MOSCOW - Close to three decades after he dragged 364 master drawings and paintings from defeated Germany to the Soviet Union in a suitcase, Viktor Baldin saw a chance to send them back to their owner - the Bremen Kunsthalle. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was about to set out for a state visit to West Germany, and Baldin wrote him to propose that he bring the collection with him as a goodwill gesture. That 1973 letter brought no results - nor did the series he subsequently wrote to top Soviet political and cultural officials, up to the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.
The Baldin collection remains in Russia, at the center of a decades-long dispute over the so-called trophy art that Soviet troops looted from Germany and its wartime allies. The collection of 362 drawings and two small paintings went on display Saturday at Moscow's Museum of Architecture, along with copies of Baldin's letters and accounts of his quest to return the art.
The exhibit comes amid a furious dispute between Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi, who is intent on returning the collection to Bremen, and a group led by Communist legislator and former Culture Minister Nikolai Gubenko, who opposes returning trophy art, especially without compensation. Last Tuesday, the Prosecutor General's Office stepped into the fight, warning Shvydkoi that it would be illegal to send the collection to Germany.
Gubenko claims the collection is worth about $1.5 billion.
Architecture Museum director David Sarkisian said Saturday that a Russian auction house, Gelos, had appraised the collection at about $23.5 million - with one work alone, a Goya portrait, worth more than $4 million.
The collection is but one of many taken from Germany and its World War II allies. Many Russians see the trophy art as rightful compensation for the 20 million deaths, untold injuries and immense destruction the Soviet Union suffered in the Nazi invasion.
Baldin, an art restorer who served as a Soviet army captain and later directed the architecture museum for 25 years, "was a front-line soldier," Sarkisian said. "Nonetheless, he always wanted to give the Germans what he carried out of Germany."
Baldin believed he had saved the collection from destruction. His engineers and sappers' unit had requisitioned a castle, Schloss Karnzow, near the town of Kyritz north of Berlin, and, the night before they were to return to the Soviet Union, a soldier tipped him off about a pile of drawings in the dark, dank basement. The pile included works by Raphael, Titian, Durer, Rubens, Rembrandt and Delacroix.
He wrote in his 1990 memoirs of spending a furious night cutting the drawings out of their packaging and laying them in a suitcase, taking as many as he could manage. His commanders refused him use of a truck, so he carried the artworks all the way home - along the way trading belts, watches and money for drawings, "mostly nude women," that other soldiers had grabbed from the basement stash.
Baldin kept his collection for three years under a bed in his office. In 1948, he gave it to the Architecture Museum, and in 1991, it was transferred to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. For more than two decades, he tried unsuccessfully to get it back to Germany. "In all spheres, the war is over for us. We're already friendly with Germans, we marry them, we dream of traveling there and they here," Sarkisian said. "But for some reason, there's a terrible war going on for culture."
http://www.sptimesrussia.com/
Iraqis hiding behind 'ancient ruins'
02apr03
AUSTRALIAN military chiefs have accused Iraq of using important historical sites to shield its army from attack.
Defence spokesman Brigadier Mike Hannan said coalition forces had pulled back from attacking Iraqi military vehicles sheltering at Ctesiphon, a third century AD site about 35km south of the besieged capital Baghdad. He released aerial photographs showing lines of Iraqi military vehicles between a museum complex and an ancient arch at Ctesiphon, on the Tigris River.
The blue and white sign that designated the area as an important cultural site under the 1954 Hague Convention was clearly visible on the museum roof.
The United States, Britain, Australia and Iraq are all signatories to the convention, which aims to protect important cultural sites in war time, and Iraq, as the cradle of western civilisation, has numerous antiquities.
Brigadier Hannan said Iraq was using antiquities in the same way that it used human shields and civilian centres like hospitals to inhibit coalition attacks.
He said the Ctesiphon arch was so fragile that the after-shock from a surgical strike on the vehicles could bring it down.
The coalition had not attacked and the vehicles had since moved on.
