SELECTED REPORTS APRIL 30, 2003
Historic £100,000 paintings stolen
Aboriginal rock art vandalized
Assessing the disaster: experts mourn the Lion of Nimrud, looted as
troops stood by
'Indiana Jones' archaeologist tells how gangs
broke in and calls for borders to be sealed
Lost history Iraq's missing treasures
Iraqi looting 'a loss to mankind'
Man free without bond in smuggling of Iraqi art
U.S. Contributes $2 Million to Protect and Restore Iraqi Antiquities
____________________________________________________________
Five miniature portraits worth about £100,000 have been stolen from
Hever Castle.
The historic childhood home of Anne Boleyn, near Edenbridge in Kent, was
open to the public when the theft happened on Monday. Thieves forced open a
locked glass display case in the bedroom of Henry VIII's second wife. The
miniatures include two of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland. The others depict
Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, Henry VIII's adviser who was executed for
treason in 1540; Queen Mary; and Anne of Austria, the wife of Louis XIII. As
soon as the theft was discovered, the castle was cleared of visitors and about
100 members of the public were searched before being allowed to leave, police said.
In a separate incident overnight, a failed
attempt was made to steal a marble oval bowl and its marble plinth from the
Italian Gardens at the castle. Robert Pullin, managing director of Hever
Castle, said: "We are all very upset and devastated by the loss of these
beautiful miniatures which formed an important part of
the Tudor and Stuart portrait collection which has been built up by the
Castle." A Kent Police spokesman said tonight: "We are obviously
interested to trace any person seen acting suspiciously in the vicinity of that
bedroom and at the exit gates."
http://www.ananova.com/
______________________________________
30Apr03
ABORIGINAL rock art more than 19,000 years old has been vandalised in a
central Queensland national park.
Environment Minister Dean Wells told state parliament he had seen the
vandalism and defacing - which had caused "significant permanent
damage" - during a recent visit to Carnarvon Gorge. "It is very
disappointing that the actions of a few arrogant vandals, who thought it
fitting to scrawl their names or carve tasteless drawings beside the artwork,
have had a significant impact on the values of this area," Mr Wells said.
"Their conceit and their pillaging will be addressed with
vigour." Mr Wells said ranger patrols had been boosted and extra
surveillance measures put in place. He warned that anyone caught defacing the
artwork could face a fine of up to $225,000 or receive two years' jail.
This report appears on news.com.au.
_______________________________________
Fiachra Gibbons, arts correspondent
Wednesday April 30, 2003
The Guardian
The first authoritative list of the treasures that were stolen or
destroyed in the chaos that followed the fall of Baghdad emerged yesterday, as
experts from the world's great museums poured scorn on the Americans for the
catastrophe. Among the thousands of artefacts looted from the Iraqi national
museum in Baghdad - which holds the world's greatest collection of Mesopotamian
art - was the 5,000-year-old Warka Vase, a "staggering masterpiece"
from Uruk carved from limestone just about the time the city's Sumerian
inhabitants were inventing writing.
It was too fragile to be moved into the museum's underground vaults in
the weeks leading up to the war, and like 18 other major artefacts so far
confirmed missing by Iraqi experts, may already have been smuggled over the
country's unguarded borders.
The Lion of Nimrud, an ivory relief of a lion attacking a Nubian, one of
the museum's most prized objects and "an icon of Phoenician art", has
also disappeared.
An international summit of experts at the British Museum yesterday
placed much of the blame for the disaster that has befallen Iraq's heritage at
the feet of coalition forces.
US soldiers stood by while 120 rooms in the museum were broken into and
stripped, in what Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, called the
greatest catastrophe to afflict any major institution since the second world war.
One tank unit was within 50 yards of the building on the morning of
Wednesday March 12, but its commanders refused emotional pleas from museum
staff to move any closer. Looters began to break into
the museum the following day. The Americans, who were still close by, did not intervene.
