More details emerge about the 'theft of the century'
Looting of Iraqi museum was long planned
By Heather Cottin
More information has come to light indicating
that the looting of Iraq's archeological museum was long
planned by those aware of its great historical treasures and
was carried out with the complicity of the Pentagon.
Some 7,000 years ago, the earliest Western civilization
began in the fertile area between the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers. It was here that people invented the wheel, writing,
law and agriculture. Today most of that area is in Iraq, which
had carefully preserved, for humanity and particularly for
scholars of antiquity, thousands of irreplaceable artifacts of
the ancient world in its museums.
In the very first days of the U.S. military occupation of
Baghdad, all the fabulous artifacts in the museum there were
stolen. It was a crime engineered on behalf of "foreign art
collectors," and was "planned well in advance of the
American-led invasion." ("Raiders of the Lost Art," Sunday
Telegraph, April 20)
The impression given by the U.S. mass media was one of utter
and spontaneous chaos. But other accounts contradict that.
"Witnesses have spoken of seeing well-dressed men with
walkie-talkies at the scene, and of artifacts being transported
away in orderly convoys of vans rather than over the heads of
the crowd. 'We already have reports of exhibits being offered
for sale in Switzerland and Japan,' says Karl-Heinz Kind,
Interpol's specialist officer for art and antiquity
trafficking." (Sunday Telegraph, April 20)
U.S. troops were completely in control of the area. "We
begged authorities to watch out for this ... All it would have
taken was a tank parked at the gate," said Jane Waldbaum,
president of the Archaeol ogical Institute of America. (USA
Today, April 14)
The tanks were there, but not to protect the building. "U.S.
forces told people to commence looting," said Khaled Bayomi, a
Swede who had gone to Iraq to be a human shield. ("U.S. Forces
Encourage Looting," Dagens Nyheter, April 11)
Granite statue on an Abrams tank
In fact, U.S. soldiers have been flaunting stolen artwork.
"On one U.S. Abrams tank in a Baghdad street soldiers carry a
granite statue from a government residence that now seems to
serve as a souvenir," wrote the Financial Times of April
14.
The destruction and looting of the culture of Iraq on April
11 and 12 was premeditated by international criminals and
sanctioned by the United States. Angry that Iraq's
"retentionist" laws protected its antiquities, a newly formed
group of art dealers, the American Council for Cultural Policy,
had met with U.S. defense and state department officials in
January, before the start of the war. Their pressure to make it
easier for Iraqi art to enter the U.S. helped pave the way for
the "crime of the century."
Since the 1991 Gulf War, when 5,000 artifacts were stolen
from Iraqi museums, the provincial museums had moved their most
valuable pieces into the National Museum in Baghdad for
safekeeping. (Sunday Telegraph, April 20) This made the
thieves' job easier.
"The vaults had been opened with keys," reported the Toronto
Globe and Mail on April 18. Valuable objects were selected and
replicas rejected. Academics who gathered in Paris at the
headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization concluded that the pillaging was the work
of an international conspiracy.
The staff of the Baghdad museum has told reporters that they
begged U.S. troops to help against the looters, but could not
get a detachment of soldiers assigned to protect the site. Nor
was there even "just one soldier for [any non-oil-related]
government building. . . I told the American major, 'you've
caused this.'" an Iraqi neighborhood official said. (Financial
Times, April 14)
This was so obviously a crime perpetrated by the U.S.
military and capitalist art collectors around the world that
several officials in the Bush administration resigned,
including Martin Sullivan, chair of the president's advisory
committee on cultural property, and Gary Vikan, a committee
member.
Aghast at the theft of 80,000 cuneiform tablets, Vikan,
director of Baltimore's Walters Art Gallery, said, "If we
understood the value of Sumerian cuneiform tablets to our past,
as we do with oil getting us somewhere in our cars, I don't
think this would have happened." (Guardian, April 11)
Once everything was stolen, the U.S. government swung into
action. It called for Interpol and the FBI to try to help
recover and "block any sale of the looted goods." But a week
after the massive theft, nothing had been done to identify what
was missing. "Iraqi Museum officials today indicated they have
had no contact from the U.S. investigators." (Melbourne Herald
Sun, April 19)
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rums feld wasn't upset. He
criticized the media for exaggerating the looting. "Stuff
happens," he said, alluding to a crude slang expression. (CNN,
April 12)
"If a country's civilization is looted, then that country is
ended," said Raid Abdul Ridha, Iraqi archeologist. That was the
idea. This was not about democracy. As Iraqi Airlines pilot
Mohammed Nasser said, "Democracy cannot come through guns and
looting." (Daily Telegraph, April 14)
The plunder of Iraq was an act of war designed to rob the
Iraqis of their history and satisfy the greed of the
bourgeoisie.
Reprinted from the May 1, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
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