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Some items returned { April 24 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27412-2003Apr23.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27412-2003Apr23.html
Slowly, Loot Is Being Returned to Museum
Some Artifacts Were Taken for Safekeeping; Thieves Urged to Bring Others Back
By Monte Reel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 24, 2003; Page A01
BAGHDAD, April 23 -- The blue Kia minivan rolled through the guarded gates of the National Museum of Antiquities early this afternoon, loaded with a precious cargo of metals and minerals: a bronze relief from the 4th century B.C. swathed in yellow foam padding, antique farm implements, an elaborately engraved marble slab wrapped in plastic, a decapitated statue of an Assyrian king.
Also inside the van was Namir Ibrahim Jamil, a 33-year-old Iraqi pianist who said that 11 days ago he watched in horror as looters ransacked the museum, hauling away as much of Iraq's tangible legacy as they could carry. He said he decided to do the same -- not to seek a fortune on the black market, but to hide the antiquities in his house until it was safe to return them.
U.S. forces have drawn worldwide criticism for failing to quickly seal off the museum as they seized Baghdad, allowing the plunder of one of the world's greatest collections of artifacts from Mesopotamia and other ancient civilizations of the Tigris-Euphrates valley.
Now, as Iraqi and U.S. officials try to calculate the cultural casualties of the war's riotous close, they are discovering that not all was lost. At least a small portion of the thousands of objects that disappeared, it seems, were tucked away for safekeeping.
Officials are also using tips from citizens to hunt down stolen items, and trying to prevail on thieves to turn them in voluntarily. Muslim clerics, at the officials' urging, have announced over mosque loudspeakers that anyone with looted items should return them to museum curators, no questions asked. U.S. reconstruction officials said they plan to air similar messages on Iraqi radio stations starting tonight.
"It's already working," said John Limbert, the U.S. ambassador to Mauritania, who is serving as adviser to Iraq's Culture Ministry for the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the U.S. postwar agency for Iraq. "I've heard from our friends that a number of objects were collected in mosques in the neighborhood after appeals from the imams of the mosques."
Jamil's story begins with a detour. As he recounts it, on April 12 he drove to the city of Karbala to pick up relatives who had fled Baghdad before the war. When he returned to the capital, U.S. military roadblocks forced him to take an alternate route, past the museum. There he saw the looting and decided to act, he said. His brother and a brother-in-law joined with him in entering the opened gates of the museum, where they grabbed everything they could.
For Jamil, a longtime student of the piano, culture had generally meant the compositions of Bach and Beethoven, but he said he remembered lessons in Iraqi history from his school days. He recognized the statue of Assyrian King Shalmaneser III, which lay in several pieces on the floor. He collected all the fragments, including slivers that had been chipped away from a blow to the statue's midsection.
"It is our history, our heritage, our civilization," Jamil said today. "So I knew it was a very valuable thing."
They filled the van and drove it home, then returned for another load. At his home, he gathered foam and plastic and wrapped the art objects. The next day, he contacted Donny George, director general of research and study for the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities, to tell him what he had.
Today George was at the museum and said he had told Jamil to keep the things until the museum was secure.
"I am so happy," George said, patting his heart with affection for Jamil.
George embraced him by the door of his van; Jamil sobbed in his arms. Other people carried the returned items through the door and under the domed ceiling of the museum's lobby, which -- like almost every other government building in Iraq -- is decorated with a painting of the now deposed president, Saddam Hussein.
Just minutes after Jamil arrived with his second van load, a U.S. Army truck pulled up at the museum carrying about 80 Iraqi paintings, the oldest of them dating to the 19th century. Officers with the 308th Civil Affairs Brigade said they recovered the paintings from a sewage-flooded vault in a heavily damaged building about a quarter-mile from the museum.
Some of the paintings had frames still dripping with water, some had jagged rips in the canvas. "They had these paintings just sitting in the water," said Col. Vincent Foulk, of Urbana, Ohio. "In some cases, you could see paint literally dripping off."
Museum officials said they expect to recover other items that had been locked away at locations outside the museum, including gold objects moved for safekeeping before the war. Finding people with keys to the safes, however, has been vexing, according to U.S. civil affairs officers.
And creating a reliable inventory of museum holdings has been complicated by the museum's lack of detailed records.
John Curtis, director of the British Museum in London, is coming to Baghdad to spearhead an international effort to catalog the holdings, according to a spokesman for the U.S. reconstruction agency. "What they need to do, and what they haven't been able to do so far, is to inventory what's gone, what's saved and what needs to be restored," Limbert said.
Some of the museum's collection was carried off in the 1990s by members of Hussein's government, according to Iraqi antiquities officials. Archaeologists who work for the Culture Ministry said today that Baath Party officials periodically confiscated gold and other valuables from the museum, possibly to be sold on international underground markets. The officials said they don't expect to see those valuables again.
U.S. customs and military officers have launched an investigation of the looting, interviewing museum officials and trying to assemble lists of museum holdings. The investigation is led by reserve Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanus. When he's not in uniform, Bogdanus is a New York City assistant district attorney whose case file includes the highly publicized arms case against rap musician P. Diddy.
Bogdanus said today he had been working on a classified mission in another area of Iraq but was pulled off the case early this week to focus on the museum. "We are conducting a criminal investigation and treating this as a crime scene," he said. "Obviously it's a contaminated crime scene, because we didn't get here fast enough."
The case has some built-in intrigue thanks to a curious pattern of looting discovered by museum workers. Many prized items were taken, while some of the less valuable holdings were left behind. A gypsum facsimile of the Code of Hammurabi, a collection of laws dating to approximately 1750 B.C., was left untouched, for example, while the valuable heads of statues from the ancient city of Hatra were broken off and taken. The seemingly selective pattern has led some to believe it was an inside job.
"There are obviously multiple theories, and none are mutually exclusive," Bogdanus said. "One would be that this was done by people who knew exactly what they were doing."
But Bogdanus said he's not jumping to conclusions. He said many Iraqis might have been reasonably familiar with Iraqi artifacts, just as he's reasonably familiar with American ones. "I think I'd know what to steal at the Met," he said, referring to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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