"In past wars significant cultural sites have been destroyed and lost forever through military actions," Brigadier Hannan said.
"The cultural heritage of Iraq is important to the whole world ... and it's incumbent on Australian forces to protect that heritage.
"This task is made more difficult when Iraqis use important and protected sites to protect military targets."
Ctesiphon, founded by the Parthians, was the capital of the Parthian and the Sassanid empires and remained important until it was sacked by Muslims in 637.
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/
Call to protect Iraqi heritage
The British Museum is leading calls to stop sites of archaeological interest being destroyed during the conflict in Iraq.
It is worried the war could wipe out thousands of years of the country's history.
Archaeologists and politicians have written to the prime minister asking for a number of sites to be respected during the conflict.
John Curtis from the British Museum said: "The Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians all had their homeland in Mesopotamia, which is modern Iraq.
"It is incredibly important. It's not just the cultural heritage of Iraq but the cultural heritage of the world."
Baghdad city museum contains 100,000 artefacts dating from 7,000BC to AD1,000 chronicling the achievements of Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian and Islamic civilizations.
Babylon: This was Alexander the Great's capital and the place where the Hanging Gardens were built
Seleucia is a site 20 miles south of Baghdad founded by the Greeks and replaced Babylon as the region's commercial centre
Basra Al-Qurna is reputed to be the site of the Garden of Eden complete with a gnarled tree know as Adam's tree
The area between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers is often called the cradle of civilization. For centuries the people living in the land which is now Iraq led the world in medicine, engineering and even invented writing.
Experts estimate that there are about 100,000 sites of cultural and historical importance in Iraq.
About 10,000 of these have been excavated but thousands more remain untouched.
More visitors
The Ministry of Defence, in response to a written parliamentary question, said: "In our military planning, very careful attention is applied to ensure that we minimise the risk of damage.
"We are confident that our servicemen and women will respect the rich heritage of the Iraqi people."
The British Museum has said visitor numbers have soared since the conflict.
A spokeswoman said: "It's just general curiosity from what's going on [with the war]," she said.
"Members of the public are coming from all over the world."
Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/england/2907775.stm
Published: 2003/04/02 05:37:03
From: "Duncan Kinder" duncan@neoclassicists.net To: securma@museum-security.org
Subject: ' 'Foreign cartels target SA museums'
Date sent: Tue, 1 Apr 2003 09:22:47 -0500
Hi.
When you resme this list, please include the following article concerning South African museums.
article
' 'Foreign cartels target SA museums'
International cartels were targeting South African museums in order to steal valuable collections, MPs heard on Tuesday from the South African Museum Association (Sama).
"South Africa has some of the world's best collections and one of the threats identified is international cartels targeting the country's museums," said Sama president Rooksana Omar.
Omar was briefing the portfolio committee on arts, culture, science and technology on transformation at museums.
She said transformation related to more than just changing the demographic profiles of staff, but included mentorship programmes, training, public-private partnerships and research.
"Museums find themselves in a dire situation," said Omar, who identified a lack of finances and human resources as one of the main obstacles to transformation.
She said it was difficult for the 400 Sama museums to retain their collections and art works, because the "market was outpriced" with particularly the smaller museums unable to afford to keep their works in the country.
"If we want vibrant and provocative exhibitions, we need more money and resources... The issue of governance regarding smaller district museums and provincial authorities must also be resolved speedily."
The absence of a national audit of the country's collections of art works was also hampering transformation.
"It is the Department of Arts and Culture's business to conduct this national audit. A national audit must also be conducted of the human remains in museums, medical schools and universities... an enormous and complex process."
Omar said that Sama would consider becoming a statutory body.
Other possible ways of improving the state of the country's museums included establishing a lobby group to advise the department of arts and culture, a peer review group to evaluate museums, and automatic representation of Sama on the National Heritage Council.
Sama is not a member of the heritage council.
