News of last week's looting of the Baghdad Museum has been greeted by international condemnation of US occupying forces for failing to secure Iraq's heritage sites, writes David Tresilian International condemnation of the failure of US occupying forces in Iraq to protect the country's cultural heritage grew this week, following last week's looting of the National Museum in Baghdad and the reported looting and burning of the Iraqi National Library and Archives, as well as of other cultural institutions across the country. According to reports emerging last weekend, looters entered the Baghdad National Museum hours after the fall of Baghdad to invading US-led forces, "entirely destroying" its collections, either by looting them or by smashing objects that were too heavy to carry away. At the same time, the National Library and Archives in Baghdad were looted and burned, in actions thought to have caused untold losses to the Iraqi, Arab and world cultural heritage. Elsewhere in Iraq, the Mosul Museum, which used to contain antiquities from neighbouring ancient Assyrian sites, as well as later Parthian sculpture, has been "wrecked" according to eyewitnesses, looters making off with objects from the museum collections or destroying them. The looting in Baghdad, lasting over several days, was ignored by US forces occupying the city, who did nothing to prevent it despite the pleas of museum curators and guards. The Baghdad Museum is one of the most important museums in the world and home to an irreplaceable collection of ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian art and artefacts from Ancient Mesopotamia, together with significant holdings of later Parthian, Hellenistic and Islamic objects from Iraq. The loss of this material, together with books and manuscripts from the Iraqi National Library and Archives has been described as "catastrophic", and the greatest cultural disaster to hit the Middle East and Arab world since the invading Mongols destroyed Baghdad in 1258. Eyewitness accounts last week were unanimous in saying that the occupying US forces in Baghdad did nothing to protect these cultural sites, while being careful to secure the Ministry of Oil in the capital and Iraq's oil wells elsewhere in the country. According to an eyewitness account in The New York Times of 13 April, "at least 170,000 artefacts [have been] carried away by looters" from the Baghdad Museum, and "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 unlighted darkness had been completely ransacked." The Times writer quoted museum officials as saying that "nothing remained ... from a museum that had been regarded as perhaps the richest of all such institutions in the Middle East." The museum's records, containing the details of excavations carried out in Iraq over the past century and being an irreplaceable resource for the understanding of the country's history and heritage, are also thought to have been destroyed. The failure of US occupying forces to take measures to secure Iraq's cultural heritage, one of the richest in the world and extending back over at least five millennia, has caused shock waves worldwide, particularly in the scholarly and academic community. According to Mounir Bouchenaki, assistant director-general for culture at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO, in Paris, the organisation had sent the US government a map of key archaeological sites in Iraq, together with a list of museums and other sites, well before the conflict started, asking that these sites be protected in the event of a US-led war against Iraq. Previous experience, particularly during the 1991 Gulf War, had shown that such sites were especially vulnerable to looting in the event of war or other disturbances, and UNESCO had reminded the US government of its responsibility to protect these sites in the event of armed conflict. Last week, Koichiro Matsuura, director-general of the UN agency charged with the protection and safeguarding of the world's cultural heritage, issued a series of statements calling on the US occupying forces in Iraq to "take immediate measures of protection and surveillance of Iraqi archaeological sites and cultural institutions". On 15 April, Matsuura warned of "the devastation and looting of libraries and archives" in Iraq, again calling upon the US occupying forces to ensure their protection. UNESCO, he said, would be organising a preliminary meeting of experts on 17 April in Paris to assess the extent of the losses and to make recommendations on what could now be saved. European and US scholars have also condemned the US occupying forces for their failure to secure Iraq's cultural heritage and institutions. In a letter to the British newspaper The Guardian on 14 April, leading British scholars condemned the British government for "having no appreciation of what is at stake" in the current, unchecked looting of Iraq's cultural heritage. British forces are currently occupying the south of Iraq and the city of Basra. For Eleanor Robson, Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, a council member of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, and keeper of a Web site documenting the current destruction (http:// users.ox.ac.uk/~wolf0126), what has been lost includes "100,000-year-old stone tools from the Kirkuk area to Sumerian jewellery and gold from the third millennium BC... Babylonian cuneiform tablets and Assyrian ivories to Parthian sculpture, glassware and manuscripts from mediaeval Baghdad". "This is a tragedy with echoes of past catastrophes," she wrote, "such as the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258, and the fifth-century destruction of the library of Alexandria."
