Iraq’s national museum is identified as a ”prime target for looters” and should be the second top priority for securing by coalition troops after the national bank, says a memo sent last month by the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), set up to supervise the reconstruction of postwar Iraq.
Looting of the museum could mean ”irreparable loss of cultural treasures of enormous importance to all humanity”, the document concluded. But the US army still failed to post soldiers outside the museum, and it was ransacked, with more than 270 000 artefacts taken.
General Jay Garner, the head of ORHA, is said to be ”livid”. ”We asked for just a few soldiers at each building or, if they feared snipers, then just one or two tanks,” said one ORHA official. ”The tanks were doing nothing once they got inside the city, yet the generals refused to deploy them, and look what happened.”
More than two weeks after the March memo was sent, ORHA was told it had not even been read. The official admitted, however, that ORHA had not identified hospitals – which were also ransacked – as a potential target, as they had not imagined that the Iraqis would resort to ”killing their own people”.
The warnings were echoed yesterday by American archaeologists, who have tried for three months to persuade the Bush administration of the risk to antiquities.
Its sacking was ”completely predictable”, says the president of the Archaeological Institute of America, Jane Walbaum. A week before the looting, one of the institute’s members, Patty Gerstenblith of De Paul University, wrote to Major Christopher Varhola, a US army civil affairs officer in Kuwait, asking for troops to be stationed at the museum.
”I am stressing this hard to the ground commander, but unfortunately I do not have good news for you,” Major Varhola replied.
British newspaper The Observer has seen documents submitted to senior US generals by ORHA on 26 March, listing 16 institutions that ”merit securing as soon as possible to prevent further damage, destruction and or pilferage of records and assets”. First was the national bank, next came the museum. The Oil Ministry, which has been carefully guarded, came sixteenth on a list of 16.
The memo said ”looters should be arrested/detained”, yet US troops continued to pass by looters carting off their booty, and no tanks appeared in front of these buildings for days.
”It’s a tragedy and a disaster for our image and for rebuilding Iraq,” said one ORHA official.
Around 20 artefacts stolen from the museum have been returned, but thousands remain missing. The US has sent a team of FBI agents to investigate claims that some items may have been stolen to order.
Martin Sullivan, the chair of President Bush’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Property, has already resigned over the issue, saying it was ”inexcusable” that the museum should not have had the same priority as the Iraqi Oil Ministry.
The US military argues that its primary job in the first few days was to quell armed resistance in Baghdad, and that it could not tackle looters until it had finished fighting a war. – Guardian Unlimited Â