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Journalism of Courage
As a catastrophe it has few parallels — and then too, they lie in the distant past. The ransacking of the National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad, and countless museums in other Iraqi cities, is being compared to the destruction of the library of Alexandria in the fifth century.
But as reports filter in of both chilling emptiness and heaps of rubble in sections of the Antiquities Museum, that comparison could prove weak. Early estimates suggest 170,000 artefacts have been lost in the pillaging of museums that followed the fall of Baghdad. The loss is first and foremost, of course, of the Iraqi people. Yet, it is a loss we all share. And it is a loss the coalition armies must be held to account for. In the weeks and months preceding the Second Gulf War, American scholars and British archaeologists had repeatedly lobbied their governments to prepare contingency plans to protect the museums in case of anarchy. In days past, their triumphant footsoldiers did absolutely nothing to prevent the rape of Iraq’s museums.
The possible damage is unfathomable. Iraq is truly the cradle of civilisation. Writing, city-building, irrigation systems, science and astronomy — thousands of years ago, it all began in ancient Mesopotamia on the banks on the Tigris and Euphrates. Relics from the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian and so many other civilisations provide critical links in piecing together the story of human progress. They figure among the hundreds of thousands of exhibits feared missing.
Among them, for instance, is the alabaster Uruk Vase — 5,000 years old and carrying the oldest known rendition of a ritual — and gold artifacts from Assyrian burial tombs. Not missing but known to be damaged in the chaos are stone tablets with cuneiform writing in Baghdad, and ancient manuscripts in Mosul.
Many of these items are bound to appear on the shadowy antique market. It is thus disturbing that American art dealers are making a case to the Pentagon that Iraq’s antiquities be exempt from prohibitions on resale in the West, arguing that they’d be safer there than in Iraq.
The inability, or refusal, of American soldiers to stop the pillage is incriminating enough — but any hint of condoning the smuggling of Iraq’s heritage would be certified as a war crime. Action on locating missing exhibits must begin forthwith.
