Robbing the cradle of civilization, five years later

Rose: Who actually do you think is selling the artifacts? How is it that the material actually gets out of the country?

George: This is one of the reasons that [I believe] it was an organized crime. It was not ... just normal Iraqis came and looted the museum. Yes, there were some who looted, but in the very first weeks, materials started surfacing in Europe and the United States. So it must be, 100 percent, that it was an organized crime. The other evidence we have found, I myself have found, that in the galleries of the museum, those who went inside the galleries were well-prepared to go inside and get materials, and these must have connections that have taken material outside the country. Now, I'm not fearing anytime that this material may end up in one of the museums, because I know that museums all over the world would not do that. But, my fear is that this material would go to some special private collectors who will just dump the material, keep it for their own sake, just to keep for 20 years. It's a money investment.

Rose: Micah, when you were talking with people, to the average Iraqi in the streets, did the subject of these precious antiquities, the loss of archaeological sites, the loss of cultural heritage, often come up in the course of your conversations?

Garen: We would ask people on the streets what they thought about it, because we thought it was a fairly esoteric issue that they might not be concerned with. But literally, with people who made maybe a thousand dollars a year, who lived in complete impoverishment, almost all of them universally said, "This is a terrible thing. This is our heritage." The problem is that they're facing such enormous problems. Clearly, they couldn't do anything [other] than say how they felt about it.

I think one of the big challenges with the looting, which really dates back to 1991 or '93, following the first Gulf War -- and this is the looting of the archaeological sites and not the museum -- but as the south became impoverished with the sanctions, that's when the opportunity for looting came up. And as well, Saddam was losing power in the south, so the area became ripe for the possibility of this organized crime. So the looting really did start to take off in the '90s and went through various periods of time. Even Donny George was involved in trying to do salvage explorations to try to combat this. But during that period, it was up and down depending on the security situation. And Elizabeth Stone, interestingly, has done a study of the patterns of the looting over the past 10 years that she just recently published, and it shows that one of the strongest periods of looting was just prior to the war, in the year leading up to the war. So as all the attention started focusing on the war, the security situation became very weak in the south, and that's when, right up to the period starting the war, when the looting really became very concentrated and heavy.

Rose: Micah, when you were talking about the looting at the sites and observing the looting, it sounded almost as if when you visited particular archaeological sites, the looters could take note of you and then continue looting.

Garen: It is extremely dangerous. And we actually only went with patrols when one of the inspectors of antiquity from Nasiriyah would go out on patrol or the Italians would go. It was far too dangerous. So what we did, we actually trained Iraqi cameramen who, over a period of months, could actually get close enough to film this. And they would start maybe a mile away and you'd just see tiny lights in the distance at night and they'd sort of work up their courage and get closer and closer. But it was far too dangerous for us to ever do that ourselves. So that's how we got the images and the information.

Rose: Cori, from your perspective, when you were there, was there much discussion about whether the sale of artifacts was being used to fund the insurgency or fund al-Qaida in Iraq?

Wegener: Not as much at that time. I think it wasn't until after I had left, which was March 2004, that I really started to notice news stories about that and that that was a possibility. As I said, I was really pretty much focused on the museum for my part of the mission there.

Garen: I think this is an important point about the link between looting and terrorism, and I know that that was made in a New York Times Op-Ed piece, but we were actually the ones that discovered that potential link. We never published it. We were freelancing for the New York Times. We never wrote a story about it because there's no proof. And I think it was a bit of a red herring. You see slogans in support of the Madhi Army scrawled all over the archaeological sites, and stuff like that, but the connection was never a direct connection.

In other words, the looting was happening prior to the war, and the looting was happening after the war, and the looting was really about poverty and money. And whatever someone's political agenda was at the moment, it wasn't as if people were saying, "Ah, we're going to go out and loot and get money and then fight the Coalition." There were rumors of that, but there was never any proof of that, and I think that's a very politically charged thing to say, because it has very strong political implications when you say that looting is about terrorism. But it's not. Looting is not about terrorism. It's about money. It's a criminal activity. It's like the drug trade. I just want to make sure that's understood for the record.

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