Looters return museum artefacts

2003-04-19 12:51

Baghdad - Prodded by Muslim clerics and guilty consciences, Baghdad residents returned 20 looted pieces from Iraq's ransacked national collection holding some of the earliest artefacts of civilisation.

Iraq's antiquities chief, Jabar Hilil, on Friday called looting of Iraq's national museum following entry of US forces the "crime of the century" - and questioned why US forces hadn't moved to safeguard it in the days of chaos that followed the toppling of President Saddam Hussein's government.

But Hilil left open the possibility the loss wasn't as absolute as first thought.

With no electricity in Baghdad, he said, museum operators had yet to make a full assessment of the now-unlit underground vaults in which they had stashed many pieces for safekeeping as war came. Even in the dark, he said, it was clear the storage rooms had been breached.

"We cannot say how many pieces were taken, but it is disastrous," Donny George, director general of research for the state board of antiquities, told reporters in an impromptu press conference on the collection's lawn, next to sandbags of an abandoned Iraqi military bunker.

Museum officials declined to let journalists into the museum on Friday to see the damage directly. Workers were busy inside with the first calculations of the destruction, they said, and couldn't be disturbed.

Interpol and the FBI pledged to try to help recover the goods. Museum officials on Friday indicated they had had no contact from the US investigators.

They urged governments around the world to block any sale of the looted goods - citing Switzerland, the United States, Israel and Japan as the markets where smuggled art was most likely to surface.

The museum is recognised as the Middle East's leading archaeological collection. It held thousands of years of fragile artworks and clay tablet inscriptions from the Tigris-Euphrates valley where many of mankind's innovations began.

Items confirmed lost from the display galleries include an alabaster vase from 3200 BC, bronze reliefs from 3500 BC, and other ancient treasures of Assyrian, Sumerian and other early civilizations, Hilil said.

Heads from Roman statues on display were hacked off and stolen, he said. Either carelessly or vengefully, the robbers smashed the bodies of the statues to shards on the floor.

The destroyed works lie still surrounded by sandbags placed around the cases, Iraqi Ministry of Culture adviser Muayad Damedji said. "We were afraid of bombing. We never thought it would be looted," he said.

Marble and other massive pieces too heavy to cart away were among chief pieces left in the galleries.

"It is a great impact on human heritage," Hilil said.

"Iraq really was the cradle of civilisation - the first agriculture was here, the first villages, the first laws. The wheel was invented here, writing was invented in this area."

Baghdad's imams, encouraged by museum operators, had urged the faithful to return works, Hilil said. On Friday, the first ones did.

"They come and say, 'Sir, sir, look in the bag,"' said Army Lt Eric Balascik, part of a US Army unit manning the museum gates. "And you look in the bag, and it's a vase or something."

The returned works included pottery and metal pieces, Hilil said.

"It was their conscience that made them bring that stuff back. That was why they brought it back," he said.

Also in answer to a plea from the operators, US forces and one tank guarded the museum on Friday - holding it against any last fits of looting and burning in what had been days of lawlessness in the city.

International scholars acting in behalf of the museum's operators had alerted the Pentagon and State Department in advance of the war on the whereabouts and value of the collection and other archaeological sites across Iraq, Hilil said.

"If the American forces had been here, nothing would have happened ... but it seems they had other priorities than the museum," he said - citing US forces' steps from early on to guard Oil Ministry headquarters.

The museum operators said on Friday it appeared some of the robbery had been selective, by someone who knew what they were seeking.

Entry into the building itself was by force, they said.

It remained uncertain on Friday just how much of the museum's collection had been taken elsewhere for safekeeping in advance of the looting.

Journalists, in the weeks leading up to the war, spoke of seeing a number of goods carted out of the museum by staffers.

News reports since the looting have quoted top staffers as saying small gold works in particular were taken to Baghdad bank vaults just before the war.

The key deposit spot was said to be the Central Bank - itself gutted and burned by looters. The bank building was too unstable on Friday for US forces to determine if the bank vaults were intact anywhere under the rubble.

Hilil said little actually had been taken off museum grounds for safekeeping - manuscripts only. Those were now being held in what he called an exceptionally safe - undisclosed - place. - Sapa-AP

- SAPA