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Just how bad was the looting of Iraq’s museum and archaeological sites? According to Salon’s experts, many ancient artifacts have come home, but the looting continues.

Mar. 20, 2008 |

Salon Conversations

Among the many unintended and unforeseen consequences of the U.S. occupation of Iraq that began five years ago this week was the wholesale looting of Iraq’s museums and archaeological sites. Iraq has been called the cradle of civilization. Starting with the Sumerian civilization, which more than 5,000 years ago produced what may be the world’s first examples of writing and math, the area centered on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and known as Mesopotamia has been home to a succession of cultures — Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian. Many believe southern Iraq was the site of the biblical Garden of Eden. But within weeks of the first American airstrike, the cradle of civilization had been robbed. Baghdad’s National Museum of Iraq, among the globe’s premier repositories of antiquities, was ransacked over the course of a week in April 2003. Statues were dragged down the steps, artifacts six millennia old were carried off in plastic bags. American soldiers were not dispatched to protect the museum until the thieves were long gone.

It was partly in response to media queries about the unimpeded looting of Iraq’s cultural heritage that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld uttered the infamous and cavalier rejoinder, “Democracy is messy.” Five years after the sacking of Iraq, we decided to ask the experts how bad it really was, how many priceless antiquities have come back to their homeland, and what, if anything, has changed about the Bush administration’s approach to protecting Iraq’s history.

On behalf of Salon, Brian Rose, professor of archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania and president of the Archaeological Institute of America, conducted a round table with Donny George Youkhanna, former chief of antiquities for the Iraqi government and director general of the National Museum of Iraq; Cori Wegener, an associate curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts who, as a major in the U.S. Army Reserve, was called up in 2003 and sent to Iraq to assess the damage to the museum; and Micah Garen, a documentary filmmaker, photographer and journalist who went to Iraq shortly after the invasion to document the looting of archaeological sites. Youkhanna, who is known as Donny George in the West, was forced to flee Iraq in 2006 and is now a visiting professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Wegener is presently president of the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, which was formed in 2006 to protect cultural property worldwide during armed conflict. Garen, who wrote a book about his experience as a hostage in Iraq called “American Hostage,” is working on a feature-length documentary about the looting. The round-table participants spoke by phone on Friday, March 14.

– Mark Schone, Salon

The article continues at:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/03/20/iraq_roundtable/print.html

Dr. John Russell teaches Functional Specialty Team members from the 353d Civil Affairs Command how to recognize an archaeological site.

Members of the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield and its partner organizations, the Archaeological Institute of America and the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, traveled to Fort Bragg, North Carolina earlier this month to provide cultural property training for the 353d Civil Affairs Command, an Army Reserve unit undergoing pre-deployment training. Among their many missions, Civil Affairs units have responsibility for cultural property issues in the military theater of operations. Although more than ninety percent of Civil Affairs personnel are in the Reserves, enabling the military to draw on civilian expertise not found in the active duty force, there are few cultural property professionals among their ranks. Large scale military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, countries with significant cultural resources, mean that Civil Affairs operators are often confronted with cultural property damage issues that require some basic knowledge and resources. Very much like the first aid training all military personnel receive, Blue Shield training provides an overview of cultural property protection as well as contacts to call upon for additional expertise once in theater.

On this day trainers included USCBS president and Minneapolis Institute of Arts associate curator Cori Wegener, who led off with a presentation on the history of cultural property at war, including lessons learned from her own work as part of the Civil Affairs Arts, Monuments, and Archives team that assisted the Iraq Museum after it was looted in 2003. Independent conservator Barbara Roberts represented the American Institute for Conservation, providing an overview of emergency assessments, basic conservation issues, and safe object handling. Dr. Brian Rose, president of the Archaeological Institute of America and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a historical overview of the region’s rich archaeological record. Finally, Dr. John Russell, vice president of both the USCBS and the AIA, provided a detailed discussion about the recognition and protection of archaeological sites.

The U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield and its partner organizations offer cultural property training to any military unit. either at home station or during mobilization training. The training is free of charge. For questions or to schedule training, please contact Cori Wegener at cwegener@uscbs.org or call 612-839-7654.

