A Civilization Torn to Pieces

Baghdad is a city at war with itself, at the mercy of thieves and gunmen. 
And, in the city's most important museum, something truly terrible has taken 
place

By Robert Fisk

Published by Tthe lndependent 

April 13, 2003 


They lie across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless 
antiquities of Iraq's history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, 
systematically pulling down the statues and pots and amphorae of the 
Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the 
Greeks and hurling them on to the concrete. 

Our feet crunched on the wreckage of 5,000-year-old marble plinths and stone 
statuary and pots that had endured every siege of Baghdad, every invasion of 
Iraq throughout history ú only to be destroyed when America came to 
"liberate" the city. The Iraqis did it. They did it to their own history, 
physically destroying the evidence of their own nation's thousands of years 
of civilization. 

Not since the Taliban embarked on their orgy of destruction against the 
Buddhas of Bamiyan and the statues in the museum of Kabul ú perhaps not since 
the Second World War or earlier ú have so many archaeological treasures been 
wantonly and systematically smashed to pieces. 

"This is what our own people did to their history," the man in the gray gown 
said as we flicked our torches yesterday across the piles of once perfect 
Sumerian pots and Greek statues, now headless, armless, in the storeroom of 
Iraq's National Archaeological Museum. "We need the American soldiers to 
guard what we have left. We need the Americans here. We need policemen." But 
all that the museum guard, Abdul-Setar Abdul-Jaber, experienced yesterday was 
gun battles between looters and local residents, the bullets hissing over our 
heads outside the museum and skittering up the walls of neighboring apartment 
blocks. "Look at this," he said, picking up a massive hunk of pottery, its 
delicate patterns and beautifully decorated lips coming to a sudden end where 
the jar ú perhaps 2ft high in its original form ú had been smashed into four 
pieces. "This was Assyrian." The Assyrians ruled almost 2,000 years before 
Christ. 

And what were the Americans doing as the new rulers of Baghdad? Why, 
yesterday morning they were recruiting Saddam Hussein's hated former 
policemen to restore law and order on their behalf. The last army to do 
anything like this was Mountbatten's force in South-east Asia, which employed 
the defeated Japanese army to control the streets of Saigon ú with their 
bayonets fixed ú after the recapture of Indo-China in 1945. 

A queue of respectably dressed Baghdad ex-cops formed a queue outside the 
Palestine Hotel in Baghdad after they heard a radio broadcast calling for 
them to resume their "duties" on the streets. In the late afternoon, at least 
eight former and very portly senior police officers, all wearing green 
uniforms ú the same color as the uniforms of the Iraqi Baath party ú turned 
up to offer their services to the Americans, accompanied by a US Marine. But 
there was no sign that any of them would be sent down to the Museum of 
Antiquity. 

But "liberation" has already turned into occupation. Faced by a crowd of 
angry Iraqis in Firdos Square demanding a new Iraqi government "for our 
protection and security and peace", US Marines, who should have been 
providing that protection, stood shoulder to shoulder facing them, guns at 
the ready. The reality, which the Americans ú and, of course, Mr Rumsfeld ú 
fail to understand is that under Saddam Hussein, the poor and deprived were 
always the Shia Muslims, the middle classes always the Sunnis, just as Saddam 
himself was a Sunni. So it is the Sunnis who are now suffering plunder at the 
hands of the Shia. 

And so the gun-fighting that broke out yesterday between property owners and 
looters was, in effect, a conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims. By failing 
to end this violence ú by stoking ethnic hatred through their inactivity ú 
the Americans are now provoking a civil war in Baghdad. 

Yesterday evening, I drove through the city for more than an hour. Hundreds 
of streets are now barricaded off with breeze blocks, burnt cars and tree 
trunks, watched over by armed men who are ready to kill strangers who 
threaten their homes or shops. Which is just how the civil war began in 
Beirut in 1975. 

A few US Marine patrols did dare to venture into the suburbs yesterday ú 
positioning themselves next to hospitals which had already been looted ú but 
fires burnt across the city at dusk for the third consecutive day. The 
municipality building was blazing away last night, and on the horizon other 
great fires were sending columns of smoke miles high into the air. 

Too little, too late. Yesterday, a group of chemical engineers and water 
purification workers turned up at the US Marine headquarters, pleading for 
protection so they could return to their jobs. Electrical supply workers came 
along, too. But Baghdad is already a city at war with itself, at the mercy of 
gunmen and thieves. 

