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Thousands of items looted insists Iraqi antiquities chief
By Fatima Al Issawi
Agence France-Presse
Jordan Times, 5/28/03
AMMAN — Iraq's antiquities department head Jaber Khalil said here Tuesday that thousands of artefacts were stolen from Iraqi museums, dismissing reports that fewer objects were looted than initially feared.
“There is a deliberate campaign to play down the damage done to Iraq's antiquities,” Khalil told AFP on the sidelines of a regional conference on retrieving Iraqi antiquities looted from Baghdad.
But Khalil declined to identify who was behind raids into the National Museum in Baghdad and other sites, after Saddam Hussein was deposed last month.
“There are 38 very valuable pieces that were stolen from the Baghdad museum, while objects stolen from its warehouses are in the thousands,” Khalil said.
Koichiro Matsuura, director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), said on May 19 that hundreds of items were stolen from the Baghdad museum during the war in Iraq rather than the tens of thousands first thought.
And an earlier report by the US military said that many antiquities escaped the looting of the Baghdad museum.
But according to Khalil, valuable items such as statues, bronze objects and others have disappeared.
A UNESCO-led team of international experts last week condemned the “terrible loss” of cultural property in Iraq at the end of a four-day fact-finding mission in Baghdad of key sites looted in the war.
“This visit confirms the terrible loss of cultural property in Iraq. It is a disaster, really a disaster,” Munir Bouchenaki, assistant director general at the UN's culture agency, told a press conference in Jordan.
According to Khalil, the museum has been able to recover 450 stolen items, which were returned to the antiquities department by a single individual.
“So you see, how can they speak of only hundreds of stolen items?” he asked.
According to Khalil, a media organisation, which he did not name, tipped the museum staff of the existence of the 450 stolen items and helped lead them to their return.
Khalil said he stayed in the museum along with another employee throughout the war and until April 9, when Baghdad fell to US troops.
“During the war we took measures to protect the museum and before leaving we sealed off doors to prevent the looting but we could not remove the bigger pieces,” he said.
“After the US and British troops entered Baghdad, I went to see a Marines officer and I asked him to help us. He promised to send a military unit but it only arrived four days later,” Khalil said.
Museum staff are currently making an inventory of the stolen items, using a list of museum pieces that Khalil was able to keep safe during the war, the official said.
But it is “slow and painstaking work because of the lack of proper equipment and insecurity,” Khalil said. “This work will need months because there is a lot to do.”
Khalil is also using his personal contacts to help recover the objects stolen from the museum.
“I have spoken to Muslim clerics and they have gone out using loudspeakers to address the people in the villages and the towns, urging them to return anything that was stolen,” he said.
“We were able to retrieve some pieces but very few,” he said.
US and British troops are also helping Khalil and his staff by recovering stolen goods and now provide protection for the museum, in addition to giving staff $20 to make up for unpaid salaries.
Work was also under way to inventory stolen goods taken from the museum in Mosul that has also been devastated by looters, Khalil said.
Khalil is among several experts from Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq attending a three-day conference in Amman organised by the Morocco-based Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |