Troop movements in Iraq damaging its historic past

The London News.Net
Monday 17th September, 2007 (ANI)

London, Sept.17 : The massive movements of troops through battle-scarred Iraq is damaging that country's valuable historic past, a report in The Independent has claimed.

The near total destruction of Iraq's historic past - the very cradle of human civilisation - has emerged as one of the most shameful symbols of the U.S.-led operation, say archaeologists.

US officers have repeatedly said a large American base built at Babylon was to protect the site, but Iraqi archaeologist Zainab Bah-rani, a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University, says this "beggars belief".

"Even if US forces had wanted to protect it, placing guards round the site would have been far more sensible than bulldozing it and setting up the largest coalition military headquarters in the region," she says.

The use of heritage sites as military bases is a breach of the Hague Convention and Protocol of 1954 (chapter 1, article 5) which covers periods of occupation; although the US did not ratify the Convention, Italy, Poland, Australia and Holland, all of whom sent forces to Iraq, are contracting parties.

According to archaeologists, Iraqis who trained as archaeological workers in Saddam Hussein's regime are now using their knowledge to join the looters in digging through ancient cities, destroying thousands of priceless jars, bottles and other artefacts in their search for gold and other treasures.

Following the 1991 Gulf War, armies of looters moved in on the desert cities of southern Iraq and at least 13 Iraqi museums were plundered.

Today, almost every archaeological site in southern Iraq is under the control of looters.

In a long and devastating appraisal to be published in December, Lebanese archaeologist Joanne Farchakh says that armies of looters have not spared "one metre of these Sumerian capitals that have been buried under the sand for thousands of years.

"They systematically destroyed the remains of this civilisation in their tireless search for sellable artefacts: ancient cities, covering an estimated surface area of 20 square kilometres, which - if properly excavated - could have provided extensive new information concerning the development of the human race, Farchakh said.

Farchakh helped with the original investigation into stolen treasures from the Baghdad Archaeological Museum in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, and she now says Iraq may soon end up with no history.

"There are 10,000 archaeological sites in the country. In the Nassariyah area alone, there are about 840 Sumerian sites; they have all been systematically looted," she said.

Quite apart from this, military operations are damaging these sites forever. There's been a US base in Ur for five years and the walls are cracking because of the weight of military vehicles. It's like putting an archaeological site under a continuous earthquake," she added.

Ur is regarded as the most important ancient cities of Iraq. Many believe it to be the home of the Prophet Abraham.

Police efforts to break the power of the looters, now with a well-organised support structure helped by tribal leaders, have proved lethal.

In 2005, the Iraqi customs arrested - with the help of Western troops - several antiquities dealers in the town of Al Fajr, near Nasseriyah. They seized hundreds of artefacts and decided to take them to the museum in Baghdad. It was a fatal mistake.

The convoy was stopped a few miles from Baghdad, eight of the customs agents were murdered, and their bodies burnt and left to rot in the desert. The artefacts disappeared.

"It was a clear message from the antiquities dealers to the world," Farchakh says.

The legions of antiquities looters work within a smooth mass-smuggling organisation. Trucks, cars, planes and boats take Iraq's historical plunder to Europe, the US, to the United Arab Emirates and to Japan.

The archaeologists say an ever-growing number of Internet websites offer Mesopotamian artefacts -- objects anywhere up to 7,000 years old.

The farmers of southern Iraq are now professional looters, knowing how to outline the walls of buried buildings and able to break directly into rooms and tombs.

The archaeologists' report says: "They have been trained in how to rob the world of its past and they have been making significant profit from it. They know the value of each object and it is difficult to see why they would stop looting."

Farchakh adds: "The longer Iraq finds itself in a state of war, the more the cradle of civilisation is threatened. It may not even last for our grandchildren to learn from."

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