A head made of unfired clay, dating from the 2nd century B.C., is part of the touring show. (Copyright Thierry Ollivier — Musee Guimet)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/20/AR2007122002427.html

National Gallery to Host Nation’s Ancient Artifacts

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 21, 2007; C01

They survived the collapse of civilizations and crossed the known world on camelback. Some lay buried for centuries in an Afghan nomad’s sepulcher. Others were spirited out of a museum in modern-day Kabul under siege from looters and religious fanatics, then hidden in secret vaults under the presidential palace.

Now, a selection of Afghanistan’s ancient artistic treasures — from a dagger hilt carved with a Siberian bear to Greek coins from an excavated city called Woman of the Moon — is scheduled to come to Washington next May and continue on a 17-month national tour, the National Geographic Society and the National Gallery of Art will announce jointly today.

The exhibit, which will be on display here for nearly four months before traveling to museums in New York, San Francisco and Houston, aims to provide a rare glimpse of the long-lost, creative melting pot that Afghanistan once represented — centuries before it became known to most Westerners as a grim Cold War battlefield and a victim of horrific Islamic repression under the Taliban.

“We hope this exhibit will help overcome the darkness of Afghanistan’s recent history and shed some light on its rich past, thousands of years old, as a crossroads of cultures and civilizations,” said Said Tayeb Jawad, Afghanistan’s ambassador in Washington. “We also hope it will showcase the courage of people who put their lives on the line to safeguard and preserve these treasures.”

As a trove of history, the artifacts are as edifying as they are beautiful. Selected from four separate sites, they span 3,000 years, beginning circa 2500 B.C. (during the Bronze Age), and include designs, scripts and images from a dozen cultures as far-flung as India, China and Rome.

The exhibition is dominated by gold: bowls decorated with Afghan and Mesopotamian motifs, coins minted in the Greco-Bactrian era of the 1st and 2nd centuries B.C., a floral crown with collapsible leaves and a four-pound belt with designs of a man astride a mythical beast. There are also thrones and table legs of carved Indian ivory, glass pieces from Rome and ornaments made with local Afghan turquoise.

The modern-day accounts of concealments and excavations that preserved and unearthed these objects are as fascinating as the ancient cultures that produced them when foreign pilgrims, warriors and kings traveled the legendary trade route known as the Silk Road across Afghanistan.

The National Museum in Kabul, from which many of the artifacts come, endured rocket attacks during the Afghan civil war in the early 1990s, an orgy of idol-smashing under the radical Islamic Taliban regime in the spring of 2001 and a final bout of looting during the chaos of the U.S.-led assault that toppled the Taliban the same winter.

It was widely rumored that museum officials and employees had retrieved some objects and hidden them for safekeeping; other pieces were said to have been stolen and smuggled abroad. In 2003, a group of boxes from the museum was unexpectedly located in a sealed vault under the presidential palace. A year later, a team of international experts and Afghan officials began opening them.

“We had no idea what treasures were inside. It was a fantastic moment of rediscovery,” said Fredrik T. Hiebert, a National Geographic fellow who is curating the U.S. exhibition and has traveled repeatedly to Afghanistan to organize it. “We kept finding more and more boxes. There were objects from the Paleolithic era to the Buddhist period. It took us three months, working seven days a week, to inventory everything.”

One of the exhibit’s four original sources was an abandoned and half-buried city in northern Afghanistan known as Woman of the Moon, built by Greco-Bactrian nobles who passed through Afghanistan more than 2,000 years ago. It was lost to history until the 1960s, when a French archaeologist began a painstaking, 15-year excavation. Hiebert said the exhibit will re-create parts of the city, including the treasury, theater and gymnasium.

Another, equally exotic locale was the walled-up, basement tomb of a 1st-century noble Afghan nomad, discovered by chance in 1978. It contained six mummies — a man and five women — adorned with elaborate gold ornaments and other pieces with designs from Rome and Scythia, a region of what is now southern Russia, as well as the dagger hilt with the Siberian bear.

“Nomads are so hard to find archaeologically. They don’t have houses or temples. So this discovery was a real victory. It showed what a crossroads Afghanistan once was,” said Hiebert. The walled-up burial site, which he also inventoried, contained 22,000 objects as well as the carefully preserved remains of the noble and five “princesses,” who he speculated might have died from drought or plague.

Although the monetary value of the collection is incalculable, the Afghan government has agreed to let it tour the United States in exchange for $1 million. A few critics have suggested that Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest countries, should have been paid a much higher sum or negotiated a percentage of special museum admissions fees.

