[MSN] It is the death of history

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It is the death of history

Special investigation by Robert Fisk

Published: 17 September 2007


2,000-year-old Sumerian cities torn apart and plundered by robbers.  
The very walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees cracking under the  
strain of massive troop movements, the privatisation of looting as  
landlords buy up the remaining sites of ancient Mesopotamia to strip  
them of their artefacts and wealth. The near total destruction of  
Iraq's historic past – the very cradle of human civilisation – has  
emerged as one of the most shameful symbols of our disastrous  
occupation.

Evidence amassed by archaeologists shows that even those Iraqis who  
trained as archaeological workers in Saddam Hussein's regime are now  
using their knowledge to join the looters in digging through the  
ancient cities, destroying thousands of priceless jars, bottles and  
other artefacts in their search for gold and other treasures.

In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, armies of looters moved in on  
the desert cities of southern Iraq and at least 13 Iraqi museums were  
plundered. Today, almost every archaeological site in southern Iraq  
is under the control of looters.

In a long and devastating appraisal to be published in December,  
Lebanese archaeologist Joanne Farchakh says that armies of looters  
have not spared "one metre of these Sumerian capitals that have been  
buried under the sand for thousands of years.

"They systematically destroyed the remains of this civilisation in  
their tireless search for sellable artefacts: ancient cities,  
covering an estimated surface area of 20 square kilometres, which –  
if properly excavated – could have provided extensive new information  
concerning the development of the human race.

"Humankind is losing its past for a cuneiform tablet or a sculpture  
or piece of jewellery that the dealer buys and pays for in cash in a  
country devastated by war. Humankind is losing its history for the  
pleasure of private collectors living safely in their luxurious  
houses and ordering specific objects for their collection."

Ms Farchakh, who helped with the original investigation into stolen  
treasures from the Baghdad Archaeological Museum in the immediate  
aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, says Iraq may soon end up with no  
history.

"There are 10,000 archaeological sites in the country. In the  
Nassariyah area alone, there are about 840 Sumerian sites; they have  
all been systematically looted. Even when Alexander the Great  
destroyed a city, he would always build another. But now the robbers  
are destroying everything because they are going down to bedrock.  
What's new is that the looters are becoming more and more organised  
with, apparently, lots of money.

"Quite apart from this, military operations are damaging these sites  
forever. There's been a US base in Ur for five years and the walls  
are cracking because of the weight of military vehicles. It's like  
putting an archaeological site under a continuous earthquake."

Of all the ancient cities of present-day Iraq, Ur is regarded as the  
most important in the history of man-kind. Mentioned in the Old  
Testament – and believed by many to be the home of the Prophet  
Abraham – it also features in the works of Arab historians and  
geographers where its name is Qamirnah, The City of the Moon.

Founded in about 4,000 BC, its Sumerian people established the  
principles of irrigation, developed agriculture and metal-working.  
Fifteen hundred years later – in what has become known as "the age of  
the deluge" – Ur produced some of the first examples of writing, seal  
inscriptions and construction. In neighbouring Larsa, baked clay  
bricks were used as money orders – the world's first cheques – the  
depth of finger indentations in the clay marking the amount of money  
to be transferred. The royal tombs of Ur contained jewellery,  
daggers, gold, azurite cylindrical seals and sometimes the remains of  
slaves.

US officers have repeatedly said a large American base built at  
Babylon was to protect the site but Iraqi archaeologist Zainab Bah- 
rani, a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia  
University, says this "beggars belief". In an analysis of the city,  
she says: "The damage done to Babylon is both extensive and  
irreparable, and even if US forces had wanted to protect it, placing  
guards round the site would have been far more sensible than  
bulldozing it and setting up the largest coalition military  
headquarters in the region."

Air strikes in 2003 left historical monuments undamaged, but  
Professor Bahrani, says: "The occupation has resulted in a tremendous  
destruction of history well beyond the museums and libraries looted  
and destroyed at the fall of Baghdad. At least seven historical sites  
have been used in this way by US and coalition forces since April  
2003, one of them being the historical heart of Samarra, where the  
Askari shrine built by Nasr al Din Shah was bombed in 2006."

The use of heritage sites as military bases is a breach of the Hague  
Convention and Protocol of 1954 (chapter 1, article 5) which covers  
periods of occupation; although the US did not ratify the Convention,  
Italy, Poland, Australia and Holland, all of whom sent forces to  
Iraq, are contracting parties.

Ms Farchakh notes that as religious parties gain influence in all the  
Iraqi pro-vinces, archaeological sites are also falling under their  
control. She tells of Abdulamir Hamdani, the director of antiquities  
for Di Qar province in the south who desperately – but vainly – tried  
to prevent the destruction of the buried cities during the  
occupation. Dr Hamdani himself wrote that he can do little to prevent  
"the disaster we are all witnessing and observing".

