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Organized outside the country { April 18 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www2.ocregister.com/ocrweb/ocr/article.do?id=35356§ion=NEWS&subsection=FOCUS_IN_DEPTH&year=2003&month=4&day=18http://www2.ocregister.com/ocrweb/ocr/article.do?id=35356§ion=NEWS&subsection=FOCUS_IN_DEPTH&year=2003&month=4&day=18
Friday, April 18, 2003
A professional pillaging
Career thieves who had keys to vaults are blamed in the thefts of antiquities from Iraqi museums.
The Associated Press
PARIS – Professional thieves, probably organized outside Iraq, pillaged the nation's priceless ancient-history collections by using the cover of widespread looting - and vault keys - to make off with irreplaceable items, art experts and historians said Thursday.
The bandits were so efficient at emptying Iraqi libraries and museums that reports have already surfaced of artifacts appearing on the black market, some experts said. Certain thieves apparently knew exactly what they wanted from the irreplaceable Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian collections, and exactly where to find them.
"It looks as if part of the theft was a very, very deliberate, planned action," said McGuire Gibson, president of the American Association for Research in Baghdad. "It really looks like a very professional job."
Gibson was among 30 art experts and cultural historians assembled by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to assess the damage to Iraq's heritage in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion.
In Washington, the FBI announced Thursday that it had sent agents to Iraq to assist in recovering stolen antiquities. The FBI is also putting alerts on the international police network about the stolen pieces and scanning the Internet to see if any are advertised for sale.
"We are firmly committed to doing whatever we can to secure these treasures to the people of Iraq," FBI Director Robert Mueller said during a news conference at the Justice Department.
But it remained unclear exactly what was gone and what survived the looting and thievery. With many museum records now in ashes and access to Iraq still cut off, it could take weeks or months to answer those questions.
Establishing a database is key to finding out what survived and tracking down what was stolen, the experts said.
The National Museum, one of the Middle East's most important archaeological repositories, was ransacked. But it was unknown whether one of its greatest treasures, tablets containing Hammurabi's Code, one of the earliest codes of law, were there when the looting began.
The pillaging has ravaged the irreplaceable Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian collections that chronicled ancient civilization in Mesopotamia - the home of modern-day Iraq. Although much of the looting was haphazard, experts said some of it was highly organized.
"They were able to obtain keys from somewhere for the vaults and were able to take out the very important, the very best material," Gibson said. "I have a suspicion it was organized outside the country. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was."
Many at the meeting feared the stolen artifacts have been absorbed into highly organized trafficking rings that ferry the goods through middlemen to collectors in Europe, the United States and Japan.
The FBI was cooperating with the international law-enforcement organization Interpol in issuing alerts to all member nations to try to track any sales of the artifacts "on both the open and black markets," Mueller said.
Ahead of the war, Iraq's antiquities authorities gathered artifacts from around the country and moved them to National Museum in Baghdad, assuming the museum would not be bombed, Gibson said.
"They did not count on the museum being looted," he said.
The network of antiquities dealing in Iraq is well-developed, escalating far beyond the ability of authorities to stop it after the 1991 gulf war. Thousands of antiquities disappeared from Iraq even before the current war.
The trafficking feeds off Iraq's poverty-stricken people, said Salma El Radi, an Iraqi archaeologist. "If you need to feed your family and the only way to do it is by looting a site, you're going to loot a site."
Much anger has been directed at U.S. troops, who stood by and watched as Iraq's treasures were carted off.
Koichiro Matsuura, director-general of Paris-based UNESCO, called Thursday for a U.N. resolution imposing a temporary embargo on trade in Iraqi antiquities. Such a resolution would also call for the return of such items to Iraq, he said.
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