But Jawad said his government was satisfied with the financial arrangement and that Afghan President Hamid Karzai saw the exhibit as one way to give something back to the Western countries that have defended and assisted his government for the past six years. He said it would be presented in conjunction with a festival of Afghan crafts and carpets, on sale to benefit artisans back home.

“We appreciate that people want us to get the most out of it, but this is a good deal for us culturally as well as financially,” he said. Jawad added that the Kabul government also hopes to bring some of the officials who hid the museum pieces, so they can tell their stories. “They could have gotten passports and fled like other people, but they stayed and saved these treasures,” he said. “They are the real heroes.”

Museum director Amira Edan gives US Army Lt Col Kenneth Crawford, commander of the 2nd Brigade Special Troops Battalion, a tour of the galleries.Photo: Sgt First Class Kap Kim, USA

The Art Newspaper

Nearly five years after the museum was ransacked, two main galleries should go on view this month; funding has come from Italy

By Federico Castelli Gattinara and Martin Bailey | From News | Posted: 25.11.07

The National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad is due to reopen at the end of December, nearly five years after the looting. Italian officials assisting the Iraqis told The Art Newspaper that work on two main galleries has now been completed. “Barring any last minute security emergencies, the museum will reopen in December,” says Roberto Parapetti, of the Turin-based Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi.

The two galleries which are set to reopen, with Assyrian and Islamic antiquities, contain large and almost immovable objects. This means that the security risks are lower than with smaller items in glass cases. The rooms are on the ground floor, near the main entrance, and lie on either side of the central courtyard.

The Assyrian Hall has monumental sculptures, including stone panels from the royal palace at Khorsabad and two winged bulls. The other large gallery is the Islamic Hall, which has the eighth-century mihrab from the Al-Mansur mosque in Baghdad. It is also hoped to display ten monumental Parthian sculptures from Hatra in the courtyard.

The Baghdad Museum has been closed since April 2003, when part of its contents were looted during the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Although originally it had been hoped to reopen part of the museum in 2004, the security situation worsened, and this proved impossible.

Donny George, director of the museum from November 2003 and head of the antiquities board from August 2005, later resisted pressure from the ministry of interior to reopen the museum. He feared that it could become a target for looters, since the security situation in Baghdad has remained very dangerous. Shortly before he resigned and went into exile in August 2006, he sealed the museum building, preventing even staff entering. His successors subsequently broke down one of the concrete barriers in September this year.

This autumn Iraqi contractors, funded by the Italian Ministry of Culture, have worked on restoring the Assyrian and Islamic halls. The rooms have been refurbished, the antiquities restored where necessary, and security devices have been installed.

On 31 October US army Lt Col Kenneth Crawford and State Department official Diane Siebrandt visited the museum with protection troops. They were shown around by Dr Amira Edan, Dr George’s successor as museum director and now also acting director of the State Board of Antiquities.

Lt Col Crawford told the American Forces Press Service that “it was nice to just get our foot in the door to identify areas of the facility we can maybe help with… [and] getting the museum open to the public.”

At present there are no plans to reopen the 16 other galleries which remain closed.

©2007 The Art Newspaper

by Eric Westervelt, NPR Morning Edition, November 21, 2007

In a patch of sloping hillside in southwest Mosul — next to a junkyard of destroyed Iraqi army tanks — sits Iraq’s oldest Christian monastery. Saint Elijah’s, a fortress-like complex of buildings dating to the 6th century, was badly damaged during the U.S.- led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Now, a few U.S. military chaplains are struggling to protect the ancient Chaldean Catholic monastery from neglect, unexploded ordnance and looters.

History of the Monastery

At one time the freshwater creek and surrounding hills, prime grazing land, made this valley a sweet spot for early Christian monks to build a place to live and worship. But today, rusting Russian-made Iraqi tanks and bombed-out car shells are piled in a junk heap next to the monastery. First Cavalry Division Pvt. 1st Class Nathaniel Irvine walks carefully around shards of old pottery. Chunks of old plates and clay jug handles litter the monastery’s ground along with shrapnel from tank and mortar rounds. U.S. soldiers have removed more than 130 pieces of unexploded ordnance from the site, but there could be more.It’s believed Dair Mar Elia, or Saint Elijah’s monastery, was built in the late 6th century by early Chaldean/Assyrian Catholic monks. Armies under Persian ruler Tahmaz Nadir Shah attacked and looted the place in the 17th century, slaughtering the three dozen monks who lived here. By Chaldean/Assyrian tradition, monks’ bones were often buried in the monastery walls. And on this windy hillside, Irvine says, soldiers have found what they believe are human remains sticking out of the crumbling walls. “Look inside down there; there’s a bone they’ve found down there, so it’s believed they’re probably buried in these two tunnels,” he says.

