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Thursday, April 17, 2003

By Joseph Coleman, Associated Press Writer

A pattern is beginning to emerge amidst the littered ruins of Iraq's ravaged museums and libraries. As curators, law enforcement and others scramble to assess the damage, they are discovering clues not only in what is missing, but what is not.

Iraqi Minister of Culture and Information Hymam Abdulkhaliq, leads a crowd through the Iraq Museum after it was reopened in two years ago, after being closed for a decade. The museum was ransacked during the takeover of Baghdad. The search has begun to assess the damage, document what's missing and try to recover pilfered antiquities. (Jassim Mohammed, Associated Press) RELATED STORIES On the Arts: Americans underestimate value of art here and in Iraq Museums try to keep stolen Iraq antiquities off market

The Knight Ridder news service reported yesterday that museum officials think most of the looters were looking for items that would be useful in daily life, such as office machines and furniture, and that only selected antiquities were taken.

Replicas of artifacts, which would look authentic to members of an angry mob, appear to be untouched. The national museum's Egypt collection, valuable but not particularly unique, also was left alone.

"The people who came in here knew what they wanted," Donny George, director general of Iraq's state board of antiquities, told Knight Ridder. "These were not random looters."

That may be good news, according to some U.S. experts.

Clemens Michel, a University of Chicago archaeologsit who specializes in Mesopotamia, told Knight Ridder that the possibility the theft was carried out by knowledgeable thieves lessens the likelihood that priceless artifacts might be melted down for the value of their metal.

The key to recovering the antiquities, experts say, will be to collect photographs and descriptions of what's lost and spread the word so customs agents, museums and collectors can identify stolen pieces.

"When a very important painting of Manet or Van Gogh is taken from a museum, it is very difficult to put it on sale on the market because these objects are very well known," said Mounir Bouchenaki, UNESCO's assistant director-general for culture.

The art world has high interest in the damage to Iraqi museum inventories, which contain vital information on the holdings. The records office of the National Museum, for example, was ransacked, though it was not clear what was destroyed.

Some say theft or destruction of records could also indicate a professional job.

"The purpose obviously is you're making it harder for material to be identified and be claimed in the future," said Neil Brodie, of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge, England. "So if there was any organization, that to me is one indication of it."

Details on the state of Iraq's museums were still sketchy yesterday, and Bouchenaki and others were hesitant to speculate on what had been lost or whether the looting had been highly organized.

The Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has planned a meeting of 30 experts Thursday to try to catalog what's missing. Bouchenaki said he also has urged Iraq's neighbors to tighten customs checks for pilfered treasures, and he is enlisting the help of Interpol.

There are also questions about the quality of Iraqi records. The museums were low on cash and equipment needed to photograph and otherwise properly document and catalog what they had.

"Documentation is very important," said Jacques Perot, president of the International Council of Museums in Paris. "The Iraqi museums were a bit isolated in the museum world."

By all accounts, their collections were stunning.

Modern-day Iraq is home to ancient Mesopotamia, considered the cradle of civilization. Iraqi museum and library collections chronicled and illustrated the flowering of ancient cultures, as well as Baghdad's later role as an Islamic center.

Among the National Museum's treasures were the tablets with Hammurabi's Code, one of the earliest codes of law. It still is not clear whether the tablets were at the museum when it was sacked.

A preliminary survey provided a limited indication of the types of treasures missing or destroyed: a four-millennia-old copper head of an Akkadian king, golden bowls, imposing statues and ancient manuscripts.

Such items would be highly prized in the underground antiquities market, which stretches from local bands of looters to larger gangs and networks often linked to drug trafficking.

Looted goods typically are smuggled across borders and change hands many times, making their origins murky by the time they make it to dealers and auctioneers in Europe, the United States and Japan.

Since the 1970s, organizations like UNESCO have pushed for tighter controls on what museums consider acceptable purchases, and the International Council of Museums has issued ethical guidelines for dealers.

But the illegal trade is being fueled by several trends: the Internet has provided a hard-to-control forum for illicit auctions and technology has given looters better tools to find treasures in tombs and other archaeological sites. Exploitation of sites in Asia and Africa is booming.

Because the trade is clandestine, experts say it is nearly impossible to define the size of the market. Estimates of the money changing hands over pilfered antiquities range widely, to as high as US$4 billion, Brodie said.

The network of illicit antiquities dealing in Iraq also is well-developed; thousands of antiquities had disappeared from the country even before the current war.

Given the scale of the destruction in Iraq, some doubt authorities will have much luck tracking lost items.

Walter Sommerfeld, professor of Ancient Oriental Studies at the University of Marburg in Germany, said the artifacts would likely disappear into the collections outside Iraq.

"Iraq has no lobby, it can't defend itself," he said. "The best we can do is to make the public aware of the importance of the loss."