Report on the current situation of "Cultural Heritage in Iraq" presented at the Second Annual Convention of the Association of Art Museum Curators, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York, June 18th, 2003
By Stefano Carboni
The situation about the looting of museums and archaeological sites and the pillage and destruction of libraries is still somewhat confused and priority must be fact finding rather than problem solving. But the picture is much clearer than just a couple of weeks ago through reports published by official bodies and by missions that have recently been in Iraq. Then, there is the news written by journalists and available through the media, from newspapers to television programs. Unfortunately, this last is also the kind of news, often distorted or misinterpreted, that reaches out to a much larger audience. I'll address this problem later.
The three most relevant and reliable reports that help to understand the situation are those of Colonel Matthew Bogdanos; of a mission organized under the umbrella of UNESCO; and of a mission organized by the National Geographic Society. A fourth report dealing with the situation of libraries and archives is also extremely useful.
Briefing of Colonel Bogdanos
Marine Colonel Matthew Bogdanos was the person in charge of a special group of military and civilian investigators appointed by General Franks to work on the Iraq Museum in Baghdad loss and recovery effort. On May 16 he and his team briefed the press on their findings after the looting of the museum on April 9-12. The investigation began on April 22. The team reported to the Joint Interagency Coordination Group (formed by the U.S. Central Command after September 11) and consisted of 3 military members including Bogdanos and 10 civilians of the former Customs department, now called Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the new Department of Homeland Security. Colonel Bogdanos is himself a reservist who in civilian life is a New York County District Attorney and has a master's degree in classical studies.
The main goals of the team were the identification of missing antiquities, the dissemination of photographs for possible interdiction, community outreach to promote a "no questions asked" program, and the development of leads on the locations of stolen antiquities.
The contents of the briefing, published also on the website of the Department of Defense, were reported in the media but often misinterpreted. In summary, the main findings are below. Many of them confirm and expand the earlier reports made by Donny George, the Director of Research of the Iraqi Board of Antiquities, and by John Curtis of the British Museum during a meeting at the British Museum on April 29 (to which I took part):
- Most of the gold and jewelry, including the treasury from Nimrud, were removed to vaults in the Central Bank of Iraq years before the recent events. [These cases were eventually opened and the works recovered].
- Weeks before the war, the staff emptied most of the display cases and moved a large number of portable pieces from the galleries to storerooms in the museum and to an undisclosed outside storage location. [The staff provided Bogdanos with a list of items in the outside storage but didn't want to reveal the site until a new government is established in Iraq and U.S. forces leave the country. I'm not aware that the situation has changed to date].
- The estimated total number of objects and fragments in the museum is 170,000 and this is not and has never been, as erroneously reported in the press, the number of missing pieces.
- 28 cases were broken into and 42 pieces on exhibit were stolen, among which the best and most recognizable icons of ancient Mesopotamia; 9 objects had been returned by May 16. Many other heavy pieces in the galleries were damaged.
- Three of the five storerooms were entered and a complete inventory of missing pieces will take months to compile. At first sight, many boxes in one room were turned upside down and their contents emptied on the floor or taken away and it is very roughly estimated that about 1300 items are missing. In another storeroom thieves entered through the bricked rear doorway suggesting that they had intimate knowledge of the museum and weren't indiscriminate looters as in the other cases. They went directly after small items like seals, coins, amulets, pendants and jewelry. [The loss of the collection of seals seems unfortunately to have been confirmed a few days ago, suggesting that the number of items now missing be in the vicinity of 6,000].
- In addition to the areas containing works of art, all offices were completely ransacked, all the equipment stolen, all safes opened and emptied (this is where they also found most of the keys and took cash to cover two months worth of salary for the staff). The damage in the administrative areas far exceeds that seen in the museum itself. I haven't seen any mention of Colonel Bogdanos in recent weeks, especially after the Bush administration replaced the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). I assume, but I cannot confirm, that his team is no longer operative and that the matter is in the hands of Ambassador Pietro Cordone, the CPA's senior culture adviser.
UNESCO/British Museum Mission
An UNESCO mission visited Baghdad shortly after Bogdanos' briefing, on May 17 and 18. Among the members were Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, Mounir Bouchenaki of UNESCO, MacGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago, John Russell of the Massachusetts College of Art, Selma al-Radi, and academics from other countries. You may have read in the news that the U.S. authority denied the visa to a representative of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, speculating that this was on grounds of his French nationality.
