Category: visual

“Museum guard, Abdulk Rahman, tried to stop the first pillagers breaking through security gates at the rear of the compound, but he was forced to give up. Once inside, guards and curators were powerless to resist. A few hours later, US troops answered a desperate call from a curator, Raid Abdul Ridha Mohammed. Tanks were brought to the entrance, which dispersed the looters, but the Americans stayed for only half an hour. Immediately after their departure, the looters returned. The main ransacking seems to have occurred the next day, when hundreds of looters quickly gained access to the 28 public galleries.”

“Stealing a country’s physical history, its archaeological remains, has become the world’s third biggest organised racket, after drugs and guns. There are those who argue that it shouldn’t need to be illegal at all. There are those who say, look, the free market should operate here. Why shouldn’t a private collector be allowed to buy an antiquity and keep it in his bathroom, maybe next to the bidet, or as a tasteful holder for the Toilet Duck, if he wishes to do so, and if both he and the seller are happy with the price? You will not be surprised to hear that many of those who argue this way are American. You may not be surprised, either, that shortly before the invasion of Iraq, and with the spoils of war on their mind, some of these people formed themselves into a lobbying organisation called the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP).”

The Art Newspaper has put illustrations of artwork lost in Iraq’s National Museum online. The drawings come from the museum’s catalog. “We should stress that at this stage there is no detailed information on what objects have been looted, what have been damaged and what are safe. Nevertheless, the images in the Treasures of the Iraq Museum represent many of the most important objects from the collection, which numbers some 170,000 pieces.”

“The tragedy has provoked international uproar. Western museums have launched an urgent rescue mission to trace and return the missing treasures. Downing Street has demanded a list of the antiquities that can be circulated to British troops in Iraq. Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, has promised a military guard on remaining museums and important archaeological sites. And Unesco is to hold an emergency meeting tomorrow to prepare an action plan. For many, it is too late. Shards of antique pottery, smashed stone sculptures and scattered bits of parchment abandoned in the museum galleries make clear that little care will be taken with the stolen antiquities.”

Allowing the destruction of Iraq’s art shows the contempt the United States has for other cultures. “The notion that Iraq even has history – let alone that 7,000 years ago this land was the cradle of civilization – is not likely to occur to the neocolonialists running a brawny young nation barely more than 200 years old. The United States’ earnest innocence is the charm that our entertainment industry markets so successfully around the world, but it is also the perennial seed of disaster as we blithely rearrange corners of the planet we only pretend to understand.”

The Art Newspaper asks eight important questions about the destruction of Iraq’s museums and what happens next.

Jim Hoagland writes that while Americans should have done something to protect Iraqi art, “the rush to condemn Americans for looting and destruction committed by Iraqis obscures fundamental questions about social responsibility and accountability in Iraq and throughout the Arab world. The debate about responsibility for the museum’s losses goes to the heart of the need for urgent moral and psychological change in the greater Middle East. An important question is going unasked in the rush to condemn: If looting was so predictable, what did the Iraqis – and particularly the staff of the museum – do to protect the museum’s valuable antiquities?”

British Museum director Neil MacGregor expresses his dismay over the looting of Iraq’s National Museum. “The human aspect is as vital as the artistic and cultural. These museum people in Baghdad, MacGregor points out, are friends, close associates, with whom his staff have been in regular contact over long-term shared projects. Only weeks ago, while the coalition plotted air attacks, British Museum scholars were still exchanging prized information on the decipherment of precious cuneiform tablets. Many of these writings on clay, having survived 5,000 years, now lie smashed.”

That Americans allowed the destruction of Iraqi culture while they stood by and watched has ignited rage among those Iraqis who might have been expected to support the Americans. “Somewhere, in the cacophony of bombs and the orgy of looting that followed, Baghdad’s cultural elite became angry about the war, seeing in its destruction a vulgarity that only pushed the country deeper into degradation. Even today, even in Baghdad, there are people unused to chaos, and chaos now it is.”

Citing “the wanton and preventable destruction” of Iraq’s National Museum of Antiquities, the chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Property has submitted his resignation to President Bush.