There is no electricity in Baghdad ú as there is no water and no law and no 
order ú and so we stumbled in the darkness of the museum basement, tripping 
over toppled statues and stumbling into broken winged bulls. When I shone my 
torch over one far shelf, I drew in my breath. Every pot and jar ú "3,500 BC" 
it said on one shelf corner ú had been bashed to pieces. 

Why? How could they do this? Why, when the city was already burning, when 
anarchy had been let loose ú and less than three months after US 
archaeologists and Pentagon officials met to discuss the country's treasures 
and put the Baghdad Archaeological Museum on a military data-base ú did the 
Americans allow the mobs to destroy the priceless heritage of ancient 
Mesopotamia? And all this happened while US Secretary of Defense, Donald 
Rumsfeld, was sneering at the press for claiming that anarchy had broken out 
in Baghdad. 

For well over 200 years, Western and local archaeologists have gathered up 
the remnants of this center of early civilization. from palaces, ziggurats 
and 3,000-year-old graves. Their tens of thousands of handwritten card index 
files ú often in English and in graceful 19th-century handwriting ú now lie 
strewn amid the broken statuary. I picked up a tiny shard. "Late 2nd century, 
no. 1680" was written in pencil on the inside. 

To reach the storeroom, the mobs had broken through massive steel doors, 
entering from a back courtyard and heaving statues and treasures to cars and 
trucks. 

The looters had left only a few hours before I arrived and no one ú not even 
the museum guard in the gray gown ú had any idea how much they had taken. A 
glass case that had once held 40,000-year-old stone and flint objects had 
been smashed open. It lay empty. No one knows what happened to the Assyrian 
reliefs from the royal palace of Khorsabad, nor the 5,000-year-old seals nor 
the 4,500-year-old gold leaf earrings once buried with Sumerian princesses. 
It will take decades to sort through what they have left, the broken stone 
torsos, the tomb treasures, the bits of jewelry glinting amid the piles of 
smashed pots. 

The mobs who came here ú Shia Muslims, for the most part, from the hovels of 
Saddam City ú probably had no idea of the value of the pots or statues. Their 
destruction appears to have been the result of ignorance as much as fury. In 
the vast museum library, only a few books ú mostly mid-19th-century 
archaeological works ú appeared to have been stolen or destroyed. Looters set 
little value in books. 

I found a complete set of the Geographical Journal from 1893 to 1936 still 
intact ú lying next to them was a paperback entitled Baghdad, The City of 
Peace ú but thousands of card index sheets had been flung from their boxes 
over stairwells and banisters. 

British, French and German archaeologists played a leading role in the 
discovery of some of Iraq's finest treasures. The great British Arabist, 
diplomatic schemer and spy Gertrude Bell, the "uncrowned queen of Iraq" whose 
tomb lies not far away from the museum, was an enthusiastic supporter of 
their work. The Germans built the modern-day museum beside the Tigris river 
and only in 2000 was it reopened to the public after nine years of closure 
following the 1991 Gulf War. 

Even as the Americans encircled Baghdad, Saddam Hussein's soldiers showed 
almost the same contempt for its treasures as the looters. Their slit 
trenches and empty artillery positions are still clearly visible in the 
museum lawns, one of them dug beside a huge stone statue of a winged bull. 

Only a few weeks ago, Jabir Khalil Ibrahim, the director of Iraq's State 
Board of Antiquities, referred to the museum's contents as "the heritage of 
the nation". They were, he said, "not just things to see and enjoy ú we get 
strength from them to look to the future. They represent the glory of Iraq". 

Mr Ibrahim has vanished, like so many government employees in Baghdad, and Mr 
Abdul-Jaber and his colleagues are now trying to defend what is left of the 
country's history with a collection of Kalashnikov rifles. "We don't want to 
have guns, but everyone must have them now," he told me. "We have to defend 
ourselves because the Americans have let this happen. They made a war against 
one man ú so why do they abandon us to this war and these criminals?" 

Half an hour later, I contacted the civil affairs unit of the US Marines in 
Saadun Street and gave them the exact location of the museum and the 
condition of its contents. A captain told me that "we're probably going to 
get down there". Too late. Iraq's history had already been trashed by the 
looters whom the Americans unleashed on the city during their "liberation". 

"You are American!" a woman shouted at me in English yesterday morning, 
wrongly assuming I was from the US. "Go back to your country. Get out of 
here. You are not wanted here. We hated Saddam and now we are hating Bush 
because he is destroying our city." It was a mercy she could not visit the 
Museum of Antiquity to see for herself that the very heritage of her country 
as well as her city ú has been destroyed. 


    
    

 

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