[South Asia Citizens Web | April 17, 2003]
Iraq: From the cradle of civilization to its grave
by Aseem Shrivastava"One who must do good to others must do so in particulars."
- William Blake
Once again, an oppressed land had been liberated. Once again by the freedom-loving Americans. Once again there was too little gratitude for the fearless feats of American soldiers.
Yet again there was no celebration, no bringing down of the brutal dictator's statues (except those stage-managed by American generals), no roses and kisses for the brave American troops, who one more time had staked their lives for the cause of human freedom.
How ungrateful the world can become! How easily, some weeks ago, the French forgot their enormous debt to America for their liberation from the barbaric Nazis (never mind the fact that the Statue of Liberty, next to Staten Island, was shipped from France long before they were rescued from Nazi terror)! How casually the world has come to take for granted American benevolence!
"From the devil to the deep blue sea", Abdul-Setar Abdul Jaber, guard at Baghdad's National Archaelogical Museum, must have mused last Saturday. He was witness to the most barbaric sacking of Baghdad since Hulegu Khan, youngest progeny of the legendary Chingiz Khan, led the massacre of the great city three-quarters of a millennium ago. Even the barbaric Mongols had spared the invaluable collection of ancient artifacts (some of them up to 10,000 years old) from the first settled human civilizations - Sumer, Mesopotamia, Babylon and Assyria - in all history.
The Mongols in 1258 had one significant ideological advantage. They did not invade Baghdad in order to "liberate" the people of the city from their rulers. For the Anglo-Americans invading Baghdad in 2003, however, the unsettling fact was that, pesticide aside, not only had no weapons of mass destruction been found by the 100,000 Anglo-American troops as they combed the length and breadth of the Iraqi desert for a month, there was not even damped Iraqi jubilation over their "liberation" from the brutal Saddam, images of which the thousands of American and Western media cameras scouting the city could relay home to justify the war, post-facto, to the citizenry of democratic nations who had allowed this extraordinary invasion to take place. (Would you celebrate the death-sacrifice of several of your loved ones in the overarching cause of the "liberation" of your country from a dictator through the aegis of a self-appointed imperial guardian of human freedom?)
After Saddam Hussein's regime lost control of Baghdad (the surest sign of which was the termination of the Information Minister's heroic broadcasts) the American generals decided that enough was enough. Iraqi people, perhaps still living in the shadow of Saddam's terror, had not realized that freedom was now theirs for the asking. Thus, jubilation, if not spontaneously forthcoming, had to be induced. At least for the sake of those parents and children of US troops gazing patriotically at their TV sets in Kalamazoo, Michigan and Des Moines, Iowa.
Middle East scholar Khaled Bayomi from the University of Lund, is in a position to tell us. He was there. Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's largest circulating newspaper, carried a report on April 11 in which Mr.Bayomi was asked:
"Are you saying that it was US troops who initiated the plundering?í
"Absolutely. The lack of jubilant scenes meant that the American troops needed pictures of Iraqis who in different ways demonstrated hatred for Saddamís regime."
"I happened to be right there just as the American troops encouraged people to begin the plundering."
"The people pulled down a large statue of Saddam?"
"Did they? It was an American tank that did that, right beside the hotel where all the journalists stay. Until lunchtime on April 9, I did not see one destroyed Saddam portrait. If people had wanted to pull down statues they could have taken down some of the small ones without any help from American tanks. If it had been a political upheaval, the people would have pulled down statues first and then plundered."
It is hard to establish that the microwave ovens and TV sets on donkey-carts were stolen, under the liberating eye of American troops, from shopkeepers especially friendly towards Saddam Hussein's regime. The mighty superpower, which had with such facility deposed a brutal dictatorship which had tyrannized the Iraqi people for a full quarter-century, found itself apparently helpless before the zeal for liberation displayed by the more desperate citizens of Baghdad. Speculation on what allowed the plunder to proceed freely is unnecessary. Listen once more to Bayomi's elaboration:
"I had gone to see some friends who live near a dilapidated area just past Haifa Avenue on the west bank of the Tigris. It was the 8th of April and the fighting was so intense that I was unable to return to the other side of the river. In the afternoon it became perfectly quiet and four American tanks took places on the edge of the slum area. The soldiers shot two Sudanese guards who stood at their posts outside a local administration building on the other side of Haifa Avenue. Then they blasted apart the doors to the building and from the tanks came eager calls in Arabic encouraging people to come close to them. "
"The entire morning, everyone who had tried to cross the road had been shot. But in the strange silence after all the shooting, people gradually became curious. After 45 minutes, the first Baghdad citizens dared to come out. Arab interpreters in the tanks told the people to go and take what they wanted in the building."
