely specialized area and one of very wealthy collectors. Sometimes things are stolen and are just held in very private locked rooms of these collectors. This type of collector who will pay any amount of money for a prestige of knowing they now own it. They are really very kinky people.

       Many of them and  there are probably fewer then 50 in the world, like to remain anonymous. My former asst. went to work for an ancient art collector and her very well paid job was to  bid for items of ancient art at Sotheby's and the now defunct Parke-Bernet in NYC. I was always amazed how well paid she was. At any given time there is but a small amount of legally acquired ancient art in the public market. There is a great demand by these 50 wealthy collectors to aquire  even legal items. This is because items held by the museum in Bagdad would never ever be expected to reach the art markets.

There are two possibilities,maybe another I havent thought of. This is what I think happened.
       1. It was a major screw-up by our military ,which is a distinct possibility.If it  was, it was the first since the Civil War.
       The way an art thief would plan is as follows.

       2. Someone made a deal with those that plan the war. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld  are the planners, The first two are both Jews who have close contacts in Israel.

       3. Very wealthy Israeli/Arab collectors formed a syndicate and paid Wolfowitz and/or Perle to ignore a precedent of military history which was to protect the cultural artifacts of Bagdad. This was the finest collection of Mesopotanian artefacts in the world.

       4. I think that much of the stuff went out in trucks . After the rare and prized pieces were removed, a previously hired Iraqi (thug) working in conjunction for the synidicate lead a groups of looters much as a college kid leads a panty raid.

       They began with trashing the statues and pottery which the thieves have left behind and a chaos of piles of broken pottery on the floors. How can anyone know what was smashed and what is just missing ?

       One museum display case that held ancient gold jewelry was broken and its contents stripped. Who would know what happened to it.

       Anyway that's what I think happened.  I am also sure that we will hear much more about this.

 Mel

In response to your comments re the looting of antiquities at the Iraq Museum and destruction of manuscripts at the Saddam Library.

Re 1. I think that the U.S. failure to guard the Museum and Library is culpable.  It is sheer negligence at best but suggests no.2

I was approached already in 1992/1993 by a well-known collector of antiquities  in London (who subsequently was required to return some panels from Nineveh to the Iraqi government) who asked me whether i would 'clean out the basement of the Iraq Museum for him'.  Needless to say, I did not take up his (highly lucrative) offer. 
 
I think that looting plans would have been made from without Iraq, long before the bombing began.  In the opinion of Scotland Yard, with whom I subsequently investigated some illegal antiquities which  a Jordanian woman attempted to send to Britain (1994/1995), the business of illegal antiquities is linked to Mafia activities and also often to drug cartels. 
There must be contacts within the country who would simply wait until the time was right.  Maybe they have waited for years ... to seize this most lucrative opportunity.  With the break-down of law and order and no border controls, truck-loads of material would be taken away. 

I do not think that the main thrust of the looting  of antiquities has been by ordinary individuals.  After all, unlike sofas and chandeliers, these are not practical household items. The sales market would also be very restricted - unless they are counting on soldiers buying souvenirs. Should this happen, I believe that the CO's or whoever should confiscate such items.  But then U.S. could not be bothered to protect the Museum/Library in the first place ...

Hoping that this might shed some light onto this tragic situation.

Broken-hearted, I share this email with you all.

In addition to what is listed by Fisk below, an Al-Jazeera documentary talks further of what was destroyed. Here are some examples:  In the museum that they burned, they burned the first printing station, the beginnings of how to print the alphabet. The first train. The first writings of Gilgamesh. The first discovery of electricity. Hundreds of thousands of hand-written history books. Hand-written copies of Al-Quran, and the writings of Al-Imam Ali and Ibn Battatu.

This was clearly planned.  They knew the locations of the historical sites, the museums, the libraries, .... They knew - and UNESCO had given the maps of all the historical locations in Iraq so that the US/UK invaders would be careful not to attack those locations. Those were the locations that were looted and burned and destroyed.

The US and UK military occupiers were able to protect the Ministry of Oil and they couldn't even protect the National Library, the Ministry of Culture, the Museum of Archaeology, the Koranic Library, the other libraries and Art Centers?

No one - among all the previous occupiers and destroyers of Iraq - no one had ever done this in Iraq, to Iraq, to us all.

