The Archaeology Channel - The Looting of the Iraq Museum: An Interview with Donny George - video

The Archaeology Channel - The Looting of the Iraq Museum: An Interview with Donny George

Here's the latest offering from TAC, and once again we return to the scene of one of the most sustained attacks on a nation's heritage in recent years, that of Iraq, from where a vast amount of antiquities has been looted, and smuggled out into the hands of any number of greed-crazed traders and a veritable army of private collectors, all intent on taking advantage of the chaos that ensued after the US-led coalition invasion of that country back in March 2003.

Before discussing this video specifically, here's a little contextual background from a recent essay at TomDispatch, 'The Good News From Iraq' (Don't Count On It), penned by Tom Engelhardt...

"On March 19, 2003, as his shock-and-awe campaign against Iraq was being launched, George W. Bush addressed the nation.

"My fellow citizens," he began, "at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger." We were entering Iraq, he insisted, "with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people."

Within weeks, of course, that "great civilization" was being looted, pillaged, and shipped abroad. Saddam Hussein's Baathist dictatorship was no more and, soon enough, the Iraqi Army of 400,000 had been officially disbanded by L. Paul Bremer, the head of the occupying Coalition Provisional Authority and the President's viceroy in Baghdad. By then, ministry buildings -- except for the oil and interior ministries -- were just looted shells.

Schools, hospitals, museums, libraries, just about everything that was national or meaningful, had been stripped bare. Meanwhile, in their new offices in Saddam's former palaces, America's neoconservative occupiers were already bringing in the administration's crony corporations -- Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR, Bechtel, and others -- to finish off the job of looting the country under the rubric of "reconstruction."

Somehow, these "administrators" managed to "spend" $20 billion of Iraq's oil money, already in the "Development Fund for Iraq," even before the first year of occupation was over -- and to no effect whatsoever. They also managed to create what Ed Harriman in the London Review of Books labeled "the least accountable and least transparent regime in the Middle East." (No small trick given the competition.)"

The reason I included that brief excerpt is to reiterate that whilst the pillaging of Iraq's archaeological heritage is bad enough, there has been a great deal more damage caused to the infrastructure, all done in the name of freedom, democracy and whatever other words the Bush administration deemed suitable to whip up media and public support for their disastrous - and probably illegal - assault on Iraq.

And so to the interview itself, which takes the form of an informal chat between Rick Pettigrew of TAC and Donny George, the former man in charge of the Baghdad Museum, who was eventually forced to flee to the US from Iraq because of death threats to members of his own family; had he stayed in Baghdad it's possible that Donny George might through his influence have been able to co-ordinate some sort of remedial or preventative action regarding the overall situation of looting in Iraq, and I suppose this was the reason certain people didn't want him there.

Running to around 45 minutes, the interview covers a lot of ground, and takes place in the wake of the TAC Film and Video Festival which had taken place a few days beforehand - there is no footage of events that took place in Iraq, or indeed of any of the thousands of missing artefacts or the damage done to the museum, or the thousands of looted and damaged sites elsewhere across Iraq, which was known in the past as Mesopotamia, i.e., the place-between-two rivers, which 5,000 years ago, was one of the birthplaces of what we refer to as modern civilisation.

And although I've covered some of this in previous posts, it's worth going over some of the more salient points, because the situation in Iraq has scarcely improved since I last wrote, and it's important to remind ourselves of the true scale of the destruction that has been witnessed there. In my opinion, it's as well as to warn how this disaster might well be repeated in the future, should there be further outbreaks of full-scale war and/or natural disasters at other locations across the Middle East and the world as a whole, giving similar opportunities to robbers, agents and associated collectors, eager to gorge themselves on ever larger quantities of loot and cash, at everyone else's expense.

The interview begins with the looting of the Baghdad Museum, which took place between the 10th and 12th of April 2003, and the immediate aftermath - Dr. George describes the scene as if a hurricane had hit from the inside, and then finding his office knee-deep in broken objects, desk smashed, computers and cameras all gone; to heap woe upon yet more misery, even the coffee-machine had been stolen.

We are told how in the time leading up to the invasion of Iraq, people were taking measures to protect their personal property in expectation of the mayhem that would accompany the coming war (in one instance, a friend had sealed his brand new Mercedes into his own house) - Dr. George requested that the contents of the Baghdad Museum should be put in sealed and secure storage, as had been the case in Lebanon - in 15 years of war, the Lebanese apparently didn't lose a single item from their museum inventory.

But Dr. George's request was ignored, on the basis that as long as Saddam was in power, the museum would be safe - and thus the sorry tale unfolded along its predicted fault-lines - Dr. George moved into the museum complex, and awoke one day to the sounds of gunfire in the locality - the US military was in town, and Dr. George expected to meet and greet the American forces, whom he imagined would take charge of the museum and thus keep it protected. Instead he was forced to leave the premises for fear of getting caught in the cross-fire, and that was the last time he saw the museum intact.