"The word spread quickly and the building was ransacked. I was standing only 300 yards from there when the guards were murdered. Afterwards the tank crushed the entrance to the Justice Department, which was in a neighboring building, and the plundering continued there".
"I stood in a large crowd and watched this together with them. They did not partake in the plundering but dared not to interfere. Many had tears of shame in their eyes. The next morning the plundering spread to the Modern Museum, which lies a quarter mile farther north. There were also two crowds there, one that plundered and one which watched with disgust."
For some of the citizens of Baghdad it clearly took time to realize that they were free - to plunder and loot. (And some apparently seized the liberty to rape as well.) Museums were plundered between April 12 and 14. Eyewitness Robert Fisk of The Independent records, in an article entitled "A civilisation torn to pieces":
"Öin the city's most important museum, something truly terrible has taken placeÖThey lie across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq's history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling down the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them on to the concreteÖNot since the Taliban embarked on their orgy of destruction against the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the statues in the museum of Kabul _ perhaps not since the Second World War or earlier _ have so many archaeological treasures been wantonly and systematically smashed to piecesÖBaghdad is already a city at war with itself, at the mercy of gunmen and thieves. There is no electricity in Baghdad _ as there is no water and no law and no order _ and so we stumbled in the darkness of the museum basement, tripping over toppled statues and stumbling into broken winged bulls. When I shone my torch over one far shelf, I drew in my breath. Every pot and jar _ "3,500 BC" it said on one shelf corner _ had been bashed to piecesÖ
For well over 200 years, Western and local archaeologists have gathered up the remnants of this centre of early civilisation from palaces, ziggurats and 3,000-year-old graves. Their tens of thousands of handwritten card index files _ often in English and in graceful 19th-century handwriting _ now lie strewn amid the broken statuaryÖ
The looters had left only a few hours before I arrived and no one _ not even the museum guard in the grey gown _ had any idea how much they had taken. A glass case that had once held 40,000-year-old stone and flint objects had been smashed open. It lay empty. No one knows what happened to the Assyrian reliefs from the royal palace of Khorsabad, nor the 5,000-year-old seals nor the 4,500-year-old gold leaf earrings once buried with Sumerian princesses. It will take decades to sort through what they have left, the broken stone torsos, the tomb treasures, the bits of jewellery glinting amid the piles of smashed potsÖ
The museum's treasures didn't merely constitute the cultural heritage of Iraq and humanity. They also served as a source of inspiration and strength for those who the Americans had set out to liberate:
Only a few weeks ago, Jabir Khalil Ibrahim, the director of Iraq's State Board of Antiquities, referred to the museum's contents as "the heritage of the nation". They were, he said, "not just things to see and enjoy _ we get strength from them to look to the future. They represent the glory of Iraq"
And what were the new guardians of Baghdad doing while this rape of culture and history was going on? The generals were clearly aware of the vulnerability of the museum:
Why? How could they do this? Why, when the city was already burning, when anarchy had been let loose _ and less than three months after US archaeologists and Pentagon officials met to discuss the country's treasures and put the Baghdad Archaeological Museum on a military data-base _ did the Americans allow the mobs to destroy the priceless heritage of ancient Mesopotamia? And all this happened while US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, was sneering at the press for claiming that anarchy had broken out in Baghdad.
There has clearly been a deliberate effort by the Americans, in pursuit of media images of Iraqi jubilation at being delivered from tyranny, to allow the looting to proceed. Ugly facts have been authored to enable a smooth script for Washington's media show. When Fisk tried to alert the US army about the ongoing plunder, he was met with a sluggish response:
Half an hour later, I contacted the civil affairs unit of the US Marines in Saadun Street and gave them the exact location of the museum and the condition of its contents. A captain told me that "we're probably going to get down there". Too late. Iraq's history had already been trashed by the looters whom the Americans unleashed on the city during their "liberation"Ö
Finding themselves apparently disallowed to stop the looting, American army officials lurched for local help:
Why, yesterday morning they were recruiting Saddam Hussein's hated former policemen to restore law and order on their behalf. The last army to do anything like this was Mountbatten's force in South-east Asia, which employed the defeated Japanese army to control the streets of Saigon _ with their bayonets fixed _ after the recapture of Indo-China in 1945.
