Mismanaging history
The US had hoped to score a public relations victory with its opening of the antiquity museum in Baghdad, but as Michael Jansen discovers, the move pointed to a host of problems
Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities opened on 3 July for a few hours so the US occupation regime could show journalists and diplomats that the damage done by looters after the collapse of the Ba'athist government was not as horrendous as first reported. Under fire for failing to protect the museum as Baghdad descended into anarchy, the administration of President George W Bush mounted the event with the twin aims of showing that most of the museum's magnificent collection is largely intact and projecting an illusion of normalcy.
But the exhibition failed to achieve those objectives. On one hand, the former head of the US recovery team who returned to Iraq to organise this event, reserve Marine Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, admitted that the number of items taken from the storerooms is now estimated at 12,000. This figure is double that declared in mid-June by the US Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On the other hand, a British television journalist was shot and killed outside the ravaged natural history museum 48 hours after the exhibit.
The first press fatality since the end of the war in April, the TV journalist's death marks an escalation of anti-occupation violence in Baghdad and demonstrates that the situation is far from normal. Of the 42 items taken from the galleries, 32 remain unaccounted for, including the 5,000-year-old alabaster bust of a woman believed by Iraqi archaeologist Selma Al-Radi to be one of the first depictions in sculpture of a real person.
Two ground-floor storerooms were thoroughly looted. One contained the museum's study collection and the other 10 trunks of uninventoried material from recent digs. One out of three basement storerooms had been broken into, some of which had housed important ceramic and ivory objects.
While the most valuable of the museum's cylinder seals were not stolen, 4,800 less important ones were taken. According to McGuire Gibson, of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago who took part in a UNESCO mission to Baghdad in May, there are also "thousands of things that are broken" but not on the list of missing pieces.
Al-Radi, who also was on the UNESCO mission, told Al-Ahram Weekly that it could take six months to complete the inventory of the half million separate items registered under the museum's 170,000 identification numbers.
The focus of the display on 3 July was a collection of gold jewellery known as the "Treasure of Nimrod" which had been stored in the vaults of Iraq's Central Bank since the 1991 Gulf War.
Those items -- a crown, necklaces, bracelets and bangles -- were found in the late 1980s in the ruins of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrod destroyed in 612 BC. During the US war on Iraq, the bank's vaults were flooded with sewage and it was impossible to recover the hoard until the water was pumped out. Bogdanos said that 3,000 items had been returned since the recovery team began work on 22 April. These include the "Warka vase" from 2,300 BC, a fragile votive vase which was returned last month along with other items by two Iraqi brothers.
The vase, broken into 15 pieces by looters was displayed in a box packed with foam rubber. Iraqis who return stolen items are pardoned under an amnesty declared by the occupation regime. The chief of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi, claims that his group returned 450 items.
Preachers serving in mosques in the museum's neighbourhood also restored hundreds of artefacts to the collection.
Inflated claims of losses in the immediate aftermath of the looting gave a false impression of what really happened during the six days of pillage. The mistaken impression that tens of thousands of articles had been stolen was created by journalists who visited the empty, ransacked galleries just after the looting took place. Staff, who had cleared the objects in the galleries and deposited them in five storerooms ahead of the war, did not promptly correct this mistake because they were furious with the US for failing to deploy tanks at the museum to halt the looting while it was in progress. Staff members who had stayed in the museum throughout most of the war to protect the collection only left on 8 April, the evening before the fall of Baghdad, because a battle was raging in the street outside. Staff also feared looters would return if they understood that most of the collection was still in the building. If museum spokesmen had been less alarmist, the Bush administration would not have ordered the military in Baghdad to provide protection to the museum.
Washington did not give high priority to the museum, one of the five most important in the world, but assigned troops to the Oil Ministry and the Saddam Sports Stadium.
The mistaken impression that tens of thousands of items were missing was not corrected quickly because the US military's Civil Affairs team arrived only on 22 April.
A proper assessment of what had been stolen from the storerooms could not begin until the end of the first week in May because until then the museum had no electricity to light the storerooms. The first task of the US team was to get the museum's generator repaired.
This took several days. Once the sorting out began, it went forward slowly and fitfully.
Women involved in checking the inventory refused to work for more than a few hours a day. They were afraid to leave their homes as long as lawlessness prevailed.
While the museum staff should be credited with saving the priceless collection by shifting it to storerooms and bunkers across the city, there is some suspicion that a staff member may have informed professional art thieves where specific artefacts were stored. A set of keys was found in a storeroom, doors are said to have been left open and it is thought that professional art thieves were involved in the disappearance of particular objects. However, such suspicions do not clear Bush administration officials of failing to listen to experts like Gibson who appealed to them early in the year to make plans for securing the museum as well as for waging war on Iraq.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 10 - 16 July 2003 (Issue No. 646)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/646/re9.htm