"It's very extraordinary ... that with American troops in Baghdad,
American troops almost at the gates of the museum, this was allowed to
happen," Mr MacGregor said. Six days after the sacking of the museum,
following an international outcry, coalition troops finally secured the
building. Iraq is the "cradle of civilisation", the home of the
Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian cultures, and the birthplace of Abraham. The
main Baghdad museum alone held more than 170,000 artefacts, including a vast
treasury of cuneiform clay tablets that have yet to be translated. Only a
cursory audit of its collection has so far been undertaken. Experts said it
would take months to catalogue all that has been lost. No one yet knows what
was pillaged from important museums in Mosul and
Basra, which were also ransacked by looters. "This is the crime of the
century," Dr Donny George, a curator at the Baghdad museum, told the
summit, convened to draft an emergency plan to recover the missing objects and
stop further smuggling of antiquities out of the country. "The looted
material belonged to all of mankind," he said.
Mr George described how he went to the US Marines' headquarters to beg
commanders to send troops to the museum three days after the looting began.
"I was afraid the building would be set on fire as had happened elsewhere.
But they did nothing for three more days ... I don't know why."
His was the first detailed account of the events leading up to the
sacking of the building. Throughout the bombing of the city, staff had remained
on guard inside but when a few militiamen began using the grounds to fire on
American patrols, they left. When the shooting stopped three hours later, the
team of young archaeologists and curators were unable to return.
"One of our staff who lived in the museum compound went to an
American tank and pleaded with them, begged in fact, for them to come in front
of the museum to keep it safe," Mr George said. "But he was told they
had no orders to do so." He contrasted this with the way US forces
immediately secured the oil ministry. "They were warned [about the danger
to the museum]. Was it done intentionally? I don't know. But moving a tank 50
of 60 metres would have saved mankind's heritage." The archaeologist,
whose bravery in tackling looters after the first Gulf war has earned him
something of a reputation as an Indiana Jones figure, also raised the suspicion
that organised gangs of thieves had been first into the galleries. "They
got in by making holes in the walls and through the windows we had
blocked," Mr George said. Glass cutters were found for breaking into
cabinets and gypsum copies of statues and a replica of The Black Obelisk, which
is held in the British Museum, were not touched. Mr MacGregor, who organised
the summit, called on the coalition to immediately seal Iraq's borders to
prevent further smuggling. The British Museum has the second biggest collection
of Mesopotamian artefacts, and is acting as a "clearing house" for
offers of help to the Iraqis.
According to Mr George, Iraq's borders are "wide open",
although Jordanian authorities have seized 12 boxes of antiquities and assorted
government documents, which foreign journalists had attempted to smuggle out.
Fears were also raised that greater treasures will disappear down British and
American military supply lines. Traditionally, looted Iraqi antiquities tend to
turn up in the black market in Britain, Switzerland
and Israel. Unesco, the United Nations cultural arm, last night revealed that
they were setting up a register of missing Iraqi artefacts which they will
share with Interpol. They are calling on the UN security council not to lift
the ban on the export ofantiquities when sanctions on Iraq are suspended.
Yesterday, the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, who came in for stinging
criticism from some experts angry that the government had ignored their
warnings about likely looting, said Britain would support the UN ban. Ms Jowell
said the government would also support a private members' bill
framed by the Liberal Democrat MP Richard Allan which would outlaw dealing in
stolen historical objects. "This loophole must be closed," she said.
But Ms Jowell refused to ringfence any of the £300m set aside for
reconstructing Iraq to repair the damage done to its heritage. Up to 50 objects
a day which local people "removed for safekeeping" have already been
returned to the Baghdad museum, Mr George said, and the Americans have
organised radio appeals offering rewards. US central command said more than 100
items had so far been handed in, including manuscripts
taken from the Saddam Hussein Manuscript Centre, one of the great libraries in
the Middle East.