He first got word of the ransacking there when it was announced on April 12th, 2003, by the BBC, and thus it was he went with his colleague the following day to ask the local US forces to protect the museum - all to no avail.

Which is hardly surprising, given the events that had allegedly taken place on April 10th - a large crowd, numbering between 300 and 400 had assembled outside the museum, brandishing a variety of crowbars and other implements with which to break into the museum. An employee of museum saw this, and asked a nearby US tank commander to help prevent the crowd from breaking in - but despite a radioed request, permission to defend the museum was denied - and upon seeing this, the crowd immediately broke in and went on the rampage.

One slightly less publicised aspect of the looting took place in the National Library and Archives, as well as the library of Mosul, although the Baghdad Museum library survived largely intact, as Dr. George had previously been able to put 100,000 books and manuscripts into safe storage elsewhere.

As well as being horrified at the ransacking that took place, Dr. George is particularly mystified as to why what could not be stolen, was instead smashed to pieces - there seems to be no clear motive for this, because it is apparent that stealing was the prime motive for those breaking in, and simply breaking stuff they didn't take seems illogical. That may have been because someone was trying to cover up exactly what had been stolen, but it sounds more as if things just got out of hand, and people wanted to break things simply because they were there to be broken.

What disturbs Dr. George greatly is the fact that all this was done by Iraqi citizens, rather than any invading military force - and as he points out, it isn't only Iraq's history that has been looted, but the history of the modern world - he describes how the first writing took hold in early Mesopotamian civilisation and spread throughout the world - the major three world religions can trace their roots back to the same region.

One quite startling statistic emerged later in the interview, when the discussion addressed the broader situation across Iraq as a whole; satellite imagery has revealed that a total of 16 square kilometers of previously unexplored archaeological sites have been destroyed in Iraq. To put that into perspective, we're told that over the last 100 years, only 1.6 square km of properly excavated and recorded sites have been worked by qualified archaeologists - meaning that far from being isolated outbreaks of opportunistic looting, the damage being done is almost on an industrial scale.

The problem is made much worse because nobody knows for sure exactly what was taken, and as such, all that information is now lost for ever - even if artifacts were recovered in the future, the context of their discovery has been lost, meaning that exact dating and relationships with other archaeology cannot be firmly established.

It would not have been possible to protect all these sites beforehand - archaeology is a slow and painstaking business, and as Iraq in its entirety might be regarded as a vast archaeological site in its own right, it would probably have centuries for everything to be recorded and recovered. And bad as the looting of the museum in Baghdad may have been, the perception here is that by far the greatest damage has been done to the unrecorded sites across Iraq.

But given the voracious appetites of private collectors in the First World, most of whom don't care how their ill-gotten treasures are obtained, the situation will continue to exist as long as there is anything left to loot and sell. It's because of the demands of the international market, and the abject poverty of many Iraqis, that many local people are quite prepared to do the spade - (or even mechanical-digger) work, as they often have no other prospect of earning enough money to support their families.

Before the current epidemic of looting, there had been comparatively little robbing and destruction of these sites by local people, as lower demand meant there probably wasn't a great deal of money to be made, and in any case, more people were able to earn a normal living, albeit on a meagre scale. Following an outbreak of looting in the mid-1990s, the archaeological community of Iraq managed to quell and bring the situation back under control.

The final point I'm going to address is the sinister implication that the raid on the Baghdad museum was carefully planned beforehand, as it is clear that many items were specifically targeted by thieves, and Dr. George wants to warn other governments who might face similar situations in the future, either through war and even natural disaster. In his opinion, it's important for designers and builders of prestige museums to construct with security in mind, rather than just assume an electronic security system might suffice.

In times of trouble, all it takes is for the power grid to go down to render electronic security useless - similarly, museum buildings might look good if constructed from materials such as glass, but would be unable to withstand the attentions of mobs and robbers wishing to break in when law and order has broken down. This might sound like bunker mentality, but as the contents of such museums are by their very nature, irreplaceable, it makes sense to construct museums, (and probably libraries etc.) in such a way as to allow them to be quickly and completely locked down in the face of impending trouble and strife visited upon them by the outside world.

Although I've covered a few of the points raised and topics discussed therein, it's well worth taking the time to sit down and watch this talk in full - it might be too late to remedy the situation in Iraq, but at the very least, it should be possible for people to take note of these events, and take appropriate steps to try and ensure that the same thing doesn't happen again to other museums, or for other nations to have their heritage stripped away under cover of warfare instigated,for whatever nefarious reasons by misguided others.

image from here