According to: Nida' Kadhim, Iraqi artist and witness: The US Military would enter into empty streets, break the doors and windows of historic sites, and then there would follow seemingly organized groups of people who would burn and destroy what was in the museums.   (Source: Al Jazeera, Documentary. April 14, 2003)

This clearly was no accident.

No Iraqi would burn his/her own history. No Iraqi would burn a museum or burn a library or burn an art center. No way.

Our history. How do we restore it?

People die. And others are born. Buildings are destroyed and rebuilt. But our history. Our books. Our archaeology. The history of all civilization. They want us to forget our history. They want to make the history of Iraq to disappear, and thus to make Iraqis disappear as Iraqis.

How and why the US encouraged looting in Iraq
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/apr2003/iraq-a15.shtml
By Patrick Martin
15 April 2003

The widespread looting in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Kirkuk and other Iraqi cities, following the collapse of the Ba’athist regime of President Saddam Hussein, was not merely an incidental byproduct of the US military conquest of Iraq. It was deliberately encouraged and fostered by the Bush administration and the Pentagon for definite political and economic reasons.

Thousands took part in the looting in Baghdad which began April 9, the day the Hussein government ceased to function in the capital city. Not only were government ministries targeted, and the homes of the Ba’athist elite, but public institutions vital to Iraqi society, including hospitals, schools and food distribution centers. Equipment and parts were stripped from power plants, thus delaying the restoration of electricity to the city of 5 million people.

Perhaps the most devastating loss for the Iraqi people is the ransacking of the National Museum, the greatest trove of archeological and historical artifacts in the Middle East. The 28 galleries of the huge museum were picked clean by looters who made off with more than 50,000 irreplaceable artifacts, relics of past civilizations dating back 5,000 years. The museum ’s entire card catalog was destroyed, making it impossible even to identify what has been lost.

The US military stood by and permitted the ransacking of the museum, an incalculable blow to Iraqi and world culture, just as they allowed and even encouraged the looting of hospitals, universities, libraries and government social service buildings. The occupation forces protected only the Ministry of Oil, with its detailed inventory of Iraqi oil reserves, as well as the Ministry of Interior, the headquarters of the ousted regime’s secret police.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) issued a statement in Geneva declaring that the relief agency was “profoundly alarmed by the chaos currently prevailing in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq.” The medical system in Baghdad “has virtually collapsed,” the ICRC warned, and it reminded the US and Britain that they were obliged under international law to guarantee the basic security of the Iraqi population.

General Tommy Franks, the overall commander of all US and British forces in Iraq, issued an order to unit commanders that specifically prohibited the use of force to prevent looting. This instruction was only modified after several days because of mounting protests by Iraqi citizens over the destruction of their social infrastructure.

The New York Times reported one such protest by an Iraqi man who was standing guard at Al Kindi hospital in Baghdad. Haider Daoud “said he was angry at his encounters with American soldiers in the neighborhood, mentioning one marine who he said he had begged to guard the hospital two days ago. ‘He told me the same words: He can’t protect the hospital,’ Mr. Daoud said. ‘A big army like the USA army can’t protect the hospital?’”

The role of the US military went beyond simply standing by, and extended to actually encouraging and facilitating looting. According to a report in the Washington Post, after the US military reopened two bridges across the Tigris River to civilian traffic, “the immediate result was that looters raced across and extended their plundering to the Planning Ministry and other buildings that had been spared.”

Sweden’s largest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, published an interview April 11 with a Swedish researcher of Middle Eastern ancestry who had gone to Iraq to serve as a human shield. Khaled Bayoumi told the newspaper, “I happened to be right there just as the American troops encouraged people to begin the plundering.”

He described how US soldiers shot security guards at a local government building on Haifa Avenue on the west bank of the Tigris, and then “blasted apart the doors to the building.” Next, according to Bayoumi, “from the tanks came eager calls in Arabic encouraging people to come close to them.”

At first, he said, residents were hesitant to come out of their homes because anyone who had tried to cross the street in the morning had been shot. “Arab interpreters in the tanks told the people to go and take what they wanted in the building,” Bayoumi continued. “The word spread quickly and the building was ransacked. I was standing only 300 yards from there when the guards were murdered. Afterwards the tank crushed the entrance to the Justice Department, which was in a neighboring building, and the
plundering continued there.

