Looting of Iraq Museum Grossly Overstated

Liar!!!

I have been saying for a while that the reporting and spin coming out of Iraq have been terrible. This is just one example of that.

 

Funny. I've been saying the same thing and every one of your posts is an example of that.

 

Let us just be greatful that more treasures weren't lost...I was disgusted when the intial reports were run that showed the looted national museum. Either way, by allied neglect or Iraqi cunning, priceless pieces of art and history are lost. This is a trajedy with or without the "spin".

 

If only dozens of priceless artifacts from the cradle of civilization were looted, and it was easily preventable, and the govt. had been warned about it what's the big deal?

 

Looting of Iraq Grossly Understated...

3000 + 33 items were stolen from that museum. This doesn't include the other museums as well. They lost their equivalent of the Library of Congress, too.


http://www.thismodernworld.com/weblog/mtarchives/week_2003_06_08.html#000749


posted by Tom Tomorrow at 11:20 AM | link


Let's try to sort this out
The Washington Post article, quoted by Sullivan in his aptly-named "Idiocy of the Week" column, does in fact give the number of looted items as 33--from the main collection.

On Saturday, a team of U.S. investigators from the Customs Service and State Department released a summary of a preliminary report that concluded that 3,000 pieces were missing. And more importantly, of the 8,000 or so exhibit-quality, world-class pieces of jewelry, statues and cuneiform clay tablets, only 47 were unaccounted for.
Today, Iraqi officials at the museum confirmed the U.S. numbers, with a slight adjustment.

"There are only 33 pieces from the main collections that are unaccounted for," George said. "Not 47. Some more pieces have been returned." Museum staff members had taken some of the more valuable items home and are now returning them.


So the actual number of looted items appears to be 3,033, an inconvenient fact Sullivan only acknowledges near the end of his column--dismissing the three thousand additional missing pieces as "minor objects of limited value." But here's how the International Herald Tribune covered the story on May 24:

PARIS A Unesco survey of Iraq's smashed and looted cultural treasures indicates that 2,000 to 3,000 objects may be missing from the National Museum in Baghdad alone and that the entire contents of the National Library are lost beyond retrieval.
In addition, more than 1,500 modern paintings and sculptures from the city's Museum of Fine Arts are still missing and only 400 have been recovered, according to Mounir Bouchenaki, assistant director general for culture at the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

"This is a real cultural disaster," said Bouchenaki, who led an international team of experts to Baghdad. "And we will have to redo everything from scratch in rebuilding all these cultural institutions."

He said that earlier reports by U.S. officials that as few as 25 pieces had been lost were "a distortion of reality" because they described only major pieces taken from the public galleries of the museum but not objects in the reserve collections.

"To give a real figure for the losses, we are going to have to draw up an inventory," he said. "Only then will we be able to assess the exact number of objects missing in the museum."

He added: "Nobody has talked about the losses at the Museum of Fine Art, which is a very important one. The National Library is a real disaster. It's gone."

Bouchenaki, an Algerian, is particularly well-placed to assess the damage. An Arab-speaking archeologist, he has worked in the National Museum on several occasions, most recently in 1998 when he helped organize work to install air conditioning and video surveillance in the building.


As one of the readers who brought this to my attention notes:

It's typical of people who have never been behind the scenes in a museum to think that all the good stuff is on display - however, national museums tend to have vast collections that simply can't be displayed all at once. In addition to the 3000 artifacts missing, there are also 1500 paintings missing from their art museum and the national library is, well, gone. There are also are archaeological sites scattered throughout the country that are most likely free-for-alls for looters, and as someone who has worked on an extensively looted site I can only guess at the artifacts and data that are lost for good.
Bottom line? The looting was nowhere near as bad as initally reported, but is still far more extensive than the revisionists would have you believe.

And then there's this--also from the article Sullivan uses to buttress his misleading claims:

Among the missing items is the 5,000-year-old Warka Vase, a three-foot alabaster relief sculpture depicting scenes of everyday life at the dawn of civilization. The vase had been bolted to a podium, Russell said, but looters breached the glass case and ripped the vase from its base.
Also missing is the Warka Face, which, at 3,000 years old, is perhaps the oldest naturalistic sculpture of a woman's face.

"It's gorgeous," Russell said. "Like the best of classical Greek sculpture."

The National Museum will open its doors for a glimpse of its hidden and recovered treasures in July. But now, George and the museum staff toil in dirty rooms filled with swept garbage. The staff is methodically going through the collection's catalogue -- index card by index card -- without benefit of computers, telephones or much outside help.

George said the storerooms "are still a mess; there's shards of artifacts still on the floor." In the main galleries, guards and visitors have stubbed out their cigarette butts on massive stone tablets covered in cuneiform. Broken egg-shaped vessels four feet tall lie in hallways, cracked and dusty.

"Thank God, we were saved from the worst," George said. "But look, these things can never be replaced. That is why they call them priceless."


In other words, even if it were true that "only 33" items had been looted--well, what if the Smithsonian were looted and the "only" thing taken was the Hope Diamond?

And as I keep trying to point out, that still doesn't excuse US negligence in the matter.

Unfortunately, this will be conventional wisdom--Howard Kurtz is already repeating the "only 33" spin uncritically, without even mentioning the 3.000 other looted pieces reported in his own newspaper:

Everyone in journalism makes mistakes, especially routine mistakes – the misspelled name, the mangled title, the wrong date. In this case, though, the press told us that, in a crushing loss for western civilization, 170,000 artifacts were stolen.
The actual number: 33.

