Tales from the Vitrine: Battles Over Stolen Antiquities (Page 4)

Catastrophe! includes a day-by-day retelling of the looting of the Iraq Museum, an event that also features prominently in Thieves of Baghdad (2005), Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos's first-person account of leading the museum's restoration effort. According to Donny George, a former director of the museum (he fled Iraq in 2006), the first looters were professional thieves who knew exactly what to target, and it's likely that many of them were linked to former or current museum employees. Later waves appear to have been more local, casual and indiscriminately destructive. Many of the writers of Catastrophe! blame the US Army for not securing the museum and Iraq's archaeological sites quickly enough or with sufficient manpower. Gibson and Russell describe the days leading up to the invasion and the years since as a frustrating series of memos ignored, phone calls unreturned. Atwood tells the story of a group of Iraqi curators and their two guards trying to defend the 3,500-year-old city of Nimrud from looters in the first days after Saddam's fall. After weeks spent dodging Kalashnikov bullets and watching as the looters carved slices of Assyrian friezes out of the walls with stonecutting tools, the Iraqis requested additional American protection; an infantry battalion finally showed up in May, too late to save the most important pieces. Bogdanos, on the other hand, details his exasperation with archaeologists who assumed the Army had total mobility throughout Iraq in the early days of the occupation. He points out that Saddam's army had used the museum as a fortress, and that securing it immediately would have required its bombing.

But everyone from Bogdanos to Russell, except Cuno, agrees that the vast illegal antiquities trade is the major impediment to curtailing looting in Iraq. Russell tells us that "as long as an unfettered worldwide market for Iraqi antiquities is allowed to provide the funding for this 'Iraqi problem,' the problem will not go away." Bogdanos, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, disdains museums and dealers who buy stolen antiquities as having "no honor, no code, no rules." There is also a security argument against abetting antiquities smuggling, as smugglers who carry weapons and drugs out of Iraq often deal in antiquities as well, and the sale of antiquities appears to help fund the insurgency. Bogdanos mentions the discovery of a weapons cache in Anbar province in 2005: along with guns and armor, marines found more than thirty pieces from the collection of the Iraq Museum.

All of this puts the lie to Cuno's permissive stance on buying objects of dubious provenance. Cuno writes, "No museum has ever endorsed the looting of archaeological sites and the loss of the knowledge they contain. But in many respects, when faced with the choice whether or not to acquire an undocumented antiquity, the looting of the archaeological site has already occurred and the knowledge that may have been gained from the careful study of an antiquity's archaeological context has already been lost." Given the choice between condemning an item to the black market and "bringing it into the public domain," he reckons, why, "putting aside the legal risks," should a reputable museum hesitate to buy? And given that the Iraq Museum is presently under the control of Muqtada al-Sadr, why would we be eager to return the valuable flotsam that has washed up in the United States, Jordan, Switzerland and Japan?

Cuno's slipshod reasoning--his creation of a false dichotomy between buying antiquities illegally and abandoning them to the purgatory of the black market, his dismissal of the legal and ethical reasons for taking a stand against the purchase of antiquities that are likely to have been stolen--reveals the bankruptcy of his argument. To posit that nationalism is the only reason a source country would cherish its cultural patrimony is to rationalize thievery; the argument also diminishes the great power these objects hold, as evidenced by the numerous Iraqi civilians who risked their lives to protect the ancient artifacts of their land, such as the five staff members who holed up in the Iraq Museum during the first days of the invasion. Even many of the casual looters Bogdanos described seemed enthralled by, and desperate to protect, the objects they were "liberating." That may not be art for art's sake, but it isn't "nationalist retentionism" either. Substitute Iraq for Egypt or Benin, and the selfish oversimplifications of Cuno's defense become clear. Sometimes the best test for arguments about the past is a more thorough look at the present.

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