Neil MacGregor filed a report that is not public but was circulated to those who were present at the meeting of the British Museum on April 29. The main goals of the visit were to ensure that international help channeled through the BM and UNESCO could reach colleagues in Iraq; to evaluate the most pressing needs of museum, sites, and cultural institutions in Baghdad and beyond; and to consider how personnel deployed by BM/UNESCO may operate with the Coalition Provisional Authority given also the circumstances on the ground.
The following are the main findings:
- Ambassador Cordone pledged cooperation with the BM and UNESCO to ensure that he wants to foster international engagement with Iraqi cultural reconstruction. The first important step is that he will appoint or re-appoint as soon as possible all the major positions of the Board of Antiquities taking into account the Decree of de-Ba'thification. [The Director of the Board (Khalil Jabr Ibrahim), the Director of the Museum (Nawala Mutawalli), and Donny George have been confirmed since then. At the time of the BM visit the impression was definitely one of paralysis; a very recent report in yesterday's Guardian, which may be unreliable, claims that the staff is not happy with the reappointment of the same executive staff].
- The preliminary list of missing or damaged objects from the museum galleries consists for Neil MacGregor of 35 missing objects and 7 badly damaged. [This is now the Red Alert List posted by ICOM (International Council of Museums) in collaboration with Interpol last Thursday, following a meeting in Lyon on May 5-6. The celebrated Warka Vase has been returned also last Thursday, June 12 although I learned two days ago that its upper section is missing and the vase is badly damaged].
- U.S. tanks in the premises of the building guarantee security.
- Staff salaries have not been paid for some months. Cordone announced that payment will be resumed soon.
- Damage from artillery and gunfire is real but limited. Security and climate systems are smashed. The offices are comprehensively trashed and there are no phones or computers, making it virtually impossible for any work to be done immediately. The galleries are mostly physically intact. In the other areas, cameras and scanners have disappeared and most of the equipment in the conservation labs was stolen or smashed. [The only pieces of furniture are presently picnic chairs to sit down, but that is about it].
- As for the collections, the ceramic and stone fragments on the floor have been left almost undisturbed, except to let people walk by, for future conservation purposes.
- The three looted storerooms suffered vandalism and it's very difficult to assess what is damaged (MacGregor's guesses that it is about 10%). The ivories from Nimrud are among the fragments lying on the floor.
- A team is assessing the situation with small valuable objects but apparently the coins and the cuneiform tablets are safe. [As mentioned earlier, the seals have disappeared].
- Inventories appear to have survived, although trashed, and they will be very useful to check holdings, though labor intensive.
- Outside the museum, the Pioneers' Museum and the Saddam Center for Modern Art were looted and ransacked, the minaret of the Imam Abu Khanifa mosque suffered serious damage, and the reports from archaeological sites continue to be confusing also because travel has been very restricted by the U.S. authority.
Among the initiatives already taken by the British Museum, three curators have attended a training course required by ORHA at the Reserves Training and Mobilization Center in Chilwell. Plans are developing to invite conservators from Iraq to the British Museum for further training, after which a team of conservators from various institutions will be sent out under the aegis of the British Museum. Eight senior officers from the Board of Antiquities will be invited to attend the conference of the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale at the British Museum in mid-July.
National Geographic Mission
The National Geographic team, which visited Iraq also in mid-May, was allowed to travel in northern and southern Iraq and the report published on the NGS website a week ago is extremely useful to better understand the situation in Mosul and in the hundreds of archaeological sites of the country.
Henry Wright of the Museum of Anthropology of the University of Michigan, Tony Wilkinson of the Oriental Institute in Chicago, Elizabeth Stone of Stony Brook University (also member of the American Academic Coordinating Committee for Cultural Heritage), and MacGuire Gibson also of the Oriental Institute and the President of the American Association for Research in Baghdad led small teams including each a photojournalist, a videographer, a writer, and an Iraqi archaeologist. Wilkinson's team went to the north, Stone's and Wright's teams to the south, and Gibson traveled also by helicopter for an aerial survey of the sites. They all left from Baghdad on May 12. The October 2003 issue of the National Geographic Magazine will feature this expedition and the trip will also be covered in a National Geographic TV documentary airing July 6 on MSNBC.
The main point they made in the report is that most archaeological sites have been seriously damaged not only by recent looting but especially by long-term neglect, unregulated expansion of agriculture and buildings, and spoliation that has continuously taken place during the past decade of lessened vigilance since the Gulf War. Teams of foreign archaeologists have not been allowed to work in Iraq in the past fifteen years. Briefly, this is the situation of the most important sites in Iraq, from north to south. [The report is extensive but incomplete, since for example they also visited the 9th century Islamic ruins of Samarra, but the teams were composed exclusively by experts in ancient Near Eastern archaeology]:
- Niniveh shows general neglect that has taken places in the past decade, but also deliberate vandalism of its reliefs and digging of at least two holes in the floors of chambers to seek valuable items. U.S. military guard the site only from 8am to 8pm.
