The Iraq War & Archaeology Archive 21

Almost all are accessible for free (or after a free registration) on the internet. Each time, I try to draw attention to the most relevant tidbits of information, esp. things that were not mentioned before; occasionally, I provide some comment. The usual warning applies: many links become defective with time. Inclusion in the list does not in any way mean that I necessarily agree with the opinions expressed in an article. But for a few exceptions, the occasional photos and figures accompanying reviewed articles are just hotlinked images on other web sites, in other words: do not download them or request permission to publish them from me, for I do not own the copyright to them in any way! Please do contact the rightful owners if you would like to use them for publication purposes. Finally, for the sake of convenience, all articles and so on are assumed to have been published on US web sites unless indicated otherwise.

"Dutch Tackle 'Tomb Raiders' at Al Warka," in Ministry of Defence (UK), online, February 15, 2004: "The squad, from the 21st Infantry Company, 2nd Netherlands Battlegroup, have been patrolling the ancient site at Al Warka, more commonly known as Uruk. A guard at the site asked for their help in stopping a group of men who were digging near a number of ancient graves. The thieves ran off, but were caught and arrested by the patrol. A number of bottles and pieces of pottery which the thieves had been stealing was also recovered and handed over to the Iraqi police. ... pottery from the site fetch a high price on the black market." [this seems the same incident as reported in Kortekaas February 18]

Photo 1: "Dutch troops apprehended a team of tomb robbers pillaging the archaeological site at Al Warka, the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk (High resolution not available)"

Photo 2: "An ancient tomb attacked by the robbers (High resolution not available)"

Photo 3: "Some of the stolen pottery recovered by the Dutch troops (High resolution not available)"

tgv S6, "Bijdrage 8 – Desert Rats Signal Troop," in Nederlands Detachement Irak (Netherlands), online, [February 15, 2004]

Photo: "Copyright Koninklijke Marine" [site of Babylon]

"Ausstellung irakischer Altertümer soll Geld für Kulturerbe einbringen," in Yahoo! Deutschland Nachrichten (Germany), February 14, 2004: at a conference on Iraqi cultural heritage in Copenhagen, the Danish company United Exhibit Groups presented the concept of a traveling exhibition of the most prized Iraqi antiquities that would raise money for cultural-heritage preservation and conservation efforts in Iraq; Museum Director Donny George "Juchana" [German spelling of Youkhanna] attended the conference together with the Iraqi Minister of Culture Mofid "el Dschasairi" [German spelling for el-Jazairi]
B. Friedman, "The Looting of Iraq's Cultural Treasures. Colonel Matthew Bogdanos. US Central Command, Iraq Museum Investigation," in Massachusetts Institute of Technology, online, February 11, 2004: report of lecture by Bogdanos: "Dr. Ibrahim Al Jabar was the Director of the Iraqi National Museum. He was in charge. A Baathist, his family name is Al Tikriti. He was a political appointee with limited knowledge of art. Dr. Donny George was the Director of Research at the Museum. Well-known in his field and knowledgeable, he is now the Director. Dr. Nawala al-Mutawili was the Museum's curator. A woman who was not a Baathist, she rose to her position based on deep knowledge and competence. She has become deeply embittered, however." "Although most museum objects were never catalogued, we could go to nations that jointly sponsored excavations and get their records to see what should be in the museum. The Italians were particularly helpful." [I don't know whether it's correct to state that most artifacts were never catalogued; of course, that depends on what you mean exactly by "catalogued"]; "The museum staff told us that under Saddam, individuals caught looting from archeological sites were executed. ... The museum staff was proud of this. So when we said we wouldn't kill people if they brought stuff back, no one believed us, especially given that we had retained the museum director, a Baathist. Like elsewhere in Iraq, we could not fire everyone from the Baath party. They're the corporate knowledge of Iraq, needed to run the state." "Almost 2000 pieces were ultimately returned under amnesty." "People who give information about illegality to authorities generally are either involved in the crime or a competitor of the person they're giving up. That is to say, people helping investigators usually have an agenda. For instance, we would get information from a market vendor that his rival vendor was selling antiquities. We always feared that the raids would lead to ambush, but we followed the tips and encountered no ambushes." "... the vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq in Baghdad, ... In the second vault, we found two groups of dead Iraqis. They had tried to break in nearly simultaneously and had a gunfight, leaving gory results. They didn't get inside the vault. There was some water damage to the treasure, but the British Museum is restoring it." "We noticed that the staff, especially Donny George, kept saying stuff was missing when it actually was not. These errors caused us to send out false reports of missing items. By following Dr. Nawala, we found that there was a secret hiding place. All the Muslim members of the staff had sworn on the Koran not reveal this room and its contents. Donny George, a Christian, had not been in on the pact, so he did not know which items were not really missing. All the items from the display cases were there. We went in to the hiding place, took inventory, and then resealed it." [this explanation about Dr. George I hadn't heard yet]; "We found wanton destruction in administrative areas - everything was shattered and burned. But museum itself - the galleries, the public spaces - was barely damaged. Looters did not intentionally destroy the artistic area. They struck out against the Baath party, not the museum. This discrimination is a credit to the Iraqi people." "The sacred vase of Warka was returned. The media says it was damaged in the war, but that's wrong. It was damaged when it was recovered in the 1940s. I think the individual who took it truly took it for safeguarding. We got the bronze bull back, but its companion piece is still missing. ... We recovered an ancient statue [Basetki statue] in a cesspool in Baghdad. This item was not taken by pros - the thieves dropped it five times because it was so heavy." "From the Heritage Room, 236 items were stolen; 167 recovered. It is impossible to teach customs officials to identify these antiquities, but the majority was recovered. From the Restoration Room, 199 items were stolen; 118 recovered. Most of this came back under the Amnesty program. Some was returned subtly by the staff - we looked the other way. In the Storage Room, it was hard to know what was gone. 2703 items were stolen; 2549 recovered. There was no forced entry, and the room keys were in Nawala's safe, indicating an inside job. ... There were counterfeit antiquities stolen, indicating a nonprofessional effort."

