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It is the death of history
Special investigation by Robert Fisk
09/17/07 "The
Independent" -- - 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.
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
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