Robbing the cradle of civilization, five years later

Just how bad was the looting of Iraq's museum and archaeological sites? According to Salon's experts, many ancient artifacts have come home, but the looting continues.

Editor's note: The transcript of this interview has been edited for clarity.

Read more: Politics, News, Iraq, Iraq War, Salon Conversations

March 20, 2008 |

Among the many unintended and unforeseen consequences of the U.S. occupation of Iraq that began five years ago this week was the wholesale looting of Iraq's museums and archaeological sites. Iraq has been called the cradle of civilization. Starting with the Sumerian civilization, which more than 5,000 years ago produced what may be the world's first examples of writing and math, the area centered on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and known as Mesopotamia has been home to a succession of cultures -- Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian. Many believe southern Iraq was the site of the biblical Garden of Eden. But within weeks of the first American airstrike, the cradle of civilization had been robbed. Baghdad's National Museum of Iraq, among the globe's premier repositories of antiquities, was ransacked over the course of a week in April 2003. Statues were dragged down the steps, artifacts six millennia old were carried off in plastic bags. American soldiers were not dispatched to protect the museum until the thieves were long gone.

It was partly in response to media queries about the unimpeded looting of Iraq's cultural heritage that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld uttered the infamous and cavalier rejoinder, "Democracy is messy." Five years after the sacking of Iraq, we decided to ask the experts how bad it really was, how many priceless antiquities have come back to their homeland, and what, if anything, has changed about the Bush administration's approach to protecting Iraq's history.

On behalf of Salon, Brian Rose, professor of archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania and president of the Archaeological Institute of America, conducted a round table with Donny George Youkhanna, former chief of antiquities for the Iraqi government and director general of the National Museum of Iraq; Cori Wegener, an associate curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts who, as a major in the U.S. Army Reserve, was called up in 2003 and sent to Iraq to assess the damage to the museum; and Micah Garen, a documentary filmmaker, photographer and journalist who went to Iraq shortly after the invasion to document the looting of archaeological sites. Youkhanna, who is known as Donny George in the West, was forced to flee Iraq in 2006 and is now a visiting professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Wegener is presently president of the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, which was formed in 2006 to protect cultural property worldwide during armed conflict. Garen, who wrote a book about his experience as a hostage in Iraq called "American Hostage," is working on a feature-length documentary about the looting. The round-table participants spoke by phone on Friday, March 14.

-- Mark Schone, Salon

Rose: We're here to assess what's actually happened in Iraq, especially involving cultural property, five years after the inauguration of the war in Iraq. I wanted to turn first to Donny George, who was then the director general of the National Museum of Iraq. What was it like when you stepped into the museum right after the looting? George: Oh my god, Brian. You're bringing up the worst memories I have in mind, really. It was as if a hurricane had hit the whole building and the rooms and the galleries and the storerooms from inside. Imagine. A hurricane on the inside of a museum and the storerooms and the administration areas. It was exactly like that. It was terrible. Over 120 doors in the administration areas were completely destroyed. And a lot of furniture appeared to have been taken away. But our problem was with the antiquities. Some of the materials that were displayed and still displayed at the gallery were taken away, such as the Warka Vase. And some of the cultural material from the galleries there. But we could not then, in those very early days, could not check what had happened to the storerooms because we did not have electricity in Baghdad. It was completely in the dark. We did not have enough fuel to start our generators. But afterward, when we went into the storerooms that were in the basement of the museum, those were another tragedy. The looters had gone into some places, it looked like they knew what they were looking for, in some places they got the smallest and most precious material. Those were the cylinder seals and a good [amount] of jewelry. From there, they took over 5,000 cylinder seals and as I said, [jewelry] too. Rose: Cori Wegener, you were actually there on the ground in Iraq. To what extent was the U.S. military aware of how much had been looted from the museum and how endangered Iraq's archaeological sites were? Wegener: When I arrived on May 16, 2003 -- so kind of well after -- Col. Matthew Bogdanos and his team were already there, and by that time they had realized that everything was not gone but that it was still quite a bad situation. [Bogdanos, a Marine reservist, organized a team of American troops to protect the museum and recover Iraqi antiquities.] And they were still trying to get a handle on the potential for inventories using some of the old card systems that had been ransacked and overturned. And using log books that many objects had been logged into. But we still didn't know the full extent of the looting at that time, because we didn't have a comprehensive inventory to go by. And also, many of the storage areas that Donny mentioned, some of those objects hadn't been inventoried when they were brought into the museum because the staff hadn't been able to work at full operating power under the sanctions they were under. So it was a really difficult situation to figure out, about what exactly had been looted and what the numbers were. As far as the archaeological sites go, that was not a huge issue in those early days and it was only later when we did the helicopter flyovers that you have John Russell's excellent photos of the looting of the sites. Rose: And I have to say from the point of view of the Archaeological Institute of America, we really didn't know what to do when this had all first developed, when the museum had been looted, when we became aware that the archaeological sites were being looted with great rapidity. The archaeologists, not just in the U.S., but also in the world were, in a sense, running around in a confused way. The archaeological institutes hadn't really collaborated with each other. And most of us hadn't collaborated with the military in the past. So we didn't have the kind of guide or the established mechanisms for interfacing with the military and lending our expertise. It was something we tried to correct in the meantime. But in the beginning, I'm afraid, our responses were not as rapid or as adept, as expert, as we would have liked them to be.

Micah Garen, you were also on the ground in Iraq and you had an occasion to actually speak to some of the looters who were active in looting archaeological sites or perhaps in looting the museums.

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