Iraqi archeology: foxes taking over the henhouse

Followup on the flight of Donny George and the events that precipitated it:

There is mounting concern among scholars that the appointment of religiously conservative Shiite Muslims throughout Iraq's traditionally secular archaeological institutions could threaten the preservation of the country's pre-Islamic history. . .

Liwa Sumaysim, the new minister of tourism and antiquities, is a dentist whose wife, a member of Parliament, is related to Sadr. The new ministry has already replaced employees of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage at both the national and local level.

Burhan Shakur, an archaeologist who was director of excavations at the Iraqi Museum, was fired in the spring, then given the option to retire; he has left for Germany. Abdul-Amir Hamdani, the inspector for antiquities in the Dhi Qar Province, an area rich in pre-Islamic sites, was jailed in April on charges of corruption. After three months he was released, and the charges were dropped. But his job was then filled by a man with ties to Al Fadilah, an Islamist party aligned with the Sadr movement. . .

A link between Islamic militants and looting at pre-Islamic archaeological sites has long been suspected, but is difficult to prove. The Nasiriyah Museum was burned and looted in 2004 by militants affiliated with Sadr. The museum's guards reported that the militants promised to do to the antiquities there exactly "what the Taliban did."

The center for Iraq's illicit antiquities trade, Fajr, is also a stronghold for militants loyal to Sadr. And anti-Western graffiti has appeared at looted archaeological sites. . .

The Sadrist leadership in the new ministry has made its views known in other ways. Recently two pre-Islamic statues it returned to the Iraqi Museum were accompanied by a note describing them as "idols."

From the International Herald Tribune (originally from the NY Times). This is a very bad state of affairs, and I suspect it has been made even worse by something left discreetly unmentioned recently: Donny George was a proud and enthusiastic confidant of Saddam Hussein, whose patronage of the Iraqi archeological establishment appears to have left a lasting taint -- and especially for those neither secular nor Sunni.

Posted by David on September 11, 2006 9:11 PM