- Nimrud has been subjected to targeted thefts recently in three locations within the NW palace. At least two reliefs have been stolen in Rooms B and I. A military guard of 16 US soldiers is stationed permanently at the palace.
- The main palace at Khorsabad shows minor damage and a number of trenches that apparently have not disturbed stratification.
- Ashur has been protected from looters by site guards but faces the problem of a dam that was begun a few years ago, which will flood part of the site if activated.
- Hatra suffered the loss of the head of a figure from the northern iwan and of a camel in relief (which was later returned). It is now guarded 24 hours a day.
- In addition, the team observed in the Mosul Museum extensive breakage of statues in the Hatra gallery with no actual loss but a more targeted theft of at least 5-6 items in the Assyrian gallery. Decorated bronze strips were taken from the Balawat gates display. Damage, but apparently no theft, took place in the other galleries.
- South of Baghdad, the Babylon Museum and library were looted and partially burned in mid-April while the site itself seems to have suffered little damage. U.S. Marines are guarding the site now. - Nippur, Ur, and Eridu seem to be in pretty good shape showing only signs of recent looter's pits and minor looting. They are now guarded.
- Larsa (modern Shenkereh) suffered extensive recent looting and there are no guards in sigth.
- The celebrated arch of Ctesiphon is still standing but, being a popular tourist destination, it is covered in graffiti and kids throw bricks around, old and new. The modern building with the view of the Battle of Qadisiyyah has been completely looted.
- The Museum at Nasiriyya is intact even though it has become a residence of the Marines.
- Elizabeth Stone also reports on the situation of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, which confirms the reports filed by Colonel Bogdanos and Neil MacGregor.
- MacGuire Gibson traveled by helicopter to key sites with Ambassador Cordone, Colonel Kessel and other officials. They noticed organized digging in several minor, non-guarded sites, like for example at least 200 men at work at the sites of Adab (Tell Bismaya) and Umma (Jukka), where an Early Dynastic cemetery from the mid-3rd millennium was being plundered. At Isin (Ishan al-Bahriyat) the damage was clearly of long duration and almost 300 diggers came up to the helicopter waving and were surprised that the Americans would think that they were engaged in wrongful activities.
Nabil al-Tikriti's report on libraries
The sorry situation of the libraries and archives is well highlighted in the report filed by Nabil al-Tikriti from the University of Chicago on June 8. He spent a week (May 25-31) interviewing directors and staff of various institutions in Baghdad and hearing reports from staff from libraries throughout Iraq.
He also gives a useful update of the current U.S. officers who are responsible for addressing the situation. The civilian contacts are Ambassador Cordone and Mr. Fergus Muir of the Coalition Provisional Authority. The military contacts are from the Civil Affairs Unit: Colonel Kessel [who traveled with Gibson on the helicopter] and majors Cori Wegener, Chris Varhola, and Wes Somners. Al-Tikriti, who is otherwise extremely critical of the US government in his report, emphasizes that the three majors are reserve officers with advanced academic training in anthropology and museum curatorship and that they were very helpful and doing their utmost given the circumstances.
He also reports that on May 28 a 25-member Iraqi ministerial steering committee elected a four-member board, to which the CPA added two other members. This board is intended to act as a proto-Minister of Culture with control over the Board of Antiquities. Another interesting piece of information is that the shi'i ayatollah Sistani has recently issued a fatwa [formal legal opinion under Islamic law, which is of course not in place in Iraq, but has remarkable weight among the population] prohibiting, among other things, the purchase or sale of antiquities. [It should be a positive step combined with earlier clerical exhortations and the tightening of border inspections, but it also represents a move from shi'ite clerics to get control over everything they can]. In summary, the status of the libraries and archives is the following:
- The collection of the Dar al-Makhtutat al-'Iraqiyya or Iraqi House of Manuscripts (formerly Dar Saddam lil-Makhtutat), which was entirely ransacked and partially burnt, was safely stored at a bomb shelter prior to the war. [This is the collection of manuscripts that was mistakenly reported by Bogdanos and the BBC journalist Dan Cruickshank as belonging to the Iraq Museum]. The shelter is guarded full-time and includes ca. 47,000 manuscripts from the Dar al-Makhtutat plus about 3,000 from other libraries in Baghdad, Mosul, Tikrit, and Kirkuk that were moved to the main library prior to the war. This is because a large number of manuscripts had been stolen in the years after the Gulf War from provincial libraries (those from Najaf and Karbala were probably taken to Iran) and it was thought to be safer to move them to the capital. The microfilm collection and the CD-Roms including images from illuminated and rare manuscripts were safely stored in other locations.
