Five years ago, the world stood by while the Iraq Museum in Baghdad was sacked
and looted. And it still beggars belief. It was abundantly clear before the
invasion that the cost of removing Saddam was going to be very high, but few
people could have predicted how high the price would be in terms of deaths
and the country’s cultural heritage.
I certainly wasn’t prepared for the newspaper headlines that screamed “Iraq
Museum Looted” when Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, and
I arrived back at Heathrow from a trip to Tehran on April 13, 2003. I had
been a regular visitor to Iraq since 1970, and during the 1980s had directed
archeological excavations at eight different sites in the north of the
country. During this time, I had formed many close friendships and come to
have a deep love for this fascinating, welcoming but troubled country. Like
many people, I was bitterly opposed to the war, but this was chiefly on
humanitarian grounds. It had not occurred to me that the coalition forces
would be so careless with cultural heritage that they would not even bother
to post a guard at the museum after their tanks had penetrated the heart of
Baghdad. To hear that the museum had been looted, therefore, was deeply
shocking.
The source of my dismay is evident: as an archeologist and historian, I’m
aware of what is at stake. But why should anyone else care? Iraq is rightly
referred to as the cradle of civilisation. It is where writing was invented,
the first cities appeared, and Mesopotamia – the land between the rivers
Tigris and Euphrates – was home to Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians. The
Iraq Museum was one of the richest museums in the Middle East, if not the
world, and housed a magnificent collection of treasures from ancient
Mesopotamia. Others around the world shared my sense of outrage, so it was
only natural that a press conference at the British Museum that had been
arranged long before, to mark the museum’s 250th birthday on April 15,
should be completely taken over by the Iraq Museum crisis. Tessa Jowell,
then secretary of state for culture, struggled to answer the probing
questions about why such a disaster could have been allowed to happen. But
neither she nor anybody else had any answers. More significantly, as the
conference was breaking up, Channel 4 News managed to set up a satellite
phone link in Baghdad to my old friend Donny George, the director of
research at the Iraq Department of Antiquities, and I was able to speak with
him directly. I was the first person outside Iraq he had been able to speak
to.
Donny was distraught. Looters and vandals had been rampaging unchecked through
the museum for two days. Although there was nobody in the building at that
time, it was still unguarded and therefore vulnerable. He asked me to pass
this information on, and he urged me to come to Baghdad as soon as possible
to see what could be done to help.
As soon as it was known that Donny wanted me to go to Baghdad, a number of
journalists offered to facilitate my trip. I joined forces with the BBC team
and on April 22 flew out to Amman, where we picked up our “protection
officers” (a euphemism for hired guns) and drove in a convoy along the
desert road to Baghdad.
Once across the Iraqi border we were confronted by stark reminders of the
recent war: military convoys, burnt-out vehicles and bombed bridges.
Nothing, however, prepared me for the changed appearance of Baghdad. On the
outskirts of the city we could see blackened buildings, some with smoke
still rising from them. The streets were more or less deserted, and there
was an unreal calm and quiet, punctuated by the periodic sound of gunfire,
showing that there was still some resistance to the coalition occupation. We
made straight for the museum, and our vehicles were allowed through the
locked gates.
Donny, Dr Jabr Ismail, the director of the Department of Antiquities, and Dr
Nawalla al-Mutawalli, the director of the Iraq Museum, all came out to greet
me. It was agreed that we should sleep on the ground on the colonnade. In
the morning we were able to start our inspection of the museum. It was a
heartbreaking sight. I already knew that, in the build-up to the war, the
curators had moved most of the objects from the galleries to a “secret
store” in the bowels of the Earth beneath the museum. However, they had left
behind all those objects that, for one reason or another, were difficult to
move or were simply overlooked, and it was these objects that had been
stolen or vandalised. Many of the glass showcases were also smashed, so in
some places there was a thick carpet of broken glass on the floor. In
addition, every one of the 120 offices in the building had been broken into,
usually by smashing a hole in the door.
Files, papers, index cards, photographs, films and computer software had all
been swept off the shelves and onto the floor. It seemed that the intention
had been to start bonfires, but fortunately this did not happen. All the
safes in the building had been broken open. It was also clear that the
intruders had broken into the storerooms, but at this stage nobody had been
inside to assess the extent of the losses. There has been much speculation
as to whether the looting that took place was spontaneous or organised – and
who, precisely, was behind it. Theories have ranged from the involvement of
Ba’athist loyalists, determined to cause maximum civilian unrest, to the
connivance of international antique-dealers, requesting items to be stolen
to order. Five years on, these questions remain unanswered. The whereabouts
of looted material is also hotly disputed. There is clearly a black market
in Iraqi antiquities, but where the pieces have ended up is not yet known.
The next day was full of uncertainty. The most important task was to prepare a
list of missing items, and I helped Donny to do this. Among the 40 or so
things missing from the galleries were some of the greatest treasures of the
Iraq Museum, including the Warka Vase and the Warka Head, both dating from
c3100BC; a stone statue of King Entemena of Lagash, c2400BC; a colossal
copper statue base with an inscription of King Naram-Sin of Akkad, c2250BC;
and an ivory plaque from Nimrud, c800BC, showing a lioness mauling an
African against a backdrop of lotus flowers.
The Americans were keen to know exactly how many objects had been stolen. I
tried hard to explain the difficulties of doing an audit and pointed out
that, faced with a disaster on this scale, any leading museum in the world
(including the British Museum) would have difficulty in giving an immediate
answer, but to no avail. I had similar difficulties with the BBC team. They
were convinced that the curators were in some way complicit in what had
happened, and regrettably this view was expressed in the subsequent
documentary. I was – and still am – certain that, although there might have
been some negligence, there is no evidence of any dishonesty on the part of
the three senior officials present at the time. It was clear that, at this
stage, the most useful thing would be to bring to the attention of the world
the full scale of what had happened. Evidently, the best way for this to
happen was for Donny George to accompany me back to London and appear at the
press conference that had been hastily arranged for April 29.
As speed was of the essence, we hired a GMC four-wheel-drive vehicle and
driver and set by the periodic sound of gunfire, showing that there was
still some resistance to the coalition occupation. We made straight for the
museum, and our vehicles were allowed through the locked gates. Donny, Dr
Jabr Ismail, the director of the Department of Antiquities, and Dr Nawalla
al-Mutawalli, the director of the Iraq Museum, all came out to greet me. It
was agreed that we should sleep on the ground on the colonnade. In the
morning we were able to start our inspection of the museum. It was a
heartbreaking sight. I already knew that, in the build-up to the war, the
curators had moved most of the objects from the galleries to a “secret
store” in the bowels of the Earth beneath the museum.
However, they had left behind all those objects that, for one reason or
another, were difficult to move or were simply overlooked, and it was these
objects that had been stolen or vandalised. Many of the glass showcases were
also smashed, so in some places there was a thick carpet of broken glass on
the floor. In addition, every one of the 120 offices in the building had
been broken into, usually by smashing a hole in the door. Files, papers,
index cards, photographs, films and computer software had all been swept off
the shelves and onto the floor.
