Iraq: Museums Closed and Looting Rampant

[struggle4progress]

Violence and instability continue to threaten Iraq's cultural heritage, report officials of the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH). All museums remain closed, and looting of archaeological sites continues. The Iraqis lack the funds, equipment, and personnel to cope with the restoration and maintenance of museums and monuments and the protection of archaeological sites. "None of the planned international initiatives can now be carried out inside Iraq", says Elizabeth Simpson, a professor at the Bard Graduate Center in New York who organised an Iraq session at the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meeting in Boston last month. The Art Newspaper was there.

At the National Museum in Baghdad, new security systems have been installed and a wall topped with razor wire has been erected around the building. Last summer the museum welded shut the entrances to the storerooms and the administrative wing. A new storage building with an underground secure bunker will be finished later this year. The conservation laboratory has been refurbished and students are training in Jordan.

The latest estimates of objects looted are 15,000 taken from storerooms of which 10,000 have been documented and 3,323 returned. Another 1,450 pieces from other sites have been brought to the museum by Iraqis, police, customs, and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). An in-house report on the thefts based on interviews with more than 90 people has been delivered to the Minister of Culture. Abdul Aziz Hameed, director of the SBAH, says that it is apparent that the perpetrators had inside knowledge of the location of items in the storerooms. It is possible that some people involved still work at the museum, although no action has been taken. A public hearing will be convened when the security situation allows and individuals will be held to account.

Other museums in Iraq remain damaged and closed: the Basra Museum is occupied by squatters, the Nasiriya Museum was burned, the Amara Museum was damaged but has been refurbished, the museums at Kufa and Nejef are occupied by the Islamist party, the new Tikrit Museum was destroyed by cruise missiles at the outset of the war (it was empty at the time), and the Mosul Museum, hit by a shell that damaged the Hatrian gallery roof. According to Dr Hameed the museum was looted with 30 bronze panels from the 9th-century BC Assyrian city of Balawat among the losses. <snip>

http://www.aina.org/news/20050204135240.htm