“I stood in a large crowd and watched this together with them. They did not partake in the plundering but dared not to interfere. Many had tears of shame in their eyes. The next morning the plundering spread to the Modern Museum, which lies a quarter mile farther north. There were also two crowds there, one that plundered and one that watched with disgust.”

Kirkuk and Mosul

Similar scenes were reported in Kirkuk and Mosul, the two large northern cities with ethnically mixed populations. There the looting of public buildings has direct political overtones, since the destruction of property deeds and other government records will make it easier to conduct ethnic cleansing of Arab or Turkmen populations by the Kurdish forces that now dominate the region, in alliance with US Special Forces.

In Kirkuk, the site of Iraq’s richest oilfield, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan has already installed its officials in the homes of former Ba’ath Party leaders. US soldiers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade seized control of an Iraqi air base but permitted looters to leave the base with their stolen goods, even opening the gates to allow them to pass.

There was no effort to halt arson at the city’s cotton plant, or at office buildings, but US troops quickly occupied facilities of the North Oil Company, the state-owned firm that manages the huge northern oilfields. Colonel William Mayville, commander of the brigade, dispatched troops to three key oil facilities, while US Special Forces stood watch over four gas-oil separation plants. Mayville told the American media that he wanted to send the message, “Hey, don’t screw with the oil.”

In Mosul, northern Iraq’s largest city, hospitals, universities, laboratories, hotels, clinics and factories were all sacked and stripped of
their goods. The 700 US troops sent to Mosul remained outside the city for more than a day while the theft and vandalism continued, leading to widespread complaints from city residents—reported even in the American press—that the US was permitting the pillaging.

Save the oil—and nothing else

Robert Fisk, writing in the British newspaper the Independent April 14, noted a pattern in the response of American forces to looting in Baghdad, which, he said, “shows clearly what the US intends to protect.” He continued: “After days of arson and pillage, here’s a short but revealing scorecard. US troops have sat back and allowed mobs to wreck and then burn the Ministry of Planning, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Irrigation, the Ministry of Trade, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Information. They did nothing to prevent looters from destroying priceless treasures of Iraq’s history in the Baghdad Archaeological Museum and in the museum in the northern city of Mosul, or from looting three hospitals.

“The Americans have, though, put hundreds of troops inside two Iraqi ministries that remain untouched—and untouchable—because tanks and armoured personnel carriers and Humvees have been placed inside and outside both institutions. And which ministries proved to be so important for the Americans? Why, the Ministry of Interior, of course—with its vast wealth of intelligence information on Iraq—and the Ministry of Oil. The archives and files of Iraq’s most valuable asset—its oilfields and, even more important, its massive reserves—are safe and sound, sealed off from the mobs and looters, and safe to be shared, as Washington almost certainly intends, with American oil companies.”

Such concerns were already apparent in the actions of the US military at the very beginning of the war. The same General Franks who instructed US troops to take no action against looting in Baghdad or other cities gave the order March 20 for the First Marine Expeditional Force to invade Iraq a day early, because of reports, later proven largely false, that Iraqi troops were setting fire to the country’s southern oilfields at Rumaila.

The Centcom chief discarded previous operational plans and potentially put many soldiers’ lives at risk by acting before the air bombardment had begun in order to safeguard the real objective of the US war, Iraq’s huge oil reserves.

The politics of plunder

The most striking aspect of the outbreak of looting was the nonchalant attitude of US government officials in Washington. At a Pentagon press conference Friday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld denounced the media for exaggerating the extent of chaos, and argued that the looting was a natural and perhaps even healthy expression of pent-up hostility to the old regime. “It’s untidy,” Rumsfeld said. “And freedom’s untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes.”

There is no doubt the Bush administration would take a less charitable view of the “freedom” to loot if mobs were breaking into corporate offices in downtown Houston, Washington or New York City.

As in every action of the Bush administration, personal greed and profit-gouging are an important aspect. The ransacking of Iraqi government facilities, added to the devastation caused by American bombing, is part of the process of demolishing the large state-run sector of Iraq’s economy, to the benefit of American companies. Already contracts have been awarded to private American firms to provide new school books, replace looted medical equipment, even train a new Iraqi police force.