In 2006, he says: "We recruited 200 police officers because we were  
trying to stop the looting by patrolling the sites as often as  
possible. Our equipment was not enough for this mission because we  
only had eight cars, some guns and other weapons and a few radio  
transmitters for the entire province where 800 archaeological sites  
have been inventoried.

"Of course, this is not enough but we were trying to establish some  
order until money restrictions within the government meant that we  
could no longer pay for the fuel to patrol the sites. So we ended up  
in our offices trying to fight the looting, but that was also before  
the religious parties took over southern Iraq."

Last year, Dr Hamdani's antiquities department received notice from  
the local authorities, approving the creation of mud-brick factories  
in areas surrounding Sumerian archaeological sites. But it quickly  
became apparent that the factory owners intended to buy the land from  
the Iraqi government because it covered several Sumerian capitals and  
other archaeological sites. The new landlord would "dig" the  
archaeological site, dissolve the "old mud brick" to form the new one  
for the market and sell the unearthed finds to antiquity traders.

Dr Hamdani bravely refused to sign the dossier. Ms Farchakh says:  
"His rejection had rapid consequences. The religious parties  
controlling Nassariyah sent the police to see him with orders to jail  
him on corruption charges. He was imprisoned for three months,  
awaiting trial. The State Board of Antiquities and Heritage defended  
him during his trial, as did his powerful tribe. He was released and  
regained his position. The mud-brick factories are 'frozen projects',  
but reports have surfaced of a similar strategy being employed in  
other cities and in nearby archaeological sites such as the Aqarakouf  
Ziggarat near Baghdad. For how long can Iraqi archaeologists maintain  
order? This is a question only Iraqi politicians affiliated to the  
different religious parties can answer, since they approve these  
projects."

Police efforts to break the power of the looters, now with a well- 
organised support structure helped by tribal leaders, have proved  
lethal. In 2005, the Iraqi customs arrested – with the help of  
Western troops – several antiquities dealers in the town of Al Fajr,  
near Nasseriyah. They seized hundreds of artefacts and decided to  
take them to the museum in Baghdad. It was a fatal mistake.

The convoy was stopped a few miles from Baghdad, eight of the customs  
agents were murdered, and their bodies burnt and left to rot in the  
desert. The artefacts disappeared. "It was a clear message from the  
antiquities dealers to the world," Ms Farchakh says.

The legions of antiquities looters work within a smooth mass- 
smuggling organisation. Trucks, cars, planes and boats take Iraq's  
historical plunder to Europe, the US, to the United Arab Emirates and  
to Japan. The archaeologists say an ever-growing number of internet  
websites offer Mesopotamian artefacts, objects anywhere up to 7,000  
years old.

The farmers of southern Iraq are now professional looters, knowing  
how to outline the walls of buried buildings and able to break  
directly into rooms and tombs. The archaeologists' report says: "They  
have been trained in how to rob the world of its past and they have  
been making significant profit from it. They know the value of each  
object and it is difficult to see why they would stop looting."

After the 1991 Gulf War, archaeologists hired the previous looters as  
workers and promised them government salaries. This system worked as  
long as the archaeologists remained on the sites, but it was one of  
the main reasons for the later destruction; people now knew how to  
excavate and what they could find.

Ms Farchakh adds: "The longer Iraq finds itself in a state of war,  
the more the cradle of civilisation is threatened. It may not even  
last for our grandchildren to learn from."

A land with fields of ancient pottery

By Joanne Farchakh, archaeologist

Iraq's rural societies are very different to our own. Their concept  
of ancient civilisations and heritage does not match the standards  
set by our own scholars. History is limited to the stories and  
glories of your direct ancestors and your tribe. So for them, the  
"cradle of civilisation" is nothing more than desert land with  
"fields" of pottery that they have the right to take advantage of  
because, after all, they are the lords of the land and, as a result,  
the owners of its possessions. In the same way, if they had been  
able, these people would not have hesitated to take control of the  
oil fields, because this is "their land". Because life in the desert  
is hard and because they have been "forgotten" by all the  
governments, their "revenge" for this reality is to monitor, and  
take, every single money-making opportunity. A cylinder seal, a  
sculpture or a cuneiform tablet earns $50 (£25) and that's half the  
monthly salary of an average government employee in Iraq. The looters  
have been told by the traders that if an object is worth anything at  
all, it must have an inscription on it. In Iraq, the farmers consider  
their "looting" activities to be part of a normal working day.


http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2970762.ece


Winner of the 2004 Hugo award - The Chesley Awards: A Retrospective,  
with John Grant & Elizabeth Humphrey