Baghdad museum staff: more cracks in the facade

From today's Guardian:

More than 130 of the 185 staff of Iraq's state board of antiquities office in Baghdad, which runs the museum, have signed a petition demanding the resignation of its directors.

Staff said they believed that some of the thefts from the museum were an inside job. They also accused Donny George, the board's head of research, of arming them and ordering them to fight US forces. . .

One employee said: "We want elections for new directors and we want an investigation into what happened at the museum."

US military investigators have discovered that the keys from a director's safe went missing and have never been found. Several employees said they found secure doors leading into the building unlocked but not broken after the first days of looting. A wall which concealed a secret entrance to underground store rooms, which only a handful of senior officials knew about, had been knocked down.

Staff also described how Mr George gathered employees in the museum for a meeting in the early days of the war at which he ordered them to fight US troops or face the sack. One employee who was present at the meeting said: "He [Mr George] said: 'If the Americans come you have to fight.' They never mentioned thieves once."

Missiles destroyed a building opposite the museum during the war. Staff said Mr George ordered them to fire at US aircraft or parachutists.

Mr George, who has worked for the board for 26 years and is known internationally, admitted he had been at the meeting and that guns were distributed but said he told staff only to guard the museum against looters. . .

He said he had been a member of the Ba'ath party, but not a senior one. Refusal to join, he said, would have meant "troubles in my position here [at the museum] and at home".

A spokesperson for the US-led coalition provisional authority (CPA), which is running Iraq, said Mr George's Ba'ath party membership had been investigated and he had been cleared. "All other allegations are just hearsay," the spokesperson said. Elections have been organised by the CPA in the ministry of culture, which oversees the museum, to choose new directors. But staff from the antiquities board are unlikely to take part. "It is not the way it works," the spokesperson said.

This looks all too much as if ordinary staff members -- those likely least politicized -- are being ignored, while a voice is being given to administrators and officers, whom as a group have long been accused of intimate ties with the former regime. As for Donny George, what about his open boasts of direct access to Saddam Hussein, not to mention his role in the looting of Kuwait?

In fact, this is not the first such protest (we noted another over a month ago, reported in the Sunday Times of London):

The furore over the looting of Iraq’s national museum took an unexpected turn yesterday when workers accused their director of conniving in the theft of priceless antiquities during the chaotic collapse of the regime in Baghdad.

Fifty museum employees staged a protest in which they waved placards under the noses of American investigators proclaiming that Jabir Khalil, chairman of the Iraqi state board of heritage and antiquities, was a “dictator” and a “thief”.

Another museum director tried to calm the protesters, calling their allegations against their boss “stupid” and baseless. “In any case, there are proper procedures for investigating these matters,” said Donny George, the museum’s head of research. . .

Posted by David on June 17, 2003 10:49 AM