As folks are beginning to actually investigate on the ground at the Baghdad Museum, the losses are looking to have been not nearly as severe as originally reported.
Col. Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Marine reservist who is investigating the looting and is stationed at the museum, said museum officials had given him a list of 29 artifacts that were definitely missing. But since then, 4 items — ivory objects from the eighth century B.C. — had been traced.
“Twenty-five pieces is not the same as 170,000,” said Colonel Bogdanos, who in civilian life is an assistant Manhattan district attorney.
Of course, any sort of theft of this sort is tragic — and the pieces that have been identified all sound pretty incredible. But nobody can yet say what more might actually be missing.
“I don’t know exactly,” said Jabbir Khalil, chairman of the State Board of Antiquities.
John Limbert, an American diplomat who is a senior adviser in the new Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq, concurred. “How bad was it?” he asked. “We just don’t know yet.”
[…] Officials now discount the first reports that the museum’s entire collection of 170,000 objects had been lost. Some valuable objects were placed for safekeeping in the vaults of the Central Bank before the war; the bank was bombed and is in ruins, but officials say its vaults may have survived.
Other objects were placed in the museum’s own underground vaults; only when power was restored this week could curators begin assessing what was lost. Even in some of the looted galleries, a few stone statues are intact.
Still more encouragingly, several hundred small objects — including a priceless statue of an Assyrian king from the ninth century B.C. — have been returned to the museum, in some cases by people who said they had taken the treasures to keep them out of the wrong hands. In addition, a steel case containing 465 small objects was confiscated by soldiers of the Iraqi National Congress and returned to the museum.
There remain theories that at least some of the looting was organized.
As evidence of a planned assault, museum officials say they found keys and glass-cutters. One official said he saw two “European looking” men enter the museum with the mob, point to various treasures and leave. “Behind the looting there were wicked hands,” Mr. Khalil said. “They took precious pieces and left less valuable ones.”
For Mr. Limbert, the case is undecided. “One theory is that this was done by people who knew which were the best pieces and came equipped to get them,” he said. “I’m told 27 pieces were taken from the actual galleries. But the other theory is that this was a smash-and-grab operation, mostly by people from the neighborhood. What supports this is that a lot of very good pieces have been returned. If you like conspiracy theories, you can go on forever here.”
And some of it may have been striking out at the fallen regime.
Officials at the National Museum, whose scholars and scientists are widely respected, dismissed the idea that the museum was targeted as another symbol of Mr. Hussein’s rule. They conceded, however, that particularly in recent years, the government had supported the work of the museum, which reopened in 2000 for the first time since the 1991 Gulf War.
Colonel Bogdanos said that some Iraqis returned looted objects to him, rather than to the museum itself, which was identified with Mr. Hussein. “It has been a challenge to us that the Iraq museum is closely identified with both the prior regime and its Baathist Party,” he said. “Everyone says this looting was anger at the regime.”
Supporting that thesis is the destruction of numerous other cultural institutions where nothing but furniture and computers were stolen.
Some of the other institutions that were hit were also not the cultural tragedies that initial reports had it.
The National Center of Books and Archives, also known as the National Library, was destroyed by fire, although Mr. Limbert said he had heard that 90 percent of its books and documents had been removed for safekeeping. The Awgaf or Religious Endowment Library, however, was burned, and it lost 6,500 Islamic manuscripts. The Central Library of Baghdad University and the Science Academy were also looted and destroyed by fire.
One piece of good news is that 50,000 Islamic and Arab manuscripts, dating back 14 centuries, were saved from the Saddam House of Manuscripts. Osama Nassir al-Naqsa Bandy, the director-general of manuscripts in the Ministry of Culture, had his entire collection removed to a safe place one week before the war began in March. He also took 150 boxes of books and catalogs from the library of the National Museum for safekeeping. “The House of Manuscripts was attacked by saboteurs who took all the installations and furniture but everything important was gone,” he said. “The library of the museum was bricked up and it also escaped vandalism.”
Colonel Bogdanos said he had visited the hiding place of the manuscripts and books and was satisfied they were well protected by the local community. “We had planned to bring them to the museum, but community members were insistent it would be a mistake,” he said. “I was assured they were safe where they were. We took an inventory of the locked cases and left.”
Part of what’s interesting here is more information coming out both on what efforts US forces planned to protect these sites, and what got in the way of their doing so. After all, a lot of other sites that the US military was interested in were also not secured — the problem not being lack of interest on the part of the military, but either error or insufficient forces in the face of opposition.
Because ad hoc discoveries might occur anywhere, the U.S. military is racing belatedly to lock down files and equipment at scores of potentially sensitive facilities in Baghdad that went unguarded in the chaotic days immediately after the fall of Hussein. Beginning late last week, U.S. combat forces in the Iraqi capital moved to take custody of all 23 government ministries and more than two dozen other locations they said might yield valuable intelligence.
Senior U.S. officials with responsibility over postwar Iraq were highly critical of the delay in securing those facilities. One official interviewed in Kuwait described it as “the barn-door phenomenon.” He said retired Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner, the occupation governor of Iraq, sought special protection for 10 Iraqi ministries, identifying them as potential repositories of weapons data, but that only the Oil Ministry remained intact after U.S. ground forces took possession of Baghdad. Combat commanders, the official said, gave “insufficient priority to getting into these places,” and “there wasn’t enough force to accomplish that initial sequestering of buildings and records.”
Military officials had evidently given a high priority to the Baghdad Museum, along with other sites that were lost.
In a memo sent two weeks before the fall of Baghdad, the Pentagon office charged with rebuilding Iraq urged top commanders of U.S. ground forces to protect the Iraqi National Museum and other cultural sites from looters. “Coalition forces must secure these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable loss of cultural treasures,” says the March 26 memo. . .
The museum was No. 2 on a list of 16 sites that ORHA deemed crucial to protect. Financial institutions topped the list, including the Iraqi Central Bank, which is now a burned-out shell filled with twisted metal beams from the collapse of the roof and all nine floors under it.
But, again, reports from various sources are now making it clear that US forces weren’t just sitting around during the looting of the multi-acre museum complex.
Two days before Iraq’s National Museum was looted of priceless objects, leading curators said they fled the museum complex when Fedayeen Saddam guerrillas entered the courtyard and fought U.S. Army tanks.
“When we saw these people in our garden firing at tanks, we said, `Oh, we’ll be hit,'” said Donny George, a museum official. George and several others headed for safety, returning five days later to discover the museum trashed by looters and several of the collection’s most valuable pieces missing. . .
The museum is across the street from a Special Republican Guard compound and transmission center, both of which were heavily bombed during the war. The compound contained three armored vehicles and a recoilless rifle mounted on the back of a truck. . .
Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz, commander of Task Force 164 of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, said during street battles in the later days of the war his men were 500 yards from the museum at a key intersection. “They went to that intersection and took some pretty intense enemy fire that came from the museum,” he said. “RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades], AK-47s. My soldiers got pelted pretty good. We fired one tank round into the museum.”
The tank round left a hole in a front arch of the museum. Bloodstains were seen on the walls, according to Army and museum officials. Some weapons, including an unexploded grenade, and uniforms were found on the museum site, according to U.S. forces. “There’s a common misconception that American forces arrived and stood around as looting took place,” said 2nd Lt. Erik Balascik, who was helping guard the museum Saturday and who participated in the battle around the museum grounds. “We didn’t observe any looting at all,” Balascik said. “There are back doors. They came in through the back and out the back. We never observed the actual looting of the museum. However, the whole city was being looted at the time.”
Balascik said it would have taken a larger force than his Task Force 164 Charlie Company to secure the museum during the battle. “And it would have opened the flank of our task force,” he said. “Our security would have been gone.”
I don’t think there’s anyone who doesn’t wish that the US forces has been still stronger, still faster, better able to quickly and completely lock down the city of Baghdad. The relatively lighter, smaller force involved (the hitch caused by Turkey’s closing the northern front notwithstanding) may well have been a mistake on Rumsfeld’s part.
On the other hand, remember how everyone was comparing Baghdad to Stalingrad, and predicting a fierce, destructive, bloody house-to-house battle? While the conquest of Baghdad took far less time than anyone imagined, why is it now that the threat, uncertainty, and delays of urban warfare are suddenly the fault of the US military?
At any rate I’m glad that the cultural losses, though bad, are turning out not to have been as bad as first thought.
And some good news from the BBC, too:
More than 100 items looted from Iraqi museums have been handed in to US-led coalition forces, according to the American military. They are said to include priceless manuscripts, a 7,000-year-old vase and one of the oldest bronze bas-relief representations of a bull. . .
In a statement, US Central Command in the Gulf state of Qatar said: “Iraqis started to return the items after coalition forces began urging local residents to return any artefacts taken during the looting in Baghdad. One man returned a chest filled with priceless manuscripts and parchments to a nearby mosque, a local pianist returned 10 pieces including a broken statue of an Assyrian king dated to the 9th Century BC and one of the oldest recorded bronze bas-relief bulls [this also reported here]. And after some negotiation, a man arrived with 46 stolen antiquities, then with eight more pieces, and finally with a 7,000-year-old vase.”
(via Cronaca)