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Tuesday, January 13, 2009

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AFTEREFFECTS: MUSEUM; Experts Despair of Iraq's Stopping Loss of Relics

By ALAN RIDING Published: May 5, 2003 E-MAIL

The ransacking of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad last month may have prompted urgent calls for a clampdown on trafficking in Iraqi antiquities, but Iraqi and American officials concede that it will be almost impossible to prevent the continued illegal export of treasures from ancient Mesopotamian sites. The immediate focus is on trying to recover what was stolen from the

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museum, but in the rare roadblocks still operated by American and British troops here, the search is for weapons, not for antiquities. The only success to date came when a unit of the Iraq National Congress stopped a truck and found a steel case containing 453 small objects taken from the museum. Among Iraq's neighbors, only the customs authorities in Jordan, traditionally the first destination of looted Mesopotamian art objects, have displayed fresh vigilance for possible smuggled antiquities. The National Museum, which remains in a state of disorder and disorganization, has in turn been slow to draw up a detailed list of looted treasures, partly because it lacks a computerized inventory. ''We can't control anything until we know what's missing,'' said Col. Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Marine reservist who is investigating the looting and is stationed at the museum. ''Only when we get a photo and a description can we disseminate the information to the international law enforcement community, also to the art community, auction houses and dealers.'' So far, the museum has provided Colonel Bogdanos with a provisional list of 25 missing objects, although many more are presumed to have disappeared. But perhaps most discouraging is the knowledge that a well-organized trafficking network has been in place since the Persian Gulf war in 1991. Iraqi officials said some 2,000 objects, stolen at the time from nine regional museums, served to create this network. It has since been fed by systematic looting of ancient sites, particularly in southern Iraq. Numbers tell part of the story. There are said to be around 10,000 ancient sites in Iraq, many dating back to at least 3000 B.C. Yet through most the 1990's none were protected. And even after the National Museum resumed its excavation program in 1997, with its teams accompanied by armed guards, it did so in only 32 places, with four other sites worked by foreign archaeologists. A drive through part of southern Iraq tells another part of the story. Major highways run north-south, with towns separated by expanses of desert. To the west lie inaccessible tribal lands, reachable only by camel or helicopter. (From 1991 to the recent war, this region was a no-flight zone from which Iraqi aircraft were barred.) Even Tell Lahan, an ancient hillside site that is a short drive from the southern city of Nasiriya, is abandoned, with only a nomadic Bedouin family grazing sheep and goats on nearby land. ''After the 1991 war, the looting began on a large scale,'' said Jabbir Khalil, chairman of the State Board of Antiquities. ''There was no authority, and many sites of southern Iraq were plundered, particularly in the middle of the desert, far away from the authorities. It
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AFTEREFFECTS: MUSEUM; Experts Despair of Iraq's Stopping Loss of Relics - ...

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is so difficult to settle and live in these areas. You can't put guards there. From these sites, the European and American markets for Iraqi antiquities was born.'' While this illicit activity was largely ignored by the law enforcement authorities in the West, not least because Iraq under Saddam Hussein was considered a rogue state, it was no secret to foreign and Iraqi experts. ''What happened to the Iraq museum is only the tip of the iceberg,'' said Jean-Marie Durand, a French archaeologist. ''For years, the whole country has been looted. At Larsa, the site was turned over by a bulldozer. It looked like the moon.'' In Basra, the largest southern city, Hamid Ahmed Hamdan, a history professor at the local university, blamed the impact of the 1991 war. ''There was greater poverty because of the sanctions, and people would do anything for work,'' he said, noting that it was easy to find impoverished peasants to excavate sites. ''In cities, intellectuals could stop this from happening, but in the deserts this was impossible. People were too poor.''
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