The British Museum has announced a taskforce of conservators and curators, funded by an anonymous private donor, to go to the rescue of Iraq’s ravaged museums.
The culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, yesterday pledged the government’s support and promised that Britain will not become a market place for looted Iraqi antiquities.
Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, said: ”Although we still await precise information, it is clear that a catastrophe has befallen the cultural heritage of Iraq.”
The museum is considering the unprecedented move of arranging extended loans or gifts from its vast stores to help recreate the shattered displays when Iraqi museums reopen. It has the world’s greatest Mesopotamian collection outside Iraq.
Dr MacGregor announced the creation of a team of six conservators and three curators to work in London until it is safe to travel to Iraq.
Tomorrow he will meet officials from Unesco, the United Nations cultural agency, to consider the crisis. He has also invited experts from some of the world’s greatest museums, including the Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan in New York, to London in the next few weeks to help and advise.
The news was greeted with joy by historians and archaeologists. Dai Morgan Evans, secretary of the Society of Antiquaries, said: ”This is splen did news, it is exactly the sort of thing the museum should be doing.”
Until Iraqi and London museum staff can meet, the London team will compile and publish as comprehensive a list as possible of what has been lost and destroyed.
An estimated 170 000 objects are missing from the museum in Baghdad and the Mosul museum was also ransacked, but it is still impossible to tell how many have been stolen and how many destroyed. Dr MacGregor said that while some of the destruction was mob violence, there was also systematic, organised looting.
The British Museum’s work has received moral support but funding from the government. Instead, a private donor is believed to be making avail able an initial six-figure sum.
MacGregor called on international art and antiquity dealers to declare a complete ban on trading in Iraqi artefacts and to pledge to return any which turned up: there was a precedent, he said, in the voluntary agreement in 1943 not to handle works of art looted by the Nazis.
Yesterday a clearly embarrassed Jowell insisted the government could not have predicted the destruction — despite archaeologists and historians, including British Museum experts, warning for months of such an outcome.
She said the initiative ”will have mine and my government’s support every step of the way”. – Guardian Unlimited Â