With international attention focussing on the violence that continues to consume Iraq, the fate of the country's cultural heritage sites, collections and institutions slipped from the headlines in 2004. Nevertheless, their condition remains critical, writes David Tresilian from Paris Writing in the British newspaper The Guardian recently, Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum in London, described 2004 as "a bad year, a very bad year indeed, for the Iraq Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad". Looted following the entry of US forces into Baghdad in April 2003 and the collapse of the Saddam regime, news of the destruction of the Museum's collections, as well as of the parallel looting and destruction of the Iraqi National Library and Archives in Baghdad, the Museum in Mosul, and countless heritage sites across Iraq, helped bring home to the international public the scale of the crisis facing the heritage sites, collections and institutions of Iraq. More than 18 months on, MacGregor wrote, the situation has hardly improved, with, "the huge task of repairing the objects damaged in the liberation" hardly begun. "The Museum did not reopen. At all. Since Baghdad's liberation by European and American troops last year the museum has been open on only one day -- for a press view ... foreign colleagues cannot travel to help, local staff find it increasingly too dangerous even to travel to work. Iraq's past remains invisible. Meanwhile, the great archaeological sites are damaged and looted with impunity." Following the reports of the destruction and looting at Iraqi heritage sites and institutions -- but also at universities, libraries, and cultural centres throughout Iraq -- carried by the world's media immediately following the entry of US troops into Baghdad, the situation of the country's heritage largely dropped from the headlines in 2004, with the media concentrating instead on the violence that continues to consume the country. Earlier reports, however, such as an eyewitness account appearing in the New York Times, had spoken of "at least 170,000 items" being carried off by looters from the Baghdad Museum in the days following US entry to the Iraqi capital, adding that "nothing remained...from a museum that had been regarded as perhaps the richest of all such institutions in the Middle East." Though these figures were later revised downwards, with around 10,000 items still missing, subsequent reports continued to highlight the international condemnation of the invading US forces' failure to safeguard both the Museum and the Iraqi National Library and Archives, looted and destroyed by fire, with scholars across the world describing the scale of the losses as "catastrophic" and the greatest cultural disaster to hit the Middle East and Arab World since the invading Mongols destroyed Baghdad in 1258. Commenting in this newspaper in May 2003, for example, following a reconnaissance mission to Iraq, Mounir Bouchenaki, head of the culture sector at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in Paris, and himself a distinguished archaeologist, spoke of a "real cultural disaster" hitting the country. "The reality [at the Museum] is really terrible," Bouchenaki said. "There is not a single door or cupboard that has not been opened or smashed. Every single piece of equipment has disappeared, even chairs and computers...when you see this terrible situation you feel that people are still in shock." At the National Library and Archives, the situation was, if anything even worse. Virtually the entire collection had been destroyed, including irreplaceable archive material relating to the establishment of the Iraqi state in the 1920s and its subsequent history, and Bouchenaki spoke eloquently of the pain he felt on crunching through the rooms of the now unsafe building across 20 or 30cm of ash from the burnt library collections. Nevertheless, despite the terrifying reality of the early days of the US-led occupation of Iraq, with armed gangs looting and destroying the remains of the successive civilisations, Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian, that had flourished in the region, giving the country a cumulative history going back some 5,000 years, today the situation has in many respects improved, as Anna Paolini, in charge of UNESCO's efforts to protect Iraq's heritage, explained during an interview in Paris earlier this month. The challenges are as great as ever, Paolini says, relating chiefly to the lack of security in the country and the inability of all UN agencies and many NGOs to work in Iraq since the bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003 and the ongoing kidnapping and murder of foreign aid workers. The economic motive for the looting is still present, she says, with items looted from Iraq fetching high prices once smuggled abroad and being highly sought after by American, European and Japanese collectors. Terrible things have happened, such as the looting and part destruction of the ancient sites of Babylon and Nineveh and of other well-known and lesser-known historical sites. Nevertheless, significant efforts are now underway both to restore the damage, and, just as importantly, to prevent further looting of the country's heritage sites and institutions. While it is not possible for UNESCO itself to work inside Iraq for security reasons, and it is impossible for outside experts to travel to the country to assist in conservation and protection efforts, much can still be achieved from outside by providing funds and assistance to Iraqi staff inside the country and by continuing to work closely with the interim Iraqi government, the occupying forces and the international police authorities to prevent further looting and illicit trafficking of antiquities. Paolini explains that UNESCO's actions in these areas have concentrated on efforts to support restoration work at the Baghdad Museum and at the Iraqi National Library and Archives, as well as to secure archaeological sites outside Baghdad that are in many cases still easy prey to looters in the absence of security in the country. The organisation has also been working to prevent the illicit trafficking of objects stolen from Iraq, cooperating with neighbouring countries to seize any items leaving the country and with the international police authorities to impound objects found for sale abroad, chiefly in London. Interpol has also set up a "Red List" of smuggled Iraqi antiquities, and there have been some high-profile seizures. Yet, even before the 2003 conflict, Paolini says, Iraqi heritage sites were already suffering from neglect and were prey to looters, driven to desperation in a country suffering under a decade of UN-imposed sanctions and the prospect of the high prices looted objects could command abroad. Writing in the bulletin of the University of Cambridge's MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in 1997, McGuire Gibson, a professor at the University of Chicago, also described the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent sanctions as "devastating" for Iraq. "In one Bond Street shop" in London, Gibson wrote, "I was shown a bag of more than one hundred cylinder seals [from Iraq] and received an apology because these were the poorer quality ones. I was told the best items had been sold to Japanese and Taiwanese collectors a day or two before." Since then, the situation has only got worse, Paolini comments, and for this reason immediate actions have had to focus on working with neighbouring states to intercept stolen antiquities and with international police authorities to seize stolen items. "While it is not possible to carry out major conservation projects in Iraq at present, it is possible to help build capacity, to provide training, and to prepare for the time when peace will be restored," Paolini says, pointing to UNESCO's "daily contact" with heritage officials in Iraq, and the "thirst to contribute" on the part of Iraqi staff. Erasing identity "A country's identity, its value and civilisation reside in its history. If a country's civilisation 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. "When Baghdad fell to the Mongols in 1258, these books survived. This time, they didn't survive. You can't put a price on this loss." Ra'id Abdul-Ridha Mohamed, an Iraqi archaeologist, speaking to the New York Times . "Appeasing a group of millionaires with a taste for Oriental curiosities would certainly fit the profile of the Bush administration. Much more fundamental, however, is the political value for the American ruling elite, of allowing such repositories of Iraq's history and culture to be destroyed. "The goal of the US military occupation is to impose colonial- style domination over Iraq and seize control of its vast oil resources. It serves the interests of American imperialism to humiliate Iraq and condition its population to submit to the United States and the stooge regime to be established in Baghdad. "Attacking the cultural resources that connect the Iraqi people to 7,000 years of history is part of the process of systematically destroying their national identity." From an editorial on the worldrevolution.com website
