Iraqi museum loot update

This Boston Globe article's main focus is on the supposed gulf between historically-conscious Iraqis and their less enlightened occupiers (not exactly a fair comparison, soldiers being soldiers, and not, for the most part, historians). It also, however, includes some material that is germane to the museum looting story:

Bogdanos's comments, including his suggestion that museum insiders had a role in the thefts, did not sit well with some Iraqi antiquity specialists, who felt that the US military was playing down losses to Iraq's heritage.

Those who so successfully (and, it now emerges, dishonestly) played up the losses are now hardly in a position to criticize. Though in the (very) short term the exaggeration of the losses helped make the US look bad, the lasting effect has been to discredit all those who joined in in crying wolf -- making it all too likely that outrage over illegal excavation of important archeological sites will now be dismissed as just more politically-inspired grandstanding.

Waleed Al-Fatlawi, a leading antiques dealer in Baghdad, said US forces have failed to stem the growing trade in looted items moving on Baghdad's black market. In the back room of one shop, Fatlawi said, a well-known trader recently displayed two looted items: A gold ring with a ruby stone said to belong to a Babylonian king, selling for $5,000 (and bought for $400), and a piece of deer leather with a history of another king carved in Hebrew. The trader refused to speak to the Globe last week.

''Iraqis, Kurds, Europeans, they all buy from him,'' Fatlawi said. ''They can show receipts and take the pieces out of the country. ''I told American soldiers, `These are the properties of 26 million citizens, not one man,''' he added. ''But the man has not been stopped.''

Forgive my suspicions, but this sounds an awful lot like one trader trying to dispose of a rival. Perhaps the tip is genuine, but one can well imagine the soldiers' reluctance to jump in (never forgetting, too, that they are trained as soldiers, not as policemen -- let alone art squad detectives).

John Russell, an art historian at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, reviewed the antiquities crisis as part of a UNESCO team. He said that ''people with integrity'' at the National Museum and other sites were being portrayed as possible thieves. At the same time, Iraqi looters were digging fresh holes at major archeological sites such as Isin, Umma, and Nippur, in southern Iraq with little or no US intervention.

I expect he means those "people with integrity" who knew the museum's treasures had been removed long since for safekeeping, but who nevertheless promoted the story that American negligence had led to catastrophic, near-total losses -- then, once their duplicity was revealed, blamed the journalists for "misinterpreting" what had been said.

''I'd like to see more American attention to those sites,'' Russell said. ''But the military has been more focused on defending itself for being late to protecting these sites.''

Professor Russell seems to forget that the protection of archeological sites is but one of many urgent tasks demanding the occupation forces' attention -- not least being, not getting killed.

Some US officers involved in the recovery said the criticisms are unfair, and that Iraqis themselves now seem to be dragging their heels. ''They're all witnesses to the crimes, but no one will say anything,'' one US officer involved in the recovery effort at the American civilian administration in Baghdad said on condition of anonymity. ''Maybe they're waiting for us to leave. They've been increasingly noncooperative.''

For a quick link to previous installments of the Iraqi antiquities looting story, look under Notables in the left column of the Cronaca home page.

Posted by David on June 7, 2003 11:14 PM