In "Letter from Baghdad' D. T. Potts recounts the aftermath of the looting of the Iraq National Museum that took place in April 2003, the international response to it and his own efforts to assist the museum staff in reconstituting their record system.Australia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori

Potts, J. T.

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A U S T R A L I A N  B O O K  R E V I E W  S E P T E M B E R  2 0 0 3     1 3Letter from BaghdadD.T. PottsTHERE CANNOT BE MANY LITERATE people left inthe world today who have not heard of the appallinglooting of the Iraq National Museum earlier this year.This followed the evacuation of the building on April 8 bymuseum personnel who had been safeguarding the site (insome cases sleeping there) up until that point. What ensuedwas a nightmare of cultural carnage involving an unknownnumber of looters who, according to Marine Col. MatthewBogdanos (head of the Joint Inter-Agency Coordination Groupinvestigating the looting ofthe museum), made off withapproximately 13,500 objects.How could the Coalitionhave allowed this to happen?I have no ironclad answer tothis, but a British Museumcolleague who has been in-volved in ongoing meetingsconcerning the looting of theKabul Museum, and who hashad contact with US person-nel knowledgeable aboutboth crises, tells me that, ac-cording to an American in-vestigator in Afghanistan, aplan for the protection did ex-ist. However, the unit as-signed to protect the museumin Baghdad never arrived. Itwas stuck in the Mediterranean, a victim of the US govern-ment’s inability to convince Turkey to allow it to move troopsacross the Turkish–Iraqi frontier. Whether or not this is apoc-ryphal I cannot say, but it certainly stretches credibility thatno plan existed, particularly following the high-profile meet-ings held in January between American Near Eastern archae-ologists and the Pentagon and State Department, at which thesignificance of the museum was made abundantly clear.When the news of the looting broke, I was, as one of thefew Near Eastern archaeologists in Australia, inundated bycalls from the media. Within a few days of giving more inter-views than I care to remember, I contacted an acquaintance atDFAT whom I knew from his time in Iran, where I am currentlyexcavating. This led, very rapidly, to a plan (sponsored by theCouncil for Australian–Arab Relations) to send me to Bagh-dad with a powerful laptop computer, scanner, digital cameraand some database and graphics software to assist the mu-seum staff in reconstituting their record system. This in-volved figuring out what they had, what was missing, andcreating a proper database to hold the information, as well asphotographing and scanning documents and objects.I left Australia on May 11. Five days later, after waiting inAmman for a few days while the Defence Attaché Lt. Col. Robde Rooy and Ambassador John Tilemann tried to get me on anRAAF flight into Baghdad, I was on a Hercules cargo andtroop transport bound for Baghdad. On arrival, I was takencare of by the Australian diplomats who had already arrivedto resurrect Australia’sembassy there (dormantsince the first Gulf War),and spent my time at themuseum with Australianfilm journalist OliviaRousset, who was shoot-ing a number of stories inIraq, including one aboutmy work, for SBS’sDateline programme.What I did in the mu-seum was straightfor-ward: I delivered theequipment, spent severalhours showing two staffmembers how to use it,ran through a dummy da-tabase I had designed forthem to use in order torecord the objects in the museum’s collection, and gave themas much advice in using the equipment as possible, whilerecognising that — appreciated as the gift from the Australiangovernment and people unquestionably was — the time wasnot yet ripe for real work.Quite simply, the staff was in a state of shock. The mu-seum was experiencing the media frenzy that had been goingon for weeks. So thorough had the looters been that moststaff members didn’t have a chair to sit on; many of themmilled around in front of the museum or in the main foyer. Theatmosphere was demoralising. With few exceptions, everyoffice door had been hacked into with axes, sometimes remov-ing the lock and door handle, in other cases creating a holelarge enough to walk through. Everything had been takenfrom the offices, apart from large, heavy tables and some filingcabinets, whose contents had been strewn on the floor. Thecorridors had been cleaned, but the débris had been pushedinto great piles of charred papers and books, broken glass andArchived at Flinders University: dspace.flinders.edu.au 1 4     A U S T R A L I A N  B O O K  R E V I E W  S E P T E M B E R  2 0 0 3building wreckage. Fires had been lit throughout the museum.The staff had attached thick foam mattresses to statues andreliefs, and placed more foam on the floors in the galleries,in case bomb shock should cause walls to collapse.When the looters arrived, there was no power. The galler-ies and corridors were therefore dark. The foam proved to bean excellent medium for burning and a light source, albeit atoxic one. But there was more than chemical poison in the air:staff members made accusations and counter-accusationsabout colleagues. Who was a Baathist, who was a really badBaathist? With the most competent people almost entirelyabsorbed in dealing with the media and the US forces nowguarding the museum and investigating the looting, there wasno hope of constructive work being done. My stay was brief,a bit less than forty-eight hours, but my aim had been accom-plished. There was little more that could be done. One doesn’texpect the inmates of an emergency