Sommerfeld May 7, 2003

Interpol [June 1-2, 2004]

"Saddam Officials Stole Ancient Artefacts," in Iraqi Press Monitor, February 11, 2004: "(Al-Nahdhah) – In an interview, Minister of Culture Mufeed al-Jazairi said officials of the former regime supervised digs at archaeological sites in order to steal statues, tablets, and many other relics and smuggle them abroad. A senior official in the department of heritage and relics said that Ali Hasan Majeed, nicknamed 'Chemical Ali', built a huge palace at the archaeological site of Al-Warid Hill, while Arshad Yaseen, Saddam's former bodyguard, smuggled a very precious handwritten copy of the Torah for a huge sum of money."
"Robbing the Cradle of Civilisation: Baghdad Treasury," in SBS (Australia), February 10, 2004: TV program: "The world was horrified when thousands of priceless artefacts were stolen from the Baghdad Museum at the conclusion of the Gulf War but this incident was just the latest chapter in the pillaging of Iraq. The systematic theft of the earliest sites in Western civilization was launched in the mid-nineties and feeds an international network of criminal smuggling that may be the most extensive in archaeological history. It extends to collectors in Canada, America, Switzerland and Norway who are siphoning millions of dollars worth of irreplaceable antiquities. The economic sanctions against Iraq created an ideal situation for a black market economy to flourish and for unprincipled private collectors to exploit it. To reveal just how extensive this network is the program speaks to Iraqi, European and American archaeologists, museum curators, investigators and private collectors. It also goes undercover to trace the route these goods take. Typically they first go to an Iraqi antique dealer who then sends them across the desert past badly policed borders into Jordan and from there they are flown to the west." "... the collection of Elie Borowski, a Polish war hero who worked for the Ontario Museum ... Despite the fact that many of these pieces are believed to have been stolen they have been showcased in the Royal Ontario Museum and a private museum in Israel. Showing an object in a museum simultaneously legitimises it, because the public believes it is 'clean' and doubles or triples its value." "Most museums signed a UNESCO agreement in 1970 which said they cannot buy unprovenanced antiquities but the loophole is that they can display items on loan from private collections without questioning their origins." "... the program’s film crew are taking footage in Samara ... they are approached by the Iraqi guards ... [who] offer to sell the crew valuable cuneiform balls from the temple site."

"Dix mois après les pillages, le musée de Bagdad craint de rouvrir ses portes," in TV5 (France), February 7, 2004: French version of Matthew February 5

Photo 1: "Une salle du musée de Bagdad. Toutes les petites pièces, évacuées avant l'invasion américano-britannique, restent enfermées dans la réserve. Les métaux précieux confiés à la Banque centrale avant la guerre du Golfe en 1991 sont toujours dans les coffres-forts. © AFP - Karim Sahib" [A room of the Baghdad museum. All small objects, evacuated before the US-British invasion, remain locked in the storage areas. The precious-metal objects that were assigned to the Central Bank before the 1991 Gulf War are still in its vaults]

Photo 2: "Les vitrines pillées du musée de Bagdad. Le tollé suscité par les pillages et l'immense patrimoine archéologique de l'Irak ont néanmoins transformé le musée en aimant pour les donateurs du monde entier, qui ont déjà envoyé quatre millions de dollars. © AFP - Karim Sahib" [The looted display cases of the Baghdad museum. The outcry caused by the looting and the immense archaeological heritage of Iraq have nevertheless made the museum the darling of donors from all over the world; they have already sent $4 million]

