US sends FBI to find museum looters
2003-04-18 11:17
Washington - The United States, under pressure after the looting of Baghdad's main antiquities museum, has sent FBI agents to the Iraqi capital to help recover priceless artefacts.
The head of President George W Bush's cultural advisory committee stepped down in protest on Thursday at US failure to stop the pillage, adding to international calls for action to protect Iraq's heritage.
Meanwhile, The New York Times reported on Friday that the war in Iraq and the feelings it has stirred in the Islamic world has forced the cancelation or postponement of hundreds of research trips by US scholars to the region.
Experts told the daily it is the greatest interruption of overseas study since World War II.
In some cases, academic institutions or researchers themselves have cancelled trips in response to state department warnings of danger, the Times reported. In other cases, host countries have denied them study permits.
Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller said agents had been sent to investigate the looting and to help improve security in Iraqi cities where there have been widespread troubles since the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime.
"We are firmly committed to doing whatever we can to secure these treasures for the people of Iraq," Mueller said. He did not say how many agents were involved.
But the chairperson of the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property quit after eight years in the post, saying the devastation of a Baghdad museum was a "tragedy" and a result of US negligence.
"The reports in recent days about the looting of Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities and the destruction of countless artifacts that document the cradle of Western civilization have troubled me deeply, a feeling that is shared by many other Americans," wrote Martin Sullivan in a letter.
A source close to the committee said another committee member, Gary Vikan, also resigned.
Baghdad's museum, which housed a major collection of artifacts from some of the world's oldest civilisations, was ransacked last week in the upheaval following the entry of US troops into the city.
Critics have faulted US forces for failing to halt the pillaging. The US government has offered rewards for the return of the items or assistance in their recovery.
"It is unfortunate that there was looting and damage done to the museum, and we have offered rewards...for individuals who may have taken items from the museum to bring those back, and we are hopeful that will happen," White House spokesperson Buchan said.
"The United States, in liberating Iraq, worked very hard to protect the infrastructure of Iraq and to preserve it and the valuable resources of Iraq for the people of Iraq."
Much of the looting was carried out by organisd gangs, according to experts at a United Nations conference in Paris.
Among items lost was a collection of around 80 000 cuneiform tablets that contain examples of the some of the world's earliest writing. A 5 000-year-old Sumerian alabaster vase - known as the Warka vase - also disappeared.
The meeting of 30 experts at the UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation headquarters was called to take stock of the damage to Iraq's heritage and recommend ways of safeguarding what remains.
"It looks as if at least part of the theft was a very deliberate, planned action," said McGuire Gibson, of Chicago University's Oriental Institute, president of the American Association for Research in Baghdad.
"Probably (it was done) by the same sorts of gangs that have been paying for the destruction of sites in Iraq over the last 12 years and the smuggling out of these objects into the international market," he said.
Students at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, a center of research on the region's antiquities, have spent hours this week transferring images of antiquities in old Iraqi museum catalogues to the web, to enable border guards, art dealers and others to more easily identify them. - Sapa-AFP
- SAPA