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Analysis: The Baghdad museum muddle

By JOHN BLOOM, UPI Reporter-at-Large
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NEW YORK, June 13 (UPI) -- If you made a movie about the

National Museum in Baghdad, it would be called "Indiana Jones and

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the Phantom Antiquities," with Harrison Ford spending most of the

movie just trying to figure out where the treasure was, how much

of it was missing, and who's lying about it.

As it turns out, almost everyone involved is lying about it

in one way or another, and the reporters on the scene have been

played for patsies.

Just to give you some range of what we're talking about

here:

On April 13 the New York Times reported that the museum full

of 7,000-year-old antiquities had been totally pillaged, "with at

least 170,000 artifacts carried away by looters."

On May 7 Lt. General William Wallace told the Financial

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Times that "as few as 17 items were unaccounted for."

Somebody apparently misplaced four zeros. If you were

Indiana Jones, at this point you would start exploring the

mystical Sumerian value of the number 17. Was it 17 items, which

would mean the New York Times was only off by 10,000 percent? Or

was it 170,000 items, which would mean the Army overlooked

169,883 pieces when they did inventory?

The answer seems to revolve around an elusive character

named Donny George, whose official title is Director General of

Research and Study for the State Board of Antiquities. He's not

the director of the museum. The director, Dr. Jaber Khalil, is

never quoted in western news accounts. For some reason Donny

George became the museum spokesman at a very early date. Why was

he the spokesman and why did everyone believe him? Possibly

because he was available, and because we don't expect antiquities

experts with Ph.D.'s to lie. Apparently we forgot he's also a

Ba'athist with a Ph.D.

Reporters on the scene swear that Donny George gave them the

170,000 figure, about three days after American troops

overwhelmed Baghdad. George now claims he didn't say that. He

said that there were 170,000 pieces in the total collection, but

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he didn't give a figure for how many were destroyed or stolen.

Yet he was definitely the guy who was crying "woe is me, our

cultural heritage is destroyed" in the days immediately following

the taking of Baghdad.

The British press has been all over this story, much more so

than the Americans, which makes sense, because it was the British

who first excavated the ancient Sumerian sites in the 19th

century, and it's the British Museum that has always held the

world's largest collection of Assyrian and Babylonian

antiquities. But for some reason this story, which should be

fairly straightforward, is rabid with political spin. The anti-

war movement in America has been hammering on it as evidence of

the Pentagon's blithe indifference to the culture of a country

they've invaded. (Many people, including me, pointed out the

irony of the military zealously guarding the oil ministry on the

same day the museum was looted.) The Pentagon, on the other hand,

has been anxious to portray the museum as a military outpost for

the Republican Guard, and the looting of it as simply the Iraqi

people trying to destroy everything associated with Saddam or the

Ba'ath party.

Who's right and what's going on?

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Since everyone is putting his own polish on the story--the

Iraqi curators, the military officials on the scene, and even the

archeologists--it's difficult to say exactly what happened, but

I'm going to try to extract the most plausible version from the

various news accounts.

First of all, we know exactly when the museum was abandoned.

On April 8, at 11 a.m., with American troops closing in on

Baghdad, the museum was evacuated and locked. The last three

people there, and the people with the keys, were Donny George,

Dr. Khalil, and Dr. Nawala al-Mutawalli, Curator in Charge of

Collections. They were forced to flee, they said, because the

Iraqi militia had sought cover on the museum grounds, and they

feared a firefight.

By April 9, the whole area was under American control. On

April 10 the Army moved on to other battles but didn't leave a

guard behind. On April 11 George pled for the Army to return

because he didn't feel the museum was secure. The Army didn't

respond to his request, and most of the looting took place on

April 12.

The museum staff returned on April 13, regained some control

of the place, and the dire media accounts flooded the west that

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day and the next, when George was at his angriest. The Army took

so much heat on the issue that it finally posted guards on April

16.

So the question becomes: What was taken or destroyed during

the 72 hours the museum was abandoned entirely?

Dan Cruikshank, an archeological expert who works for the

BBC, has very sensibly set out three distinct areas of the museum

that could be looted or damaged--and distinguishing among the

three turns out to be crucial.

First there are the actual galleries of the museum. This is

where most of the theft took place. But the galleries had been

CLEARED before the military arrived. Curators had started

planning for this months in advance. They had dealt with

archeological looting after the 1991 Gulf War, and besides the

usual mercenary art thieves, they feared there would be

vengeance-seeking Kuwaitis with the American troops. So they made

a decision to hide all the smaller items, leaving only artifacts

that were so huge they couldn't be stolen without mechanical

equipment. Even with these precautions, somewhere between 17 and

50 major items were stolen or, in a couple of cases, vandalized

by chipping away a fragment that could be carried off. Another 15

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items sustained major damage.

