Sunday, April 13, 2003

INSIDE THE WRECKAGE OF THE BAGHDAD MUSEUM:

A civilisation torn to pieces

Baghdad, reports Robert Fisk, is a city at war with itself, at the mercy of thieves and gunmen. And, in the city's most important museum, something truly terrible has taken place

13 April 2003

They lie across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq's history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling down the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them on to the concrete.

Our feet crunched on the wreckage of 5,000-year-old marble plinths and stone statuary and pots that had endured every siege of Baghdad, every invasion of Iraq throughout history only to be destroyed when America came to "liberate" the city. The Iraqis did it. They did it to their own history, physically destroying the evidence of their own nation's thousands of years of civilisation.

Not since the Taliban embarked on their orgy of destruction against the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the statues in the museum of Kabul perhaps not since the Second World War or earlier have so many archaeological treasures been wantonly and systematically smashed to pieces.


Lots more information in the article, but this gives you the general picture. I've been thinking all morning about what to say about this. [Blogger was down this morning so I'm posting in the afternoon.] I am profoundly saddened by the loss of all these precious relics. But I also don't think that Robert Fisk, is being very fair in his analysis (nothing new there). I don't exactly blame the looters: they're going after anything that represents the Baathist government to them and not being very discriminating about it. And perhaps they're running amok beyond that � it's hard to tell from the news reports. If we'd spent decades under a ruthless dictatorship, I'm not sure we'd be behaving much differently. So what exactly are the American troops supposed to be doing about the looting? I hardly think that putting one tank and two soldiers in front of the museum would have prevented it- as suggested by the deputy director of the museum according to today's London Times (requires paid registration outside the U.K.), unless those soldiers were prepared to shoot the looters � but current rules of engagement have"prohibited the use of deadly force to prevent looting", and rightly so. The antiquities are not worth the price of even a single human life. Allied forces are trying to recruit local leaders to help, but many of these are tainted by past connections (as Fisk points out). I see very little, if anything, that could have been done to prevent the looting in the short term, and it's the short term in which the massive damage is being done. The bottom line, in my humble opinion, is that this is yet another consequence of the evil of Saddam and the Baathists, and if it's part of the price of liberating the Iraqi people from them, then it's worth it. I say that with a heavy heart indeed.

What do you think?

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