"Cops and Markets. Use Incentives, Not Tighter Bans, to Preserve Iraq's Heritage," in The Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2004: "Called 'Not for Sale,' the conference is being held in Geneva to focus on how British and Swiss regimes, which don't ask too many questions about what gets shipped through them, have helped make these countries handy transit points for a market in illicit antiquities. Hence the emphasis is on stricter laws and more controls. And certainly part of the solution to recovering stolen treasures--whether from Baghdad's National Museum or [Iraq's] thousands of still vulnerable archaeological sites--is bringing in more law-enforcement manpower. We'd suggest a priority should be training for Iraqis to investigate and follow these thefts. Where it gets sticky is on the issue of trade itself." "What strikes us as missing from this debate is the central fact of all black markets: They arise only when either there is no legal market or the cost of doing business in it is too high. The parallel here is with endangered species. The reason that cows are not threatened and elephants are is that, while people can legally raise and sell cows and cow products, with elephants we have a prohibited trade in ivory--which poachers happily ignore." [misleading comparison: elephants are still much more wild animals than cows are; the latter are the product of thousands of years of selective breeding; regarding cultural heritage, this would be the same as comparing true archaeological Native American artifacts from centuries ago with modern-day made-for-tourists pottery and sundry stuff---the latter may be abundant but does no longer accurately reflect the original culture but at best a romanticized, commercialized clone construed in Euro-American minds; that's why the abundance of the "faux" Native American artifacts hasn't stopped the looting and theft of the original, historical artifacts]; "Last week we even had an example where art and endangered species converged, when Smithsonian chief Lawrence Small was convicted of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act because a headdress in his collection of Brazilian tribal art included unauthorized feathers. Does anyone really believe that this helps any endangered birds?" [encouraging this type of practice surely wouldn't; besides, a senior museum official like this should be held to the highest standard, e.g., many respected museums require their curators and the like to not have any personal collections at all in order to avoid any conflict of interest or improprities]; "The reality is that, even if you had guards at every site, in poor countries all this does is give the guards a huge incentive for bribery. Ashton Hawkins, president of the American Council for Cultural Policy and former counsel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, suggests that it's far better to nip the problem in the bud by giving local Iraqis a modest reward for turning over the artifacts they dig up to the proper cultural authorities. 'Paying them is not a perfect answer,' he says. 'But it's easier to stop the problem at the local level than trying to hunt it down later in Geneva.'" [this of course totally ignores the loss of archaeological context of looted artifacts, context which enhances the artifacts' understanding manifold and allows for better reconstruction of ancient societies in all their facets; the article writer falls for the trap of market reductionism: all an archaeological artifact is about is its market value, not the knowledge to which it may provide a key]; "That's anathema, of course, to many of those hollering loudest about Iraq's cultural heritage." [true: an artifact that was looted and disappeared into a private collection is of no use to anybody else; "looted but saved as an object" is incrementally better but paying finder fees would likely just encourage looting; why not address the reasons why so many Iraqis resort to plunder, i.e., high unemployment, insecurity, etc.?]; "So is the idea of allowing the sale and export of artifacts that Iraq already has in abundance (clay tablets, cylinder seals, etc.), which would help satisfy demand while providing income to help maintain the real treasures." [maybe after cataloging and study, and in an organized, selective way? I guess a new Iraqi government would have to decide on such matters]
"Iraq: Antiques slowly being returned," in TIDES Iraq Reconstruction Report, online, 96 (February 6, 2004): "'There is no way you can sell these things because collectors are big ego people who don't buy just for private enjoyment, they buy for private enjoyment and public acclaim,' John Russell, the ... CPA['s] deputy adviser to the ministry of culture told IRIN in Baghdad. 'Very few people would buy one of these pieces, knowing they would never be able to sell it,' he added." "Other large pieces that remain missing include a bronze bull from outside an ancient temple, an historically significant vase, a slab from the palace of an Assyrian king and a column with writing dating back to the middle Assyrian period, according to Dr Ahmed Kamil, ..."
A. Nelson, "Ancient Artefacts 'Not For Sale' in Switzerland. Swiss, British and Iraqi Officials Have Gathered in Geneva to Discuss How to Prevent the Plundering and Trafficking of Ancient Artefacts," in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland), February 6, 2004: "The two-day 'Not for Sale' forum is also examining new British and Swiss legislation, which aims to crack down on the illegal trade in stolen cultural goods." "Cornelia Isler-Kerényj, an archaeologist and representative for Unesco Switzerland, says the recent war in Iraq is one of the main reasons politicians are now keen to be seen to be doing something about the problem." "[Co-president of the conference, Pierre] Lalive[,] believes that it is still to early to judge the effectiveness of the new regulations, but agrees that public pressure is becoming an increasingly powerful tool in the fight against the trafficking of ancient artefacts."