Yes, some of the booty was later returned, but 169,967 items? Maybe Don Rumsfeld was right that TV kept showing the same vase being carried away over and over.


I'll bet you dollars to donuts that the self-appointed fact checkers of the blogosphere aren't going to be fact-checking this one. They're going to be too busy promulgating the spin.

I hope my friends at Salon do a follow up on this one. And I hope Kurtz issues a clarification. We'll see, I guess.

Update: via Sullywatch, I see that Salon did post a correction of sorts--in the form of this Joe Conason column, which makes many of the same points as the preceding entry.



http://www.iht.com/articles/97287.html

Unesco lengthens list of looted art in Iraq
Barry James/IHT International Herald Tribune Friday, May 23, 2003
Thousands of treasures said to be missing

PARIS A Unesco survey of Iraq's smashed and looted cultural treasures indicates that 2,000 to 3,000 objects may be missing from the National Museum in Baghdad alone and that the entire contents of the National Library are lost beyond retrieval.
.
In addition, more than 1,500 modern paintings and sculptures from the city's Museum of Fine Arts are still missing and only 400 have been recovered, according to Mounir Bouchenaki, assistant director general for culture at the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
.
"This is a real cultural disaster,” said Bouchenaki, who led an international team of experts to Baghdad. "And we will have to redo everything from scratch in rebuilding all these cultural institutions."
.
He said that earlier reports by U.S. officials that as few as 25 pieces had been lost were “a distortion of reality” because they described only major pieces taken from the public galleries of the museum but not objects in the reserve collections.
.
"To give a real figure for the losses, we are going to have to draw up an inventory," he said. "Only then will we be able to assess the exact number of objects missing in the museum."
.
He added: "Nobody has talked about the losses at the Museum of Fine Art, which is a very important one. The National Library is a real disaster. It's gone."
.
Bouchenaki, an Algerian, is particularly well-placed to assess the damage. An Arab-speaking archeologist, he has worked in the National Museum on several occasions, most recently in 1998 when he helped organize work to install air conditioning and video surveillance in the building.
.
The museum reopened in 2000 for the first time since the 1991 Gulf War after extensive renovation, but has now been stripped of virtually all its furniture and equipment, Bouchenaki said.
.
He said the National Library, founded in 1920, contained about 2 million volumes, all of which have been reduced to piles of ashes. However, he said a few of the most valuable manuscripts were held in the Saddam Center for Manuscripts and are believed to be safe.
.
Iraqi museum officials said they had also scattered some objects around the city's mosques and religious buildings and had placed about 6,700 pieces of gold and jewelry in bank vaults, where they would remain until the security situation improves.
.
Although the Unesco mission was confined to Baghdad, it received reports from experts working outside the capital. From those, it was possible to deduce that the scale of looting at historic sites had been enormous, he added.
.
The members of the team are drawing up a report, expected to be completed next week, that will describe the damage and suggest measures that need to be taken immediately.
.
The team included the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor; the director of the Iraqi-Italian center for the conservation of monuments, Roberto Parapetti; the head of the Japanese archeological mission in Iraq, Ken Matsumoto, and the dean of the Massachusetts College for Arts, John Russell.
.
Bouchenaki said that the museums would now have to be handled like an archeological dig, with every centimeter mapped and photographed to help in later restoration efforts.
.
He also said that movement must be restricted to avoid any trampling of small fragments underfoot.
.
Next, he said, a body set up by Unesco to study the preservation and restoration of cultural objects would need to train local people to restore smashed objects, which included fragments of a golden harp and a gold mask from the city of Ur.
.
Bouchenaki said that under an agreement signed earlier this month with Interpol, the international police organization, Unesco had already set up a database of missing objects that was being circulated to law enforcement organizations around the world.
.
Iraqi objects are already being offered for sale on the Internet, he said, and there is evidence of an organized traffic of looted objects from Mosul to Damascus.
.
Bouchenaki said that Unesco had asked governments in the region to prevent stolen items from leaving Iraq and that he had been impressed on arriving in Amman at how efficiently Jordanian authorities were complying with the request.
.
The director of the Jordanian Antiquities Department, Fawwaz Khreisha, said that customs workers had intercepted 163 items believed to have been stolen in Iraq.
.
International Herald Tribune

 

Oh well,

**** happens.



DD

 

Ya'll should know better than to believe anything in the media.

This is just spin to make the looting seem like less. Sure, maybe fewer pieces were stolen or desecrated than originally reported; but that doesn't change the fact that important works of art and archaeology were forever lost.

How would it look if we allowed looters into the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art and say, "Well, they only stole a Picasso and a Monet, oh yeah, and the Michelangelo section was trashed...but, pshaw!, we have lots more stuff than that."

Not to mention how the Iraqi museum was supposedly #2 on our list of sites to protect once we invaded, and the Iraqi oil works was dead last on the list; and yet we had secured the oil fields before we even invaded, yet failed to bother with the museum, and had to put up with Rumblesfeld mocking how "the media kept showing the same thing over and over, so it looks like we're taking all these vases," or words to that effect.

 

So what !!

Art was lost, happens all the time, is it bad, you bet, is it devestating...hardly.

We lost more in WW2 then in this war by a factor of n.

We should try to get it back, but realize that looting happens in war, always has, always will.

Why should anyone be surprised that a people that were held down under brutal rule for 35+ years would loot?

I mean really...

DD