In the event, responsible citizens of Baghdad have had to take up arms to defend the treasures of the city:
Mr Ibrahim has vanished, like so many government employees in Baghdad, and Mr Abdul-Jaber and his colleagues are now trying to defend what is left of the country's history with a collection of Kalashnikov rifles. "We don't want to have guns, but everyone must have them now," he told me. "We have to defend ourselves because the Americans have let this happen. They made a war against one man _ so why do they abandon us to this war and these criminals?"
The reaction of Baghdad citizens to American presence gets increasingly bitter:
"You are American!" a woman shouted at me in English yesterday morning, wrongly assuming I was from the US. "Go back to your country. Get out of here. You are not wanted here. We hated Saddam and now we are hating Bush because he is destroying our city." It was a mercy she could not visit the Museum of Antiquity to see for herself that the very heritage of her country _ as well as her city _ has been destroyed.
As if the plunder of the Museum of Antiquity, described by UNESCO as "a disaster" was not enough, the National Library and Archives - with invaluable handwritten records dating back at least to 16th century Ottoman rule - were burnt down the next day. Fisk reports on the wilful neglect by the American troops:
And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy yard they blew, letters of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands for ammunition for troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks on pilgrims, all in delicate hand-written Arabic script. I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history. But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?
When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning _ flames 100 feet high were bursting from the windows _ I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a colleague that "this guy says some biblical [sic] library is on fire". I gave the map location, the precise name _ in Arabic and English. I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn't an American at the scene _ and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the airÖThere was a time when the Arabs said that their books were written in Cairo, printed in Beirut and read in Baghdad. Now they burn libraries in Baghdad.
For almost a thousand years, Baghdad was the cultural capital of the Arab world, the most literate population in the Middle East. Genghis Khan's grandson burnt the city in the 13th century and, so it was said, the Tigris river ran black with the ink of books. Yesterday, the black ashes of thousands of ancient documents filled the skies of Iraq. Why?
Fisk has counted as many as 35 public buildings which the Americans have allowed to be burnt down during the first week of US occupation of Baghdad. Significantly, the two buildings well-protected from mob "fury" are the Ministry of Oil and the Ministry of the Interior (which has stores of information on Saddam Hussein's intelligence).
All the news from Baghdad is quite consistent with the view of liberation being taken in Washington. Thus, opines that genius of democracy, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "It is untidy and freedom's untidy and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things" (quoted in The Independent, April 13, 2003). This, while peace movement demonstrators, in the freest nation in the world, are tear-gassed, rubber-bulleted and thrown in prisons.
"History is bunk", said Henry Ford, that apostle of American business. The fact that the US, having just overthrown one of history's most brutal tyrants in an unprecedented display of military firepower, could not spare a tank or two to guard the last remaining artifacts of the oldest recorded human civilization is testimony to the high priority accorded to human culture in the reigning ethos of American civilization. What, after all, are a few Sumerian statues or Assyrian reliefs before an array of Blackhawks and Apaches?
Enlightened citizens of Baghdad have this message for their liberators: "A country's identity, its value and civilization resides in its history," Raid Abdul Ridhar Muhammed, an Iraqi archaeologist, told John Burns of the New York Times. "If a country's civilization is looted, as ours has been here, its history ends. Please tell this to President BushÖPlease remind him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a humiliation."
BBC reports that Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to retrieve the situation a few days after the jubilant looting and burning of Baghdad, when he promised a "recover and restore" plan for the city's Museum of Antiquity, even as Donny George, an archaeologist at the museum, said: "It was the leading collection of a... continuous history of mankind...And it's gone, and it's lost. If the marines had started before, none of this would have happenedÖIt's too late, it's no use, it's no use."
Perhaps we can look forward to a Mesopotamian Smithsonian, located not on the banks of the Tigris, but on those of the Potomac. That's where, it will be argued, the retrieved treasures of Iraq would be safest. Such indeed has often been in the past the pretext for the quiet transport of colonial treasures to London and other metropolitan cities.
Don't worry Mr.Powell, the oil-wells
Return to: Progressive South Asian Voices Against the War on Iraq - 2003