·Warka vase, a Sumerian masterpiece decorated with reliefs from 3100BC
·Gold decoration was stripped from the reconstructed Lyre of Ur, found
in ruins of the city in which Abraham was born
·The Lion of Nimrud, the iconic ivory of a lion attacking a Nubian,
carved around 850BC
·The statue of King Entemena of Lagash (circa 2400BC), the largest
example of the "lost wax method of casting"
·The Babylonian terracotta lions of Tell Harmall, dating from 1800BC,
remain, but their heads have been smashed
·Two figures from the reign of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III - one
looted, one returned in three pieces.
·A seated copper figure from the reign of King Naram-Sin of Akkad, 2250BC
·Ivory reliefs and a fantastically complex chair back with a sun disc
symbol from Nimrud, 850BC.
·Eleven statues and heads of statues from the Roman-period Parthian city
of Hatra and a statue of Hermes from Nineveh.
·Rare, richly decorated wooden mosque doors from Mosul.
A full list of all the missing antiquities will not be ready for several
months
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
________________________________________________
The looting of Baghdad's international museum was not just a loss to the
Iraqi people but to the whole of mankind - according to its director of research, Donny George. The looting was the crime of the
century, Dr George told representatives from some of the world's leading
museums at a meeting in London.
The meeting, at the British Museum, saw
photographs of the vandalism and heard that many of the 170,000 items in the
collection had vanished. The aim of the London summit was to decide what can be
done by the international community to restore Iraq's devastated heritage.
Among the missing objects are a 5,000-year-old marble vase and a headless
statue of a king. Another statue of an Assyrian king has been brought back to
the museum but in pieces.
The world's leading museums have called on the United States to secure
the borders of Iraq to prevent further export of looted items.
They also called on the United Nations Security Council to impose a ban on all
international trade on Iraqi cultural heritage. Dr George told the meeting that
looted items had already left the country - many taken
out by journalists. US border controls were non-existent, he said. Dr John
Curtis, from the British Museum, also briefed colleagues from the Louvre in
Paris, the Getty Museum in California, New York's Metropolitan Museum and the
Hermitage in St Petersburg. Dr Curtis, the British Museum's keeper of Near East
antiquities, has just got back from a visit to Iraq's national museum in Baghdad.
He saw the catastrophic damage wreaked by Iraqi
looters smashed artefacts, empty plinths, and decapitated statues. The British
Museum, which has traditionally had the largest Mesopotamian collection outside
Iraq, has already offered expert assistance to their beleaguered counterparts
in the country. One man returned a chest filled with priceless manuscripts and
parchments to a nearby mosque US Central Command The medium-term goal of the
museum community is to get a team of curators and conservators to Iraq within
the next few weeks. British Museum director Neil McGregor told BBC Radio 4's
Today programme that the meeting would ask what help could be offered to Iraqi
colleagues with the advice of Dr George. Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell will
also be announcing how the UK Government intends to help.
There has been widespread criticism of coalition forces, particularly the US
forces in Baghdad, for their failure to protect Iraq's cultural treasures.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
___________________________________________
The root causes of pillage, By Daniel
Pipes
Apr. 30, 2003
Who's to blame for the destruction of Iraqi museums, libraries, and
archives, amounting to what The New York Times calls "one of the greatest
cultural disasters in recent Middle Eastern history"?
The Bush Administration, say academic specialists on the Middle East.
They proceed to compare American leaders to some of the worst mass-murderers in
history. Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University: US political leaders are
"destroyers of civilization" like Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and
Tamerlane. Michael Sells of Haverford College: They are "barbarians"
whose "criminal neglect" makes them comparable to Nero. Said Arjomand
of the State University of New York (Stony Brook): The US government's
"war crime" renders it akin to the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in 1258.
These academics overlook one tiny detail, however: It was Iraqis who looted and
burned, and they did so against the coalition's wishes. Blaming Americans for
Iraqi crimes is deeply patronizing, equating Iraqis with children not
responsible for their actions. The academics also overlook another fact: the
extreme rarity of such cultural self-destruction. The French did not sack the
Louvre in 1944. The Japanese did not burn their national library a year later.
