Baghdad looting: museum officials' motives questioned

The Museum Security Network, which maintains a news log about art and artifact theft and related museum issues, has maintained a harshly critical stance towards the US government's actions in Iraq, relying heavily on the widely-reported statements of Iraqi museum officials. Now there is an interesting post by art historian Dr. Tom Flynn (scroll down to read), expressing dismay at the duplicity of those same officials:

It is with great bewilderment that some of us read the claims by officials at the Iraq National Museum that "shoddy reporting" is to blame for creating the impression that the majority of the museum's 170,000 objects were looted following the invasion. I was present at the British Museum Press Conference a few weeks ago [April 29; the report here corroborates Flynn's recollections -- D.] at which curators who had already visited the museum and Donny George himself all had ample opportunity to clarify to the best of their knowledge the extent of the looting and the likely number of missing objects. True, they too were operating under the fog of war at that time, but perhaps they could all have made a greater effort either to be more accurate in their estimates or more cautious in the speculations they made. Most importantly, they could have been more open about the precautions they had taken to hide away certain objects prior to the invasion, which were barely mentioned.

All put very politely, but the outrage comes through loud and clear.

I recall from my notes of that press conference that Donny George recounted - and, it appeared to some of us, not without a certain relish - how Saddam had in the past proved himself prepared to summarily execute looters of cultural heritage. Conversely, although the estimate of looted items might have been exaggerated, Donny George was emphatic in his condemnation of the American military for protecting the Oil Ministry but neglecting the museum. There is a queasy subtext here if you bother to seek it out.

And for more on George, look here.

Many questions still remain unanswered about this event, not least how irreplaceable artefacts such as the Warka Vase could have been removed prior to the invasion without the knowledge of museum officials. But there are also questions to be asked about why Donny George and other museum officials knew so little about pre-war measures to store and protect, which now appear to have been efficient enough to safeguard many of the items which many of us were misled into believing had been looted. We may have got the wrong end of the stick at the British Museum - but is it not a little strange that quite so many journalists went away with the wrong impression, while Mr George made little or not attempt to clarify the context of the figure of 170,000 which he repeated with such regularity and gusto before, during, and after that meeting.

The claim that the 170,000 figure was a journalistic error was reported recently in the Telegraph:

Officials at the National Museum of Iraq have blamed shoddy reporting amid the "fog of war" for creating the impression that the majority of the institution's 170,000 items were looted in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad.

A carefully prepared storage plan, used in the Iran-Iraq war and the first Gulf war, ensured that tens of thousands of pieces were saved, they said. They now believe that the number of items taken was in the low thousands, and possibly hundreds. . .

Donny George, research director, said: "There was a mistake. Someone asked us what is the number of pieces in the whole collection. We said over 170,000, and they took that as the number lost. . .

However, some of the blame for the confusion lies with the poor communication skills of museum officials, most of whom are less approachable than Mr George. Shortly after the looting they were in a highly defensive mood and gave away little about what appeared to be - and probably still is - one of the biggest art thefts ever.

At the time, accusations flew that valuable pieces were looted to order in an operation that required inside help. American investigators from the immigration and customs enforcement department also did little to dispel the notion that the theft had been on a much larger scale. . .

Mr George now admits that the looters knew what they were looking for. "I see it as a planned project involving parties abroad which included planning the removal of items out of the country," he said.

I'm not sure where that "admits" comes from, since George was the first to point the finger at international master criminals -- and, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, away from insider involvement -- a claim he has repeated loudly and continually from day one.

Prof McGuire Gibson, an oriental specialist from Chicago University and a member of the Unesco team that first said the losses might have been wildly exaggerated, said he had received reports that "top five" items out of the 33 had shifted to Teheran and Paris within days of their removal from the museum. These may include the Sumerian period Vase of Warca, and the 4,500-year-old Basitki statue.

Mr George said that judging from the fate of pieces looted from regional museums after the first Gulf war, London was likely to play a key role as an evaluation centre for stolen items. He said buyers for those artefacts came mostly from Japan, America and Israel.

Let's continue playing the game of Read The Subtext, noting that most experts in the antiquities trade point not to America or Israel, but to Japan and Western Europe:

Dealers said few of the Iraqi museum objects would reach the United States because of tight customs controls and federal laws involving stolen property. More likely destinations would be Switzerland, known as a transshipment point for looted antiquities, and other European countries, such as Germany and Belgium, that have not signed or ratified a 1970 international treaty intended to combat the trade in illicit antiquities, dealers said. The United States ratified it in 1983, France in 1997 and Britain last year.

It is also interesting that George (the "Dr." seems to be being dropped with increasing frequency lately) has been quoted praising the Jordanian border guards, while faulting the American forces for not bringing smuggling to a halt along the Iraqi-Jordanian border.

Posted by David on May 26, 2003 9:32 PM