The End of History in Part II Brian Guerin "The World Monuments Fund has now placed Iraq on its list of the Earth's 100 most endangered sites. ... This is the first time that the Fund has ever put an entire nation on its list."

(From Erasing History by Felicity Arbuthnot). [1]
   
The Despoliation of Iraq's National Museum

As the full extent of the looting of Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad emerged, it becomes clear that there was nothing accidental about it. Rather it was the result of a long planned project to plunder the artistic and historical treasures that are held in the museums of Iraq.
Had the National Museum of Iraq been looted by poverty-stricken slum dwellers, it would have been a criminal act, and the responsibility would have rested with the American administration that refused, despite repeated warnings, to provide for the security of Baghdad’s cultural infrastructure.
Once the museum staff were able to communicate with the outside world, however, it became apparent that the looting was not random. It was the work of people who knew what they were looking for and came specially equipped for the job. [2]

Dr. Dony George, head of the Baghdad Museum, said, “I believe they were people who knew what they wanted. They had passed by the gypsum copy of the Black Obelisk. This means that they must have been specialists. They did not touch those copies.”

It was only almost a week after the museum was originally looted that Dr. George was able to alert archaeologists worldwide to what had been stolen. The American military authorities had made no effort to prevent the objects leaving Baghdad or to put in process an international search for the stolen artifacts.
The US reluctance to act cannot be explained by any lack of warning. Professional archaeologists and art historians had told the Pentagon of the danger of looting beforehand. Dr. Irving Finkel of the British Museum told Channel 4 that the looting was “entirely predictable and could easily have been stopped.”

The museum was the victim of a carefully planned assault. The thieves who took the most valuable material came prepared with equipment to lift the heaviest objects, which the staff could not move from the galleries, and had keys to the vaults where the most valuable items were stored. Not since the Nazis systematically stripped the museums of Europe during the second World War, a crime that was explicitly condemned as cultural genocide by the Nuremberg Tribunal has such a crime been committed. [3]

The US online publication of Business Week magazine reiterated the theme of premeditation and conspiracy in the looting of Iraq’s museums in an April 17 article headlined “Were Baghdad’s Antiquity Thieves Ready?” The article carries the subtitle: “They may have known just what they were looking for because dealers ordered the most important pieces well in advance.”
Business Week writes: “It was almost as if the perpetrators were waiting for Baghdad to fall to make their move. Gil J. Stein, a professor of archaeology at the University of Chicago, which has been conducting digs in Iraq for 80 years, believes that dealers ordered the most important pieces well in advance. ‘They were looking for very specific artefacts,’ he says. ‘They knew where to look.’”

Since the end of Gulf War I in 1991, Iraqi antiquities have flooded onto the market from the museums that were looted then and from archaeological sites that have been attacked with bulldozers. At such locations ancient statues have been sawed apart so they could be exported, a practice also frequent in Cambodia.
This plundering of Iraq’s cultural heritage has whetted the appetite of collectors who are already responsible for looting Far Eastern, Latin American and Italian archaeological sites. With the recent collapses of global stock markets, works of art and antiquities have come to be regarded even more highly as a secure investment, fuelling an already huge underground market.
The illegal trade in antiquities is thought to be as lucrative as drugs trafficking, to which it is often linked. According to a report by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, “The Trade in illicit Antiquities: the Destruction of the World’s Archaeological Heritage,” produced in 2001, London and New York are the main markets for this trade. Switzerland, which allows an art work that has been in the country for five years to be granted a legal title, is a key trans-shipment point.
Professor Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, director of the McDonald Institute at Cambridge, told a press conference at the report’s launch that the trade continues because “The government is in the pocket of the art market, which wants to keep the flow of antiquities.” He added, “It’s a scandal.”
As news of the looting of the Iraqi Museum broke, the then Labour government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair organised a hasty press conference in the British Museum, at which Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell promised official support to protect Iraqi antiquities.
Even as she spoke, the National Library of Iraq was being looted. Home to rare, centuries-old illuminated copies of the Koran and other examples of Islamic calligraphy, as well as irreplaceable historical documents from the Ottoman Empire, the building was set on fire, destroying an untold number of texts. [4]
Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent of the London Independent, was in Baghdad on the day of the fires. Fisk went to the offices of the U.S. Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau and gave the officer on duty precise map locations for the two archives and their names in Arabic and English, and pointed out that the smoke could be seen from three miles away. The officer shouted to a colleague, "This guy says some biblical library is on fire," but the Americans did nothing to try to put out the flames.