In the Orwellian language of New York Times columnist William Safire, the US aim is to “introduce free enterprise and the rule of law”—by means of a criminal invasion, followed by widespread looting. This will set the stage for a much bigger theft: the privatization of Iraq’s vast oil resources and their exploitation, directly or indirectly, by US and British oil companies.

There is more at stake, however, than rank hypocrisy or an appetite for Iraq’s oil wealth. The looting in Iraq directly serves the political interests of American imperialism in cementing its domination of the conquered country.

The Bush administration is seeking to encourage the emergence of a new ruling elite in Iraq, formed from the most rapacious, reactionary and selfish elements, which will serve as a semi-criminal comprador force entirely subservient to the United States. The acquisition of property through the theft of Iraqi state assets serves to bind these elements to the US occupation forces by their own economic self-interest. As one Army officer told the Times, as he watched the looting approvingly, “This is the new income redistribution program.”

There is recent precedent for such an operation. The first Bush administration proceeded in the same fashion when it encouraged the
formation of a new capitalist elite in Russia out of layers of the Soviet-era mafia and former Stalinist bureaucrats who acquired state assets by wholesale theft. What US imperialism promoted in the 1990s in eastern Europe and the former USSR under the label “shock therapy”, it is now applying in the aftermath of its “shock and awe” devastation of Iraq.

Bush Cultural Advisers Quit Over Iraq Museum Theft

Reuters - Thursday, April 17, 2003; 1:43 PM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The head of a U.S. presidential panel on cultural property has resigned in protest at the failure of U.S. forces to prevent the wholesale looting of priceless treasures from Baghdad's antiquities museum.

"It didn't have to happen," Martin Sullivan said of the objects that were destroyed or stolen from the Iraqi National Museum in a wave of looting that erupted as U.S.-led forces ended President Saddam Hussein's rule last week.

Sullivan, who chaired the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for eight years, said he wrote a letter of resignation to the White House this week in part to make a statement but also because "you can't speak freely" as a special government-appointed employee.

The president appoints the 11-member advisory committee. Another panel member, Gary Vikan, also plans to resign because of the looting of the museum.

"Our priorities had a big gap," Sullivan told Reuters on Thursday. "In a pre-emptive war that's the kind of thing you should have planned for."

The National Museum held rare artifacts documenting the early civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, and leading archeologists were meeting in Paris on Thursday to seek ways to rescue Iraq's cultural heritage.

Earlier this week, antiquities experts said they had been given assurances from U.S. military planners that Iraq's historic artifacts and sites would be protected by occupying forces.

U.S. archeological organizations and the U.N.'s cultural agency UNESCO said they had provided U.S. officials with information about Iraq's cultural heritage and archeological sites months before the war began.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has rejected charges the U.S. military was to blame for failing to prevent the looting, noting the country has offered rewards for the return of artifacts and information on their whereabouts.

"Looting is an unfortunate thing. Human beings are not perfect," Rumsfeld said, earlier this month. "To the extent it happens in a war zone, it's difficult to stop."

The Advisory Committee on Cultural Property convenes when a country requests U.S. assistance under the 1970 UNESCO Convention on international protection of cultural objects.

senseless yet purposeful...shame on us all. the reference to the sacking of baghdad by the monghols in 1258 is important, for it took iraq almost 700 years to recover from that.

<<<<<<"This morning, the ashes were still smoldering at the Ministry for Religious Affairs, where a building housing thousands of Korans, many of them illuminated and hand written, several a thousand years old, had been burned to a charred shell. It was another severe blow to Iraq's 10,000 years of cultural history, along with the looting of the National Museum and the burning of the National Library, in which countless priceless artifacts and books were lost. "When Baghdad fell to the Mongols in 1258, these books survived," said Abdel Karim Anwar Obeid, 42, the ministry's general manager for administration. "And now they didn't survive. You can't put a price on this loss. "If you talk to any intellectual Muslims in the world, they are crying right now over this," he added>>>>.

full article can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/16/international/worldspecial/16BAGH.html

À l'Université de Bagdad, seuls les murs sont intacts

Judith Lachapelle

La Presse Montreal  www.cyberpresse.ca  

Bagdad

À l'entrée de l'Université des technologies de Bagdad, une dizaine d'étudiants gardent la porte de fer. Lorsque des visiteurs louches se présentent, ils haussent la voix pour s'enquérir de l'objet de leur visite. Si le visiteur a des airs d'Ali Baba, ils sortent le fusil et tirent en l'air.

