Baghdad museum polemics

In recent letters to the Guardian, David Aaronovitch's harsh judgement of the Baghdad museum administration was taken to task.

The co-author of one of these letters, Eleanor Robson, has also written an article in defense of both the museum officials and her own claim two months ago that the looting was a loss of equivalent magnitude to the burning of the library of Alexandria or the 13th-century Mongol sack of Baghdad. Yet while some of her points are well taken, her aim of complete exoneration ultimately undermines her credibility. She also repeats the claim that the Warka vase had been cemented in place, and was thus not removable -- which conflicts with another recent report that it had been taken for restoration at the time of the looting.

And today, architectural historian Dan Cruikshank, whose BBC TV documentary raised some of the most serious charges, responds:

But as the five museum storerooms have been examined more thoroughly in recent weeks, they have turned out not to have been ransacked. Only three were entered by thieves and only key items, their locations known only to a few people, had been removed.

Furthermore, many of the 33 major pieces supposedly taken from the galleries are extremely valuable, and very small - prime candidates for being put into storage pre-war. So why hadn't they? That led me to conclude that, quite possibly, they had disappeared some time ago.

The news this week that the museum staff were staging a revolt against the senior personnel didn't surprise me, either: it was clear to me that they were unhappy, and I was even shown a whip that had apparently been used on them by members of the museum security department. They talked about the upper echelons of the museum hierarchy - people such as George - being Baathists who had to report on them. The whole culture of terror that you would associate with a totalitarian regime was in place.

That fear may explain the whereabouts of other missing items: I went to the place where 4,000 manuscripts were being stored and the people there said they did not want to return them - they did not trust the Baathists at the museum.

As well as adding to the confusion over the looting, Robson repeats as fact the claim that the bunkers in the museum grounds were purely defensive, but that's one of the things that is under dispute. The Americans claim there were 150 Iraqi soldiers there, and that the bunkers were fighting positions - and they cited evidence for this. Pretending that this question is settled is a very significant sleight of hand.

Robson also says the arms found in the museum storeroom were there because Fedayeen had broken into it. But they hadn't - the door was open and the lock intact when US soldiers arrived. Who unlocked it and when remains a mystery.

That said, I'm quite prepared to believe that the museum heads are victims, not villains - that they are being terrorised by high-ranking former Baathists who are threatening to kill them if they say what really happened. But, for now, great caution must be exercised before the museum is handed back to them: there are so many inconsistencies, and they are tainted by being members of a foul regime, even if they weren't themselves foul members of it. Emotionally, it may be impossible for them to reconcile what has actually happened with anything that it would be acceptable to say now.

Posted by David on June 19, 2003 11:28 PM