Fisk wrote in the Independent, “I gave the map location, the precise name in Arabic and English. I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn’t an American at the scene and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air.”  
After the fate of Baghdad museum, it can only be concluded that the generalised looting and arson at the library served to cover up a more systematic crime, in which select manuscripts were stolen for wealthy collectors. In the process they connived in the burning of books—another Nazi practice. The torching of books and manuscripts in the Library of Korans and the National Library was in itself a historical disaster of the first order. Most of the Ottoman imperial documents and the old royal archives concerning the creation of Iraq were reduced to ashes. According to Humberto Márquez, the Venezuelan writer and author of Historia Universal de La Destrucción de Los Libros (2004), about a million books and ten million documents were destroyed by the fires of April 14, 2003. [5]

At a conference on art crimes held in London a year after the plunder of Iraq's National Museum, John Curtis from the British Museums reported that at least half of the forty most important stolen objects had not been retrieved and that of some 15,000 items looted from the museum's showcases and storerooms about 8,000 had yet to be traced. Its entire collection of 5,800 cylinder seals and clay tablets, many containing cuneiform writing and other inscriptions some of which go back to the earliest discoveries of writing itself, was stolen.
Since then, as a result of an amnesty for looters, about 4,000 of the artefacts have been recovered in Iraq, and over a thousand have been confiscated in the United States. Curtis noted that random checks of Western soldiers leaving Iraq had led to the discovery of several in illegal possession of ancient objects. Customs agents in the U.S. then found more items. Officials in Jordan have impounded about 2,000 pieces smuggled in from Iraq; in France, 500 pieces; in Italy, 300; in Syria, 300; and in Switzerland, 250. Lesser numbers have been seized in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. None of these objects has as yet been sent back to Baghdad. [6]

The 616 pieces that form the famous collection of "Nimrud gold," excavated by the Iraqis in the late 1980's from the tombs of the Assyrian queens at Nimrud, a few miles southeast of Mosul, were saved, but only because the museum had secretly moved them to the subterranean vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq at the time of Gulf War I. After the mass looting of Iraqi Government buildings in 2003, its building was a burnt-out shell filled with twisted metal beams from the collapse of the roof and all nine floors under it. Nonetheless, the underground compartments and their contents survived undamaged. On July 3, 2003, a small portion of the Nimrud holdings was put on display for a few hours, allowing a handful of Iraqi officials to see them for the first time since 1990.

The International Trade in the theft of Antiquities:

Given the enormous black market value of ancient art objects, U.S. military leaders had been warned that the looting of all thirteen national museums throughout the country would be a particularly grave danger in the days after they captured Baghdad and took control of Iraq. In the chaos that followed the Gulf War of 1991, vandals had stolen about 4,000 objects from nine different regional museums. In monetary terms, the illegal trade in antiquities is the third most lucrative form of international trade globally, exceeded only by drug smuggling and arms sales. [7] Given the richness of Iraq's past, there are also over 10,000 significant archaeological sites scattered across the country, only some 1,500 of which have been studied. Following the Gulf War, a number of them were illegally excavated and their artifacts sold to  international collectors in Western countries and Japan. All this was known to American commanders.
In January 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, an American delegation of scholars, museum directors, art collectors, and antiquities dealers met with officials at the Pentagon to discuss the forthcoming invasion. They specifically warned that Baghdad's National Museum was the single most important site in the country. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute said, "I thought I was given assurances that sites and museums would be protected." Gibson went back to the Pentagon twice to discuss the dangers, and he and his colleagues sent several e-mail reminders to military officers in the weeks before the war began.

However, a more ominous indicator of things to come was reported in The Guardian of April 14, 2003. Rich American collectors with connections to the White House were busy "persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects Iraq's heritage by prevention of sales abroad."
On January 24, 2003, some sixty New York-based collectors and dealers organized themselves into a new group called the “American Council for Cultural Policy” and met with Bush administration and Pentagon officials to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq should have relaxed antiquities laws. Opening up private trade in Iraqi artefacts, they suggested, would offer such items better security than they could receive in Iraq.
Even the British press that works under some of the toughest libel laws in the world has been willing to suggest that the ACCP may have influenced US government policy on Iraqi cultural artefacts. [8]