The second vulnerable area consisted of the museum offices

and conservation rooms, where the safes, keys and equipment are

kept. This area was looted heavily, mostly so that people could

steal office equipment that has an immediate resale value. This

is not pleasant, but it amounts to zero damage to the culture.

The third area was known only to the curators. There were

five secret storerooms spread throughout the museum. They were

reinforced locked vaults. And it was here that museum officials

placed the items of greatest value. When experts arrived to

inspect these rooms, three had not been opened. (One of those

rooms contained tens of thousands of Greek and Roman gold coins.)

One room had been opened with a key, indicating it was an inside

job. And the fifth one had been broken into. Remarkably, the

losses in the two violated vaults were minimal, and seemed to be

"steal to order" jobs. The thieves went directly for the two or

three pieces they wanted.

Donny George had to know all this on April 13, the day he

crowed about the destruction of Iraq's heritage. By his account,

it was a fully functioning museum, with all of its 170,000 pieces

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on display, and it had been overrun by a ravenous horde. "And

it's gone," he said. "It's lost. If Marines had started [to help

us] before, none of this would have happened. It's too late. It's

no use. It's no use."

But here are a few of the things we now know Donny George

was NOT saying:

1) George himself had a secret vault in which he placed the

most prized possessions of the museum. Only he knows where it is,

and to this day he won't reveal its location.

2) Many museum staff members took items home to protect

them.

3) All the items made of gold, including 600 pieces of

jewelry from the Treasure of Nimrod, were safe and secure in an

underground vault in the Iraqi Central Bank. They'd been there

more than a decade, since the Iran-Iraq War. The vault had been

flooded, but when it was drained and opened a few days later,

there were 20 undisturbed cases containing 7,000 pieces,

including the jewelry from the royal tombs at Ur, and a 4500-

year-old golden bull's head from the Harp of Ur.

4) In one of the museum's secret storerooms, archeologists

found parts of a machine gun, a hand grenade and a rocket-

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propelled grenade. The room had slit windows opening to the

street, a perfect sniper's perch. This tended to support the

Army's claim that they had taken fire from the museum.

So the question is: Why was Donny George being so evasive?

I can think of several reasons. First of all, he held a

high-ranking sinecure in the Ba'ath party. He didn't want to

reveal where everything was until he knew which side had won. He

also wanted to say the right anti-American things in case Saddam

Hussein was alive.

Second, and more important, there were apparently artifacts

that had disappeared from the museum long before war broke out.

The curators seem to have had an ambivalent relationship with

Saddam Hussein's family. On the one hand, they did things that

were apparently designed to protect the museum's treasure from

Saddam Hussein himself--like storing pieces away from the museum.

On the other hand, items from their collection had turned up on

the international antiquities market as early as 1996. The most

notable were the 2700-year-old wall reliefs from the throne room

of Assyrian king Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh.

Then there's the matter of that vault at the central bank.

Was the Treasure of Nimrod put there so that it would be safe, or

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so that Saddam Hussein would have access to it if he desired to

sell it or--even worse--melt down the gold?

In other words, was Donny George collaborating with Saddam

Hussein or defending the museum against the greed of him and his

sons? (Uday seems to be the most likely culprit for selling

artifacts on the international market.)

What we now suspect is that whoever was secretly plundering

the museum in the mid-1990s came back to plunder again on April

12. The thieves made a beeline to the five most valuable items,

smuggled them out of the country--apparently through Damascus--

and sold them in Tehran and Paris. That's what stolen-to-order

means. They had lined up buyers in Europe long before the war

broke out.

There's another odd fact about the thefts. The biggest

losses were two world famous pieces--a 4500-year-old alabaster

relief vase from Warka which may be the first sculpture of a

woman's face in the history of civilization, and a 4,250-year-old

bronze Akkadian Basetki statue. Both of these pieces are

extremely heavy. It would have taken, at the least, a block and

tackle, a hoist and a pickup to get them out of the museum. Who

does that kind of preparation or has that kind of time? Weren't

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the curators even WATCHING the museum on the chaotic days, even

if from a safe distance?

Finally, there are the increasingly odd remarks of Donny

George. At one point he told a British reporter that on April 9

he saw two American soldiers go inside the museum, stay for two

hours, and leave carrying objects. If he was this vigilant, how

did he miss entirely the removal of the Vase of Warka and the

Basetki statue?

