Europe, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Middle East & North Africa

IRAQ: Worldwide Move to Stop Sale of Loot

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Apr 15 2003 (IPS) - Worldwide moves have been launched to stop illegal sale of archaeological treasures looted in Iraq in recent days.

Director-general of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation) Koichiro Matsuura has urged Interpol, the World Customs Organisation, the International Confederation of Art and Antiquities Dealer Associations (CINOA), the International Council of Museums (ICOM), and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) to join a "comprehensive mobilisation so that stolen objects do not find their way to acquirers."

Matsuura has pointed out that the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Properties in the Event of Armed Conflict forbids trade in works of art stolen during a war.

The Hague Convention was drawn up in 1954 in the wake of massive destruction of cultural heritage during World War II. It aims to protect monuments, archaeological sites, works of art, manuscripts, books, and other objects of artistic, historical, or scientific interest.

Neither the U.S. nor Britain have signed the Hague Convention.

UNESCO also called Tuesday for a meeting of experts in Paris to assess the damage to Iraq’s cultural and historic treasures. The experts from 30 countries will also seek to make an inventory of the losses.

Art galleries and antiquities traders have assured UNESCO they will support the campaign against illegal trafficking of Iraqi treasures.

Auction houses and art brokers in Paris and London say they will not deal in stolen Iraqi treasures. "We don’t want to have anything to do with such a market," said a spokesperson of the Paris auction art house Drouot.

But archaeologists point out that many objects stolen from archaeological sites during and after the first U.S.-led war against Iraq 12 years ago have surfaced in the international market in Europe, Britain and the U.S.

The treasures now in the hands of collectors and dealers include several wall reliefs going back 2,700 years from the palace of the Assyrian king Sennacherib. Historians and experts in Iraqi archaeology were contacted throughout the nineties to certify the authenticity of other ancient works.

This time plunderers took away or destroyed thousands of invaluable treasures over the past few days, dating from up to 5000 years before Christ. At the National Museum in Baghdad alone at least 170,000 objects were either stolen or destroyed, Iraqi archaeological authorities say.

The rich museum of Mosul was also plundered. Among the many treasures stolen are a solid gold harp from the Sumerian era, a sculpture of the head of a woman from the Sumerian city of Uruk, stone carvings, gold jewellery, tapestry fragments, ivory figurines of goddesses, friezes of soldiers, ceramic jars and urns.

The museum held the tablets with Hammurabi’s Code, considered the world’s earliest legal documents, early texts describing the epic of Gilgamesh, and mathematical treatises that reveal a knowledge of Pythagorean geometry 1,500 years before Pythagoras.

"The National Museum in Baghdad was certainly the most important archaeological site in the world," says Bertrand Lafont, archaeologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. "The pillaging there is a tragedy. Many treasures from the Assyrian and Sumerian cultures may well have disappeared for ever."

The pillaging took place despite repeated warnings. The International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) had urged the U.S. and British governments early in March to "act in the spirit and the letter of …the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Properties in the Event of Armed Conflict."

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLAI) had also said that looting of Iraqi museums and archaeological sites was looming with the war. "The pillage of archaeological and historical treasuries is a major problem after armed conflicts," acting director of IFLAI Ross Shimmon had told IPS March 26.

Despite such warnings, U.S. troops watched the pillaging of the National Museum of Baghdad without intervening.

German archaeologist Michael Petzet, president of ICOMOS, accuses the U.S. military authorities of committing "a crime against humanity" by ignoring the warnings.

"It is impossible to understand that the U.S. troops only stood by while thieves were plundering the Iraqi museums," Petzet said. "The U.S. army was informed about the risks of looting long before the war began and could very well have prevented the destruction and the plunder with a handful of soldiers."

Jeremy Black, a specialist on ancient Iraq at Oxford University, said: "What has befallen Baghdad and Mosul museums was foreseen by archaeologists worldwide. Meetings were held with the American military before the war to warn of the extreme likelihood of looting should an invasion occur."

Black said it was regrettable that "the U.S. troops failed to implement measures to protect Iraq’s and the world’s cultural heritage. U.S. and British forces must now act immediately to safeguard what remains in the museums and at key archaeological sites."

Iraqi archaeologists say that the only installation that U.S. troops seemed keen to protect was the ministry of oil.

 
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