Sapa
BY CAROLINE B. GLICK Thursday, March 27, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
Voices questioning the wisdom of the U.S.-led operation against Saddam Hussein's dictatorship charge it will cause the reckless destruction of Iraq's cultural heritage. Is the U.S. taking sufficient care to spare Iraq's treasures? Does the Gulf War provide any guidance? And why are the people now accusing the U.S. making no mention of Saddam's uses of archaeological sites as military shields then?
Millennia ago, Iraq was the cradle of civilization, hence the concern about its cultural and archaeological sites. Yet the laws of warfare make clear that while combatants may not target such sites, if they are used for military purposes they lose their protection. Legally, therefore, the burden to protect these sites falls most heavily on Saddam's regime. If Saddam used them to shelter his forces or hide his armaments they would legally become military targets.
Unfortunately, at the CENTCOM briefing yesterday, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks disclosed that the Iraqis had placed military equipment and communications equipment next to the 2,000-year-old brick arch of Ctesiphon on the banks of the Tigris River, the world's largest surviving arch from ancient times and the widest single-span arch in the world.
This is history repeating itself. In early February 1991, for example, Saddam parked MiG fighter jets at a Babylonian ziggurat at Ur to deter coalition forces from disabling them during the Gulf War. By Nineveh, the ancient capital of the Assyrian empire, he built air bases and weapons factories. According to archaeological scholars from the University of Chicago, an 80-foot mound containing many ruins of ancient Nineveh also housed an oil storage tank. During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam used the site for anti-aircraft batteries because it was the most elevated spot in the area. The French-built Osirak nuclear reactor, which the Israelis destroyed in 1981, was built adjacent to the Ctesiphon arch.
Erbil is one of the world's longest-inhabited cities. Ruins from its first settlements are more than 6,000 years old. Saddam built several military installations near the site.
In February 1991, the Pentagon contacted Robert McC. Adams, then secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a scholar of ancient Iraq, to help identify important archaeological sites to safeguard them from bombing. Even earlier Colin Powell made it clear that U.S. pilots were told to steer clear of antiquities.
Prof. Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist critical of U.S. bombing in the Gulf War due to its endangerment of antiquities, visited Iraq after the war and said that the damage turned out to be minor. Another initial critic of the bombing campaign, Prof. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago, allowed in 1993, "The U.S. Air Force went out of its way not to hit certain places."
In contrast, at the height of the bombing campaign the Pentagon produced aerial photographs of the Al-Basrah mosque. They showed clearly that the Iraqis had destroyed the mosque for propaganda purposes. While coalition forces had bombed a target some 100 yards away, leaving the mosque unscathed, Iraqi engineers sliced off the dome in the hope of duping journalists that the U.S. had been responsible for the destruction.
The U.S., over the past decade, has amassed an arsenal of precision bombs and weaponry. The risk of archaeological devastation is even smaller than in 1991. Besides, says retired Israeli Brig. Gen. Aharon Levran, the current war "will be less bombing intensive because the aim is . . . to eject Saddam Hussein from Iraq and remain on. If the U.S. were to rely on bombing civilian infrastructures like refineries or electrical grids, they would be shooting themselves in the foot."
The coalition is also dropping leaflets stressing its desire to preserve religious and cultural sites but warning that it will destroy "any viable military target."
The strongest argument that antiwar archaeology experts make is that the chaos that may reign in a post-Saddam Iraq will probably make it harder to safeguard archaeological sites and museums. This contention may be reasonable. But an operation aimed at deposing Saddam because he constitutes a clear and present danger to global security cannot be canceled because a successor regime may commit or not prevent the commission of a crime of another kind.
Rather than opposing a war that stands to liberate Iraqi archaeology from exploitation and destruction by a self-serving dictator who has destroyed and endangered Iraqi antiquities for decades, concerned archaeologists should be advising the U.S. on how best to preserve our ancient roots in a post-Saddam Iraq. Ms. Glick, the deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post, is an embedded reporter with the U.S. Third Army Infantry Division in Iraq.