MUMBAI: The shock at the cultural destruction in Baghdad is gathering as news of the scale of loss spreads, but for historians, scholars, cultural anthropologists and archaeologists around the world, the immediate need is to catalogue what has gone missing and what is presumed to have been destroyed.
The concept that such treasures should be guarded, that they are sacred, are no longer operative .
That is the concern that has led academics and scholars to collectively write letters of outrage about the looting of Iraqi museums and libraries, and to send them to various US government institutions.
At the same time, they are assembling the beginnings of a factual inventory of lists of objects known to have been held in various museums in Baghdad, and which of these have been stolen, damaged, or burnt.
The pace of work is feverish — it is obvious that only concerted, collective action will alert authorities worldwide to the quick spread of the looted Iraqi heritage. But behind the round-the-clock effort is a seething anger at why this destruction was allowed to happen.
“The US owes Iraq reparations for the destruction of Iraqi heritage, and those reparations should not come from Iraqi oil revenues but from US funds,” said Prof Michael Sells, of the department of religion at Haverford College in the US.
He added: “The Bush administration has violated the Geneva conventions, referring to international law that puts the responsibility on an occupying force on overseeing a country.”
For many, he said, US President George W Bush, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Gen Tommy Franks, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and other members of the UN Security Council “will go down in Iraqi history, along with Saddam and Hulagu I the Mongol conqueror who invaded and ruinously sacked Baghdad in 1258), as barbarians that oversaw the destruction of Iraq.
The outrage in the academic community is palpable. The Americans made much of the incredible planning that went into this campaign, Jeff Spurr, cataloguer for Islamic art in the Aga Khan Programme for Islamic Architecture at the Fine Arts Library of Harvard University, told IPS.
An astonishing amount of damage has been wreaked, leaving almost no records for a new government to inherit with incalculable negative consequences for the administration of Iraq in the future,” he pointed out.
Spurr and his colleague Andras Riedlmayer are well-known for their efforts through the late nineties to help begin to rebuild the Sarajevo Library, which had been deliberately burned in the course of the Balkan war.
With reports that the looters of Baghdad’s treasures were organised gangs, and not simply a disaffected citizenry practising an untidy freedom , as Rumsfeld remarked, a group that has come under scrutiny is the American Council for Cultural Policy.
The group was formed in 2001 by wealthy art collectors to lobby against the US Cultural Property Implementation Act, which attempts to regulate the art market and stop the flow of stolen goods into that country.
Its position on the traffic and sale of international art treasures can be gauged by the statement of Prof John Merryman of Stanford Law School, and a member of the group. He has called for a selective international enforcement of export controls in US courts. In other words, it should be legitimate to import objects looted from Baghdad if a US court chooses not to recognise Iraqi legislation.
As catastrophic as it is, the plundering of Iraq’s millennia-old cultural heritage underscores the reach and influence of collectors who are already responsible for looting Middle Eastern, Asian and South American archaeological sites.
The collapse of stock markets has turned works of art and antiquities into secure investments, and this transfer of notional value — at the expense of the cultures that revere such works as an integral part of their heritage — has fuelled an already highly active underground market.
The illegal trade in antiquities is thought to be as lucrative as drug trafficking, to which it is often linked by way of money laundering.
According to a report by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge, Britain, London and New York are the main markets for this trade. Switzerland, which allows an art work that has been in the country for five years to be granted a legal title, is seen as a key transshipment point.
A historian of the Ottoman period has called it mnemocide under the barrels of US guns. But what the academic community is pointing out is that while Unesco invokes the Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict in an effort to contain the damage, two countries are not signatories to it — the United States and Britain. —Dawn/InterPress News Service