J. Matthew, "Baghdad Museum Too Afraid to Reopen. Nearly a Year After War, Director of Iraq's National Museum Is Too Frightened to Reopen His Doors to Public Amid Insurgency," in Middle East Online (UK), February 5, 2004: "... the museum remains shut, its vast exhibition rooms barren, glass cabinets smashed, antiquities defaced and the floor thick with dust. In a building surrounded by coils of barbed wire, guarded by dozens of Facility Protection Service officers and patrolled daily by US troops, director Donny George says he is too frightened to reopen his doors to the public. 'We're really afraid that if we open the museum it will become a target for these terrorists." "All small artefacts, which were evacuated before the US-led invasion last March, remain in storage. Precious metals entrusted to the Iraqi central bank even before the 1991 Gulf war are still in the vaults. A security wall is being built behind the building after the looters stormed through the back door, tearing off with more than 14,000 objects, of which 5,000 have been seized abroad and returned, George says. Among them are 1,000 pieces recovered in the United States, 700 in Jordan, another 500 in France and 250 in Switzerland. But he accuses Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey of continuing to drag their feet in retrieving goods secreted across their borders." "So far up to four million dollars have flooded in from [donors] across the globe. The US State Department alone has set aside one million dollars, which coalition officials say should be enough to refurbish the building by April. The moribund air conditioning, electricity and water systems are being repaired, walls painted, lights replaced and the plumbing worked on. 'I hope everything will be finished in two or three months,' the director says, ..." "Museums in Europe and the United States have sent their own experts to Baghdad and offered to collect publications to replenish its patchy archives. 'I'm so optimistic now because of the huge help we are getting from all over the world,' George says, hoping an upcoming trip to Japan will bring in yet more cash. Three Iraqis are training at the British Museum, 15 are going to France and 20 archaeologists to the United States for a five-week study tour. For many of the last 20 years, the museum has been shut, principally during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war and the 1991 Gulf war. 'It's barely been functioning. It will be an opportunity for them to see how other collections work, bring ideas back and meet people,' says John Russell, professor of archaeology and coalition advisor to the Iraqi culture ministry. Stacks of special display cupboards donated by Germany for the museum's clay tablets crowd the corridors, still waiting to be unpacked."

Photo: "Fear of becoming a target for insurgency"

A. Riding, "Saving Cambodia's Treasures," in The New York Times, with online audio slide show, February 3, 2004: "During Cambodia's long nightmare of civil war, genocide and foreign occupation, concern for its archaeological treasures took second place. But now, after more than a decade of peace, an international campaign to rescue Angkor Wat and other centuries-old temples is being hailed as a model for safeguarding the ancient sites of Afghanistan, Iraq and other nations enduring war." "There is talk of creating a Charter of Angkor, which would detail the institutional structure and the new scientific techniques and ethical standards that have been applied here and that might also work elsewhere. There is no international campaign to protect and restore archaeological sites in Afghanistan and Iraq." [not yet]; "One conclusion of the Paris conference was that over the next decade, along with pursuing restoration of Angkor's sites, other countries should help Cambodia fight poverty, protect the environment and promote regional development. 'The population must feel that Angkor Wat improves their lives,' said Azedine Beschaouch, the project's coordinator at Unesco. 'We must focus not just on stones, but on men, women and children.'" [hear, hear!]
"Iran to Assist Heritage Preservation in Neighboring Countries," in Tehran Times (Iran), February 1, 2004: "Deputy ICHO [Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization] Director Mohammad Hassan Moheb Ali noted Iraqi historical heritage was considered part of the cultural and civilization sphere of Iran." "Iran has communicated its readiness to UNESCO through the foreign ministry and ICHO, he said, adding it is prepared to take part in an international task force should one is formed.""... ICHO could send restoration experts ..."
On February 1, 2004, Dr. John Russell sent me an e-mail from Baghdad in reaction to reports on January 8: "Thank you very much for bringing out the news of our interpreter's tragic death so quickly. Nahla Wahid was a wonderful person and a close friend. Her death represents a great tragedy not only for us but for the new Iraq, which she dreamed of and worked tirelessly to realize. I should note that the published reports were incorrect in most particulars. The convoy was not on the way to the museum and Nahla was not in a humvee--the wrecked humvee in the published photo had nothing to do with this incident and must be a file photo from a different attack." [our condolences to Ms. Wahid's family and loved ones]

This site is edited by Belgian archaeologist Francis Deblauwe, Ph.D., living in Streamwood, Illinois (USA), who is affiliated with Archaeos, Inc., and a research associate of the University of Vienna (Austria).