ward to rally and immedi-ately resume their daily routine when a guest arrives.Was the looting an inside job, as the press has oftenclaimed or insinuated? According to Col. Bogdanos and histeam, the looters consisted of three different sorts of people.First, there were looters on a mission — those who wentstraight for certain things, left others and knew what theywere after. Presumably, these were people with access topublished guides to the galleries, who knew the value of whatthey were taking, who bypassed less valuable objects or, insome cases, plaster casts (albeit painted to look as original aspossible) and headed straight for important pieces. Second,there were random looters who joined in and might have beenas happy absconding with a desk chair or air conditioner as acylinder seal. These people got into two of the three storageareas on the main floor and literally swept objects off shelves— genuine antiquities, plaster casts and fakes (any fakesbrought to the museum over the years had simply been put onshelves in storage, not destroyed, and thus were in the build-ing when the looters came). And third, there were one or morepersons with definite ‘insider knowledge’, who used keys toenter a remote corridor leading to five basement rooms. Oncethrough the door, they then breached another door for whichthey had no keys with a crowbar, and entered four of fivesubterranean storage rooms where they again bypassed lessvaluable, but genuine, antiquities, and ransacked a series ofplastic fishing tackle boxes holding important finds that hadbeen shown in an exhibition on treasures from the Iraq Mu-seum staged in Turin, Italy, in 1985. Some 10,337 objects,including 4795 cylinder seals, were stolen in this manner.The extent of the damage was overstated in the media.Nothing like 170,000 objects were stolen. The vast majorityof the important works on display had been taken out oftheir cases before the war and put in a safe place (thoughnot everything, such as the Warka Vase and the beautifulfemale head of marble dating to ca 3000 BC). The extraordi-nary gold discovered by Iraqi archaeologists in the royalAssyrian tombs at Nimrud had been stored in a bank vault.Almost 40,000 manuscripts were locked away safely in an air-raid shelter. The magazine containing the museum’s collec-tion of cuneiform tablets was missed entirely by the looters.But the museum is, if physically standing, a ruin; and thestolen cylinder seals, many of them exquisite examples oflapidary art in miniature, would alone have a market valueexceeding US$200,000,000.And what of the US efforts to recover the stolen artifacts?Col. Bogdanos, who has a background with the FBI and theDistrict Attorney’s office in Manhattan, is proud of the factthat, as of 11 July, 2935 objects had been recovered. Of these,1591 had been brought in voluntarily by Iraqis, 500 wereseized in Iraq, 400 were turned in by the Iraqi National Con-gress, and 675 had been seized by customs agents outsideIraq. From what I saw at the museum, admittedly in mid-May,roughly half of everything that had been returned voluntarily,under an amnesty, consisted of fakes and casts, but Col.Bogdanos insists that theft is theft, and he is bound anddetermined to recover all of the Iraq Museum’s property, bethey antiquities or not. This may be very noble and, in a legalsense, strictly correct, but it heavily dilutes the figures beinggiven out by his group, for the Iraq Museum officials couldnot care less about the recovery of the casts and fakes.UNESCO sent several fact-finding missions to Baghdadto investigate the looting of the museum, as well as thewholesale looting of archaeological sites throughout the coun-tryside. It is beginning to mobilise and will undoubtedly pro-vide considerable assistance to the museum. As of mid-May,however, the laptop, digital camera, scanner and softwaredonated by the Australian government was the very firstmaterial support received by the Iraq Museum, and theirgratitude was palpable.It has often been said — senior staff at the Iraq Museummake this point — that they are the ‘lucky ones’. They arefortunate in the sense that the world’s attention has focusedso much on their plight, and that aid is forthcoming. But thefact remains that other important cultural institutions, fromthe Museum of Modern Iraqi Art to the National Library, havebeen completely gutted, and they are definitely not receivingthe kind of attention and assistance that has come to themuseum.By all accounts, Iraq today is a far more dangerous placethan it was in May. I doubt very much whether the mission tosend me to Baghdad would or could occur in the presentsituation. There is an enormous amount of work to be done,but none understand better what needs doing, and how to goabout doing it, than the archaeologists and museum profes-sionals of the Iraqi Directorate of Antiquities. They simplyneed the wherewithal to get on with the job and the securityto re-establish their national network of offices, site guardsand records. Every vehicle belonging to the Directorate wasstolen in the looting of Baghdad. We can only hope that thestaff is gradually moving from the ‘emergency ward’ state inwhich I found it, to one of recovery, recuperation and rehabili-tation. It will take years, however, to pick up the pieces. If theexperience of the first Gulf War is anything to go by, thechances of most of the remaining objects being returned orrecovered are remote indeed.L E T T E R  F R O M  B A G H D A DArchived at Flinders University: dspace.flinders.edu.au 

Letter from Baghdad

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Letter from Baghdad

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