May 21, 2003	Wednesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 18,1424

AMMAN, May 20: An American expert on Tuesday dismissed a report by the US military that many antiquities escaped the looting of the Baghdad museum, saying: “That is simply not true.”

John Russell, dean of the Massachussetts College of Arts, was a member of a team led by Mounir Bouchenaki, a senior Unesco official, on a fact-finding mission to Baghdad to assess the damage to Iraq’s cultural heritage.

During four days they toured Baghdad’s archeological museum, the national library and archives as well as several other key sites in the Iraqi capital which have been heavily damaged and looted.

Speaking at a press conference here, Mr Russell disagreed with UNESCO chief Koichiro Matsuura, who said on Monday that only hundreds of items were stolen from the national museum in Baghdad, rather than the tens of thousands first thought.

“We visited the galleries and there you can fairly, easily tell what is gone. But in the store rooms it will be a matter of months if not a year or more to inventory the hundreds of thousands of objects,” he said.

“It is a big mistake to heave a sigh of relief and say it is not so bad. It is bad enough. It is not time for complacency,” Russell said.

“Major monuments are known to be gone, the captions in the art history books will have to be rewritten,” he added.

Mr Bouchenaki bemoaned the “terrible loss” of cultural property in Iraq at the end of the four-day fact-finding mission of key sites looted after the occupation.

“This visit confirms the terrible loss of cultural property in Iraq. It is a a disaster, really a disaster,” Mounir Bouchenaki, assistant director-general at the UN’s culture agency, said at the press conference.—AFP