- The Maktabat al-Awqaf al-Markaziyya (Central Library of Religious Affairs) is the oldest public manuscript collection in Iraq. The building was entirely destroyed by fire after the staff had removed ca. 5250 codices out of the total 7,000. The remainder, ca. 1,750 manuscripts, was packed in metal trunks but was in the building when the looters came. Ten trunks were burned destroying ca. 600-700 manuscripts while the fate of over 1,000 others is unknown.
- The Dar al-Kutub wa al-Watha'iq (National Library and Archives) with its 12 million documents was completely looted and burned. Perhaps some documents were taken to a safe place but the Ottoman records, the records of the period of Hashemite rule, and the largest collection of Arab newspapers in the world have been destroyed.
- The Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), a research center in the arts and humanities housed in a 13th century madrasa (Qur'anic school) contained a large library of Western as well as Middle Eastern publications and research collections, which were largely destroyed by fire. The madrasa itself didn't suffer a lot of damage but the contents of an exhibition of Ottoman costumes were looted. Although officially the Bayt al-Hikma did not collect manuscripts, the ca. 100 codices in their holdings are missing, either stolen or burned, among which a 9th century Qur'an and one of the earliest copies of the Maqamat of Hariri. Apparently an active flea market sale of books from the Bayt al-Hikma is taking place in a square nearby.
- Al-Majmac al-'Ilmi al-'Iraqi (Iraqi Academy of Sciences) is another research facility with a large library but in this case the looters were mostly interested in its computer labs and office equipment and didn't set fire to the building. It is estimated that about one half of the 58,000-strong collection of books was however looted.
- More fortunate were smaller manuscript collections and libraries such as those of the Qadiriyya Mosque, the University of Baghdad Central Library, and the Mustansiriyya University Medical School Library. Most of the provincial libraries in Mosul, Arbil, Sulaymaniyya, Karbala, Najaf, and Nasiriyya seem to have not been touched.
Conclusion
This is the current situation to the best of my knowledge as of today, June 18th, 2003. A lot more has been written, said, and speculated about and it is sometimes extremely hard to separate grain from chaff. In the press, the initial erroneous speculation that 170,000 items were missing from the Iraq Museum is now playing into the hands of those who want to minimize what happened saying that the damage is nowhere near what was portrayed initially.
The truth still remains, however, that over two dozen of the most precious works of art from Mesopotamia are missing and we can only hope that they are still in Iraq like the Warka Vase. That a number probably close to 10,000 archeological finds and seals are probably now in other countries if not already for sale on E-Bay. That hundreds of manuscripts, thousands of reference books, and millions of documents were burned. That archaeological sites have been continuously dug illegally and pillaged for the past 10 years. No one should downplay this grim reality.
Without any solid evidence, journalists like Dan Cruickshank in his BBC documentary or David Aaronovitch in the Guardian go so far as suggesting that museum curators were involved in the disappearance of the most valuable items and accuse Donny George of being the mastermind. These news reports have unfortunately a much wider distribution than the reports filed by Colonel Bogdanos and the UNESCO and National Geographic missions and can only partially be contradicted through the same media, such as the article written by John Russell for the Washington Post last Sunday. This can only damage and slow down the already impossible task of compiling a final list of missing objects and beginning recovery and reconstruction.
The chairman of the British Institute of Archaeology, Harriet Crawford, writes that "… our high opinion of the character of Dr. George and his colleagues has been formed over two decades of working with them throughout an era of extraordinarily difficult circumstances - from the Iran/Iraq War to the few months leading to the most recent conflict. George deserves the world's praise, not its condemnation, for saving so many of Iraq's treasures, and strong practical support in restoring the museum to functionality." Jane Moon of the Center for the Study of Global Ethics says that "… the British archaeologists' appraisal of the Iraq Museum situation is based on long experience of working with the staff there, not gullible impressions from blundering documentaries. The 'unconceivable' bit is for us westerners to appreciate what it was like trying to stay alive and free under the Ba'th regime, let alone pursuing the passionate commitment to their country's heritage that the likes of Donny George and Nawalah Mutawallah have demonstrated through decades of oppression. Yes, the museum's cataloguing, conservation, and storage were in a mess. Years of sanctions, including an import ban on computers, chemical, and packing material did not help. A lifetime's enforced caution about who you tell about what does not suddenly melt away under the cameras of the BBC, especially when you rightly suspect that they are there to cause trouble." I think that the Association of Art Museum Curators should fully stand behind these statements.