RE: US plans for Iraqi nat'l bourgeoisie

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Speaking of lumpen-bourgeoisie, the NY Times reports that street
> scum just carried off 50,000 works of art from the main museum in
> Baghdad:

mainstream science journals have for months and months been warning
about harm to archaelogical treasures in Iraq due to war.

well, i guess our Masters of War don't read Science Online.


Science, Jan 31, 2003:

   ARCHAEOLOGY: Impending War Stokes Battle Over Fate of Iraqi
   Antiquities

   Andrew Lawler

   While the world awaits a possible war in Iraq, a battle is already
   under way over how best to preserve the country's vast cultural
   heritage. At the center of the controversy is a group of wealthy
   and influential American antiquities collectors and curators with
   enough clout to wangle a meeting last week with U.S. Defense and
   State department officials.

   The collectors say that their goal is to save the country's myriad
   archaeological sites, museums, and invaluable data collections. But
   many scientists fear that the group is also eager to have a postwar
   government loosen Iraq's tight restrictions on the ownership and
   export of antiquities. Those changes would increase opportunities
   to obtain artifacts--a motive members of the group hotly deny.

   Although the 1991 Gulf War did negligible damage to Iraqi
   antiquities, an unsuccessful but bloody uprising against the
   government left museums looted and innumerable objects damaged or
   lost (Science, 6 July 2001, p. 32). A decade of poverty and
   economic sanctions also took its toll on ancient sites. That
   history leaves scholars and collectors alike more concerned with
   what happens after a war than with the immediate impact of bombs or
   troops. "Who knows what will happen in a post-Saddam Iraq?" says
   Ashton Hawkins, a former longtime counsel to New York City's
   Metropolitan Museum of Art and president of the New York-based
   American Council for Cultural Policy, which pressed for last week's
   meeting. "There is a real concern about the aftermath, and we would
   want to be helpful."

   [ snip ]

   But several archaeologists, while acknowledging the need to alert
   the U.S. government to the importance of Iraq's heritage, fear a
   hidden agenda in the council's moves. "There is a strong common
   interest here," says art lawyer Patty Gerstenblith, a member of the
   Boston-based Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). "But one
   has the strong sense that this group is using this discussion as a
   pretext for their ultimate goal: to change Iraq's treatment of
   archaeological objects."

   [ snip]

   State Department officials pledged at the meeting to include a
   cultural-heritage panel in their postwar planning, and Pentagon
   officials said they have coordinates for 150 major archaeological
   sites. Gibson and other scholars, meanwhile, are compiling a more
   detailed roster to help military planners who review potential
   bombing targets. It is a daunting task. "God knows how many sites
   there are--maybe 15,000 to 20,000 major ones," Gibson says. Still,
   Gerstenblith says that scientists can only do so much. "If Saddam
   Hussein puts a command center next to a ziggurat," she says, "it
   becomes a legitimate target."


Science, Mar 2003:

CONSERVATION:
Fate of Iraqi Archaeology
McGuire Gibson

  [ snip]

   From the founding of the modern state of Iraq until 1990, Iraq had
   an enviable record of protecting its antiquities and cultural
   heritage. The Department of Antiquities, backed by an exemplary
   Antiquities Law, had control of all archaeological sites and
   artifacts. The department, from its inception in the early 1920s,
   began to develop a well-trained academic, museological, and
   security staff. As early as the 1930s, students were sent abroad
   for advanced degrees, and some became the mentors of new
   generations of archaeologists and epigraphers. During the 1980s,
   there were more than 25 foreign-trained Iraqi Ph.D.'s working in
   the antiquities service or the universities in the
   country. Archaeology programs at the universities allowed the
   Department of Antiquities to assemble a staff of thousands for its
   20 museums, for supervision of excavations, and other purposes. An
   important component of the staff was for security: hundreds of
   guards who were responsible for individual sites. Dozens of
   Department of Antiquities representatives, residing in towns
   throughout the country, were responsible for the protection of all
   sites in large regions, including the deserts.

   The result of this evolution of trained staff was that, before
   1990, there was virtually no illegal excavation on archaeological
   sites and no illicit trade in antiquities. The uprising at the end
   of the Gulf War brought an end to that record. Nine of the 13
   regional museums in the south and north of the country were raided
   by mobs, who smashed exhibits, stole antiquities, and sometimes set
   fire to the buildings. More than 3000 objects were lost, almost
   none of which have been recovered.

   [ snip ]

   The embargo has caused other damage to sites, and even the loss of
   entire mounds. To feed its population, Iraq has embarked on
   emergency agricultural projects, encouraging farmers to open new
   irrigated fields in southern Iraq on land that has been desert
   since the Mongol conquest in the 13th century. Judging by satellite
   images, some new fields seem largely unregulated, and
   archaeological sites that would have been respected in normal times
   appear to have been erased, apparently with graders and other heavy
   equipment. Now, a new war will mean the damaging of many more sites
   in the western desert, which is classic "tank country," and if the
   campaign bogs down for any length of time, sites between the two
   rivers once more will be the high ground. But the greatest concern
   of archaeologists, art historians, and historians around the world
   is for the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad and the Museum in Mosul,
   as well as our colleagues on their staffs, who will try to protect
   the collections. Both buildings are close to government buildings
   that were hit by "smart bombs" in the Gulf War. Even if they
   survive the bombing, any period of chaos or uncertain control
   during or after the fighting will render both institutions
   vulnerable to looting.




from Science, 1999:

   Iraq's Cultural Heritage: Collateral Damage

   Robert McC. Adams

   [ snip ]

   Sanctions have brought further erosion: isolation from worldwide
   progress in archaeology, restrictions on internal movement, and
   attenuation of site protection efforts. That has led to extensive
   looting, stimulated by the international market in illicit
   antiquities that supplies U.S., European, and Japanese
   collectors. The root economic cause is widespread unemployment and
   impoverishment, although visiting archaeologists also report
   contrasting pockets of intense agricultural development and
   rebuilding. Its despotic reputation notwithstanding, the regime's
   control of many rural regions is uneven at best.



les schaffer