Panamanians did not destroy their archives in 1990. Kuwaitis did not destroy
their historic Korans in 1991.
Yes, looting took place in all these cases, but nothing approached what
the Associated Press calls Iraq's "unchecked frenzy of cultural
theft." And a frenzy it was. At the National Museum of Iraq, perhaps the
greatest storehouse of antiquities in the Middle East, "the 28 galleries
of the museum and vaults with huge steel doors guarding storage chambers that
descend floor after floor into unlighted darkness had been completely
ransacked," reported one eyewitness.
THE DEVASTATION at Iraq's national library and archives was yet worse,
for both institutions were purposefully incinerated. Much of the country's
culture and records was destroyed; "nothing was left in the National
Library's main wing but its charred walls and ceilings, and mounds of
ash." The smoldering shell contained the charred remnants of historic
books "and a nation's intellectual legacy gone up in smoke." Iraq's
main Islamic library, with its collection of "rare early legal and literary
materials, priceless Korans, calligraphy and illumination" was also
burned. This descent into barbarism is so unusual, it has only a single
precedent Iraqi actions in 1990-91.
In Kuwait: When Kuwait was an Iraqi province, Iraqi troops plundered the
national museum, set fire to the planetarium, ransacked libraries, and
otherwise crippled the cultural infrastructure. In Iraq: During the instability
that followed Iraq's loss, anti-government elements engaged in a looting
rampage, pillaging regional museums and other cultural institutions, stealing
some 4,000 items. Archaeologists published a
catalogue, Lost Heritage: Antiquities Stolen from Iraq's Regional Museums, to
prevent trade in these artifacts. How to explain this possibly unique Iraqi
penchant for cultural self-hatred? The inherently violent quality of modern
Iraqi society is one cause. Writing in 1968, the Israeli scholar Uriel Dann
explained that a climate of violence is "part of the political scene in
Iraq. It is an undercurrent which pervades the vast substrata of the people
outside the sphere of power politics. Hundreds of thousands of souls can easily
be mobilized on the flimsiest pretext. They constitute a permanently restive
element, ready to break into riots." The Kuwaiti scholar Shafiq Ghabra
expanded on this theme in 2001 in the Middle East Quarterly. Noting Iraq's
uneasy mix of Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shi'ites, urbanites and tribal
members, plus other divisions, he noted how unmanageable governments found this
diversity, which led them to create "a state
devoid of political compromise." Leaders "liquidated those holding
opposing views, confiscated property without notice, trumped up charges against
its enemies, and fought battles with imaginary domestic foes." The empty
shell of the national library testifies mutely to the excesses of a country
singularly prone to violence against itself.
The blame for the looting in Iraq, therefore, lies not with the
coalition forces but with the Iraqis themselves. Yes, the coalition should have
prepared better, but Iraqis alone bear moral
responsibility for the cultural wreckage. This conclusion has two implications.
Middle East specialists have yet again confirmed their political obtuseness.
And Iraqis have signaled that they will act in ways highly unwelcome
to the coalition. The writer (Pipes@MEForum.org) is
director of the Middle East Forum and author of Militant Islam Reaches
America.
http://www.jpost.com/
________________________________________________
From: "Amalyah Keshet" akeshet@imj.org.il
To: moderator@cpprot.net
Subject: Visual Resources;
call for papers/information for next issue dedicated
Mesopotamian and Afghan art
Date sent: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 10:07:38 +0200
The Editors of Visual Resources: An International Journal of
Documentation, like the rest of the civilized world, are deeply disturbed by
the destruction or loss of works of art and cultural heritage documentation in
Iraq and Afghanistan.