«Ça suffit pour éloigner les pilleurs», dit Haidar Nema Baqir, un étudiant en génie qui s'est présenté à l'université au lendemain de la chute de Bagdad. Ce qu'il a vu à ce moment l'a pétrifié. «Un gros char américain a enfoncé la porte de fer. Et à ce moment, des milliers de pilleurs se sont engouffrés sur le campus. Ce sont les Américains qui les ont laissé entrer!»

Avec d'autres étudiants, il a pu chasser les derniers pilleurs qui restaient sur le campus et protéger ce qui avait échappé à leur convoitise. Depuis, les étudiants se sont divisés les rondes pour assurer une présence toute la journée. Le soir, des gardes mieux armés sont postés devant les portes pour barrer la route aux voleurs.

«Les dossiers administratifs sont encore là et une certaine partie de la bibliothèque», dit Haidar Nema Baqir. Mais dans le reste de l'université, c'est la catastrophe.

Les bâtiments ont pratiquement tous été visités par les pilleurs qui ont volé de l'équipement, cassé les vitres, renversé les bibliothèques, et même mis le feu à certains endroits. Entre les immeubles, les allées normalement grouillantes d'étudiants sont désormais désertes et jonchées d'objets divers. Ici, on a renversé une boîte d'élastiques en caoutchouc et une bouteille d'encre. Là, un lecteur de microfilms cabossé et ses négatifs traînent dans le sable. Les trois autres universités de Bagdad sont aussi en très piteux état.

En clair, en plusieurs endroits, seuls les murs sont restés intacts. Dans une classe, un tableau porte encore les dernières indications d'un professeur pour résoudre un problème mathématique, comme si le cours s'était terminé 15 minutes plus tôt et non le 19 mars.

Sur un autre tableau, un témoin anonyme a décrit à la craie ce qu'il a vu lors des scènes de pillage en intitulant son texte «Notre tragédie». «Les pilleurs ont commis des mauvaises choses dans notre université, ils criaient dans les couloirs, et ils sont restés jusqu'à ce qu'il n'y ait plus rien à voler. (...) Des gens sont entrés (des Koweïtiens et des gens du Golfe) portant des masques et habillés à l'américaine. Après qu'ils furent partis, la fumée a commencé, couvrant toute l'université, pour que les gens du voisinage soient au courant de ce qui s'est passé.»

Un autre graffiti lui répond: «Nous devons tirer des leçons de ce qui s'est passé.»

À l'entrée de l'université, les étudiants ne s'entendent pas sur le moment ou doivent reprendre les cours. Un mois? Quatre mois? Il faudra voir qui prendra la tête de l'université. Les administrateurs d'avant la guerre sont revenus, mais ne font pas l'unanimité... «Ce sont des gens du parti Baas! dénonce Bashar Najar. Je ne veux pas qu'ils reviennent, mais qu'est-ce qu'on peut faire?» Ses collègues ne sont pas tous d'accord. «Ils n'avaient pas le choix d'être membres du parti», dit Haidar Nema Baqir.

«Qui va payer pour la reconstruction?» demande Bashar Najar. Les hôpitaux reçoivent de l'aide, à juste titre, mais ils se demandent qui aidera les écoles. Des mères rencontrées dans la rue ont aussi exprimé leur inquiétude quant à la reprise des classes pour leurs enfants.

Hier après-midi, au milieu des décombres de leur université, les étudiants s'inquiétaient pour leur avenir en Irak. Certains songent à partir. «Si ça reste comme ça... se désespère Hayder Ismael. J'aime mon pays, mais je dois étudier. Je n'ai qu'une seule vie à vivre. Sans professeur, sans université ici, je suis peut-être mieux de m'en aller.»

Les questions sur la présence américaine en sol irakien ou la mise en place d'un nouveau gouvernement ne le passionnent guère. «Nous ne voulons qu'étudier, répète Bashar Najar. Nous ne voulons pas faire de politique, nous ne voulons qu'étudier pour assurer notre avenir.» Dans un pays à reconstruire, ne pense-t-il pas qu'un ingénieur comme lui aura de toute façon sa place? Il sourit faiblement. «Je veux bien, mais je dois finir mes études d'abord!»