Destruction of Today

Today the outer wall of the monastery’s chapel looks as though it were swatted by the hand of a giant. But it was no giant: It was a U.S. anti-tank missile fired in 2003 by advancing 101st Airborne soldiers battling an Iraqi tank unit based in and around the site.

“(The 101st) fired upon the tanks using stuff that would destroy the tanks. They were being fired at so they had to return fire,” Irvine says.

The tow missile that crashed into the ancient chapel’s wall could be chalked up to the fog of combat. But the same can’t be said for the sophomoric graffiti scrawled around the place and the big “Screaming Eagles” logo painted above the chapel’s door. “If you look over the sanctuary you’ll see the 101st Airborne patch. We’ve since tried painting over it and washing it off, and it won’t come off,” Irvine says. U.S soldiers four years ago also white-washed the stone alter and the two-story high walls of the chapel, covering remnants of 600-year-old murals. An ornate, shell-shaped stone alcove with a cross still adorns one wall. Looters apparently got the second one: an identically shaped alcove on the other side of the door sits empty with chisel marks around it. And in the roof line, right above the alter, you can still see a square, man-made opening to the sky.

Leaving a Mark

101st Airborne soldiers were hardly the first soldiers to leave their mark here. Previously, Iraqi tank units trashed the monastery, damaging rooms and filing an ancient cistern with trash and feces. Near the monastery’s entranceway, there’s much older graffiti: A Crusader-era Jerusalem cross is carefully etched into the stone, perhaps a vestige of some medieval battle in the region. Today the monastery sits on the edge of forward U.S. operating base Marez. Despite the ravages of war and neglect, Saint Elijah’s remains an enchanting place. The reddish-brown sand walls seem to soak up the sharp, late-afternoon sun. Underground tunnels, now grass-covered and partially collapsed, poke through the earth near an egg-shaped cistern.Irvine, a 21-year-old from South Dakota, is trying to help preserve the site and gives soldiers occasional tours.“I love it coming here,” Irvine says. “Just the atmosphere it has versus being at work or running outside the wire where it’s stressful. Very relaxing.” Some of the damage U.S. forces did here can’t be undone. But U.S. military chaplains are trying to protect the site as best they can during wartime.

Capt. Martin Chang, the chaplain here, calls the largely unexplored site a potential archeological treasure trove. But with a war still on, the simple chain-link fence chaplains have erected around the monastery may be its only protection for years to come.

Sgt. 1st Class Kap Kim, USA Special to American Forces Press Service
2007-11-13

BAGHDAD, Nov. 13, 2007 – When what was supposed to be simply a short meeting turned into a grand tour of the National Museum of Iraq, some 1st Cavalry Division soldiers got to see a part of early civilization that was beyond their imagination — in some cases, artifacts that dated back to more than 5,000 years ago.

Army Lt. Col. Kenneth Crawford, commander of 2nd “Spartan” Brigade Special Troops Battalion, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, and Diane Siebrandt, a U.S. State Department culture heritage liaison officer, set up the meeting with Dr. Amira, the museum’s newly appointed general director, Oct. 31.

“What we did was huge,” said Siebrandt, who works closely with Iraq’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities.

After a meeting with Amira and her other director generals, Crawford and a few lucky soldiers from his personal security detail received the first tour of the museum and its exhibits since the early part of the war. The doors were closed to visitors April 23, 2003.

“I was in awe of what I saw in there,” said Crawford, a San Antonio native. “You come here, and you’re in the cradle of society.”

During the Ottoman Empire, archeologists and fortune finders were granted digging permits and were able to keep any find. According to Siebrandt, it was during that time when most of the Mesopotamian artifacts left the country.

After World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, it was a British traveler, Gertrude Bell, who started supervising many of the excavation sites and brought to light the importance of having a sense of cultural awareness. The museum, which was originally opened in the early 1900s by Bell, was known then as the Baghdad Archaeological Museum. Many of the exhibits contain artifacts once belonging to her private collection.