We would like to devote a Special Issue of
Visual Resources to the subject of Mesopotamian and Afghan art and the
consequences of war, especially through visual documentation. Topics of interest include (but are not
limited to): documentation of Iraqi artifacts
and architecture in photographic inventories and databases
- where are they? who maintains them? how they
are used?; media coverage of cultural
heritage in the Middle East, past and present
- how today's technology affects what we hear and know?; international
conventions and their role in the protection of the arts - agencies and their
efforts to save or restore the 'cultural victims' of war.
Please submit by June 15th at the latest any
proposals, articles, or suggestions to the Editors:
Helene Roberts, Visual Resources, Art History
Department, 6033
Carpenter Hall, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 03755, USA
helene.roberts@dartmouth.edu,
or Christine Sundt, Architecture and Allied Arts Library,
Lawrence Hall, 5249
University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA
csundt@darkwing.uoregon.edu.
Rules for submission and other information
about Visual
Resources can be found at
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/01973762.html
amalyah keshet (editorial
board, Visual Resources)
head of image resources & copyright management
the israel museum, jerusalem
www.imj.org.il
tel +972-2-670-8874
fax +972-2-670-8064
_____________________________________
A former Fox News Channel technician accused of smuggling artwork from a
palace of one of Saddam Hussein's sons was released without bond yesterday.
Benjamin James Johnson is accused of taking items from
a Baghdad palace and shipping them back to the Washington area. U.S. Customs
agents discovered a dozen paintings in a cardboard box during a routine search
of luggage at Washington Dulles International Airport
on Thursday.
"I don't think he realized he was breaking the law,"
Christopher Amolsch, Mr. Johnson's defense attorney, said after a brief
appearance in federal court. Mr. Johnson, 27, waived his right to a formal
reading of the charges and a preliminary hearing. U.S. Magistrate Judge Barry
R. Poretz released Mr. Johnson, but ordered him to remain in the Washington
area. Authorities said the pictures — which depicted
the former Iraqi dictator and his son Uday — were taken from Uday's palace
while Mr. Johnson was traveling with U.S. troops during the Iraq war.
"There were some journalists who brought back some artifacts of
substantially greater value who don't face charges," Mr. Amolsch said. The
lawyer contends the Customs Service is engaging in selective enforcement
because his client has been the only private citizen charged. "Anytime that
you single out one individual to send a message to the country, that's
wrong," the lawyer said. Fox fired Mr. Johnson,
who lives in Alexandria, after he acknowledged bringing back the items. Under federal law, the government has 30 days to
indict Mr. Johnson, who also is charged with making a false statement to
federal officials. Both charges carry penalties of up to five years in prison
and fines of up to $250,000. Customs agents also found 40 Iraqi monetary bonds
and a visitor's badge from the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait inside his luggage.
http://www.washtimes.com/
____________________________________________
US Department of State
Office of the Spokesman
For Immediate Release
April 29, 2003
2003/448
Statement by Richard Boucher, Spokesman
The United States is pleased to announce a contribution of $2 million to
help protect and restore key museums and archeological sites in Iraq. The
American people value and respect Iraq's cultural heritage. The funds will
support specific cultural preservation needs to be identified in consultation
with Iraqi cultural officials. The archeological and cultural heritage of Iraq
documents over 10,000 years of the development of civilization.
Included in this contribution are funds to re-establish a U.S. overseas research center in Baghdad, support for development of the
"Red List of Iraqi Antiquities at Risk" by the International Council
of Museums, and a searchable on-line database of images from the Baghdad
Museum. The "Red List" will consist of categories of objects looted
from Iraq and will serve as an aid in the interdiction and recovery of these
objects worldwide.
At the request of Assistant Secretary Patricia Harrison, Maria P. Kouroupas,
Executive Director of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee and Director of
the Cultural Property Office of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs,
is attending the second meeting of international experts to save Iraq's museums
and cultural property today in London. The meeting is taking place at the
initiative of the British Museum and United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization.
(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S.
Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
____________________________________________