To some extent we can sympathize with Donny George's

position. Even museum curators in peaceful countries live on a

knife edge of conflict between their patrons, their academic

colleagues and their government. In George's case, he had to keep

Saddam Hussein happy while retaining credibility with his French,

British and American counterparts in the archeology and museum

worlds. No one can deal with Assyrian antiquities without the

cooperation of the British Museum and the Louvre.

Having said that, war is a very convenient way to cover up

past humiliations. If valuable items DID disappear from the

National Museum in the 1990s, it would be very easy to include

them on a list of looted items, especially since the museum had

been closed for years, only reopening in the summer of 2000, and

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most of its collection had not been on public display for over a

decade.

What are the real numbers of the losses? Like the numbers of

the World Trade Center dead--which began at 120,000 and declined

to under 3,000--the stolen antiquities losses have been revised

steadily downward, first to 80,000, then to 50,000, then to

8,000, and now to between 2,000 and 3,000, if you believe UNESCO

and the U.S. Customs Service. (The statements of the military,

that there were either 17, or 33, or 50 items taken, are not

credible. That may be the number of valuable items taken from the

main galleries, but the total loss is more.)

So who's right, the carping self-righteous anti-war

moralists, or the indignant Pentagon defenders of freedom and

security?

Both and neither. Even if the losses are limited to 50

priceless items and 3,000 lesser items, that's still the most

significant robbery of antiquities in living memory.

Is it fair to say, though, that the Army was asleep at the

wheel? They did take fire from the building. It's possible that

the Republican Guard used it as a temporary outpost. And it's

certain that they didn't get the full story from Donny George.

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The real tragedy of Assyriology was actually happening

elsewhere. There are 20,000 archeological sites in Iraq, and as

the country descended into chaos, a professor at the Oriental

Institute of the University of Chicago flew by helicopter to

check on as many of them as he could. What he saw was hundreds of

people frantically digging, with Kalashnikov-armed guards

standing by. (The local militias, on the other hand, had been

disarmed by the Allied military--proving the old National Rifle

Association saying that, if you take the guns away from the

people, only criminals will have guns.)

The worst site was apparently Larsa, where giant holes had

been dug in the foundations of ancient buildings, apparently to

try to extract cuneiform tablets. A Marine found a copper

harpoon, dating from 1900 B.C., lying on the ground. The ancient

city of Nineveh was damaged by looters. Babylon was looted,

although there was no damage to the site proper. Ur, the oldest

city in the world, survived without damage because,

providentially, the United States had established an air force

base next door.

At the active archeological sites, there's been a scramble

to establish security patrols. But the guards at Hatra, to take

one example, are afraid to fire their weapons--because they think

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the victims will retaliate against their families.

And alas, the National Museum, for all its woes, turns out

to have been the best guarded of the various antiquities museums.

At the museum in Mosul, the city where modern archeology began,

there was massive vandalism and theft, including the loss of 30

bronze panels that once decorated a gate leading into the

Assyrian city of Balawat.

In southern Iraq, where security is worst, it's open season

for anyone with a shovel and a gun. Dan Potts, an archeologist at

the University of Sydney, reports that he saw a whole group of

sites south of Nasiriyah being systematically looted by a gang of

300, guarded by 40 men with Kalashnikovs. All of the sites relate

to the Sumerian city of Umma.

Still, there's some good news. It was originally reported

that the National Library was a total loss when it was burned to

the ground by looters. It now turns out that as many as 400,000

Islamic manuscripts, including those from the Abbasid Empire of

750 to 1250 A.D., were rescued by the imam of the Al Hak Mosque,

who went to the library as the troops were advancing and moved

the collection eight miles to his mosque, where books and scrolls

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and religious texts were stacked to the ceiling. This man,

Mohammad al-Jawad al-Tamimi, should be canonized as the patron

saint of all bibliophiles.

Lost in all the claims and counter-claims about who was

reponsible, who was lying, and what was done or not done, was the

fact that the whole affair was based on a libel against the Iraqi

people--that they would destroy their own citadel of history. It

would be the equivalent of thousands of Americans rampaging

through the Smithsonian Institution like cannibals.

Dan Cruickshank has been to the museum and examined the

collection, and he, for one, is having none of it. "It is simply

not true," he said on the BBC, "that the people of Baghdad looted

their own museum."

It's not an Indiana Jones movie after all. It's more like

"The Maltese Falcon." If you'll recall, the Falcon turned out to

be a fake clay shell with a dirty secret inside.

*

John Bloom writes a number of columns for UPI and may be

contacted at [email protected] or through his Web site at

joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas 75221.

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