The museum was open to the general public until 2003, when looters and vandals stole many priceless items during the war, Siebrandt said. Since then, the museum and its staff have closed the doors to almost everyone. So, the meeting and subsequent tour of the exhibits currently under construction were a surprising treat for the few who were able to see it.

Since December 2006, the State Department and coalition forces have tried to start a dialog that might start the process of reopening the museum to the Iraqi people. “We just were never able to get dialog started,” Siebrandt said. “With Dr. Amira, I met with her and talked about Colonel Crawford (coming to the museum). It was all about getting the right person in.”

For Crawford, whose unit does a lot of civic projects throughout the Karkh Security District, getting to help the museum reopen to the public is important. “It’s an icon, … not just for Karkh or Baghdad, but for Iraq,” Crawford said. “This showed a big step toward joint relations. It was nice to just get our foot in the door to ID areas of the facility we can maybe help with — the end state of getting the museum open to the public.”

http://www.emilitary.org/article.php?aid=12642 

Michael Howard in Irbil
Friday August 10, 2007
Guardian

Thousands of rare books and manuscripts in Iraq’s national library and archive, one of the country’s most important cultural institutions, are in peril after the occupation of the building by Iraqi security forces, the library’s director said yesterday.Saad Eskander, a respected Kurdish historian who has run the library since 2003, told the Guardian that up to 20 Iraqi troops had seized the building at gunpoint yesterday, threatening staff and guards.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (May 16, 2007) - Today, at its 101st Annual Meeting in Chicago, the American Association of Museums (AAM) and the U.S. Committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM-US) honored Ms. Corine Wegener, President, U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield with the 2007 ICOM-US International Service Citation. The citation strives to honor individuals who have made a commitment to advance the cause of museum-based international relations.

Cori Wegener is assistant curator, Architecture, Design, Decorative Arts, Craft, and Sculpture at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and is also a major (retired) in the U.S. Army Reserve. Stationed in Baghdad from May 2003 to March 2004, she worked as the Arts, Monuments and Archives Officer for the 352nd Civil Affairs Command, served as the military liaison to the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, and assisted the staff of the Iraq National Museum in their recovery efforts.

After returning to the United States, Wegener looked for ways to prevent the military-civilian disconnect she witnessed in Iraq from recurring. In response, she established the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, an American branch of an international committee set up in 1996 to respond to armed conflicts that may threaten cultural property.

In a 2007 Museum News article, “Lost: The Battle to Save Iraq’s Antiquities,” Wegener said, “We are offering training for [Army] Civil Affairs units on how to give first aid to cultural property–how to recognize what is art and how to deal with it in an emergency situation and do the best to stabilize the situation until they can get a professional. The hope is that in the future, it will also be easier to deploy cultural heritage professionals in areas where sites are threatened.”

The U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield coordinates with the U.S. military, U.S. government, and other cultural property organizations to protect cultural property worldwide during armed conflict. It also works to provide advice and assistance to U.S. cultural organizations in emergency planning for situations involving armed conflict.

“We are honored to present Cori with the ICOM-US service citation this year,” said Dr. Nina Archabal, vice chair of ICOM-US and director of the Minnesota Historical Society. “She has demonstrated outstanding leadership, courage and commitment to the international museum community.”

The ICOM-US citation is only presented in years when a person, museum or other organization is identified whose work has promoted international relations and has had significant impact in the museum field. Cori is only the third recipient of the award.

For more information about the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, visit www.uscbs.org .
Additional award information, including a list of past citation honorees, is available online athttp://www.aam-us.org/museumresources/icom/icomaward.cfm. Nomination materials will be available in late May.

About ICOM-US
ICOM-US, the U.S. National Committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), provides the framework through which US citizens participate ICOM’s world-wide network. ICOM-US members are museum professionals who are committed to learning from and sharing knowledge with colleagues from abroad. ICOM-US members forge ties with colleagues from around the world while bringing global perspectives to their own museums and the communities they serve. For more information, visit http://www.aam-us.org/museumresources/icom/.

About the American Association of Museums
The American Association of Museums (AAM) has been bringing museums together since 1906, helping to develop standards and best practices, gathering and sharing knowledge, and providing advocacy on issues of concern to the entire museum community. With more than 15,000 individual, 3,000 institutional, and 300 corporate members, AAM is dedicated to ensuring that museums remain a vital part of the American landscape, connecting people with the greatest achievements of the human experience, past, present and future. For more information, visit www.aam-us.org.