|
Illicit Antiquities |
‘Nobody gets off scot-free’
|
|
|
Although President Bush declared that ‘major combat operations in Iraq have ended’1 on 1 May 2003, the suffering of the Iraqi people continues, with over 34,000 insurgent attacks in 2005.2 Controversy persists, surrounding the justifications for the war, events during and after the conflict and the most appropriate way and time for the Coalition forces to disengage. The same can be said about the looting of the Iraq Museum, although Thieves of Baghdad attempts to set the record straight on the events between 8 April 2003 when the last staff left the Museum, and 16 April, when the US army’s C Company secured the compound. The book is authored by Matthew Bogdanos, (with William Patrick, whose contribution to the first person narrative is unclear). Bogdanos was the US Marine who, whilst heading a multi-agency counter-terrorism unit in Basra, rushed his team to Baghdad on hearing reports of the looting. With limited cooperation from all sides, they set about unravelling the complex sequence of events. In the Author’s Note, Bogdanos states that he dislikes people who go to war and write books about themselves — this book is a personal account ‘with candor and without bias or agenda’ (the author’s emphasis), relating to a team effort and celebrating the courage of servicemen, Iraqis and journalists, amongst others. Considering the selection of quotes on the book’s dust cover, and its somewhat provocative title, this reader wondered whether the ‘complexity’ Bogdanos identifies in the Museum staff applies to the author(s) too. Indeed, Thieves of Baghdad is far from being the staid forensic investigation of the events of nine days in April 2003 that it might have been. The tale deviates from initial impressions of the Museum in the first two introductory chapters, to Bogdanos’s childhood in New York, a detailed eye-witness account of 9/11, and his active service in the subsequent so-called ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan. Bogdanos then recounts his team’s counter-terrorism investigations in southern Iraq (thus perpetuating the US administration’s blurring of 9/11 and the invasion Iraq), before reaching the supposed heart of the matter, the looting of the Iraq Museum, by the end of Chapter 8. These contextual chapters undoubtedly offer much of interest to the contemporary and/or military historian, as well as the general reader, but little of relevance to the archaeologist, which, considering Culture Without Context’s raison d’être, was my primary focus in reviewing this book. Given some of the antipathies running through Thieves of Baghdad, I should state my biases at this point — I was at the time, and remain, firmly opposed to the war in Iraq, and I am happy to place myself within the group of ‘educated non-military skeptics’ that the author holds in such contempt. That said, I have also experienced my home town (in Northern Ireland) being blown up by terrorists, although significantly fewer resources and less will-power were devoted by the USA to ‘hunting down and smoking out’ such operatives and their backers prior to 9/11. My archaeological fieldwork in Afghanistan is somewhat less covert than Bogdanos’s mission there, and I have never been to Iraq, although I have worked on data from excavations in Iraq. In March 2002, as part of the Nimrud Database Project, I proposed that the British School of Archaeology in Iraq (BSAI) should apply to the British Academy for funding to create a unified catalogue of all the objects from Nimrud, many of which are in museums and collections scattered around the world. This project would have included the collation of data on, and digital photography of, the Nimrud objects in the Iraq Museum. For reasons I have never been able to ascertain, the BSAI decided not to back our proposal. When the Iraq Museum was looted a year later, the lack of accurate, up-to-date inventories and photographic records of many of the Museum’s objects severely hampered the investigation. Core to the central theme of Thieves of Baghdad, the looting of the Iraq Museum, are the following questions:
Bogdanos’s agenda, for every author has them, are to dispel the myths and inaccuracies surrounding the reporting of the looting, and to counter what he regards as the knee-jerk reactions of many prominent Mesopotamian archaeology scholars. Although he has already done this in a 50-page paper in American Journal of Archaeology 109 (2005)3, Bogdanos obviously felt the need to reach a more general audience, and to his credit he is donating the royalties from Thieves of Baghdad to the Iraq Museum. The investigation’s teasing out of the events in the Museum is thorough, as you would expect from a District Attorney of note. Bogdanos proposes a convincing theory that the crime scene encapsulated the theft of three different categories of objects (‘marquee’ items removed from the galleries; random thefts from the above-ground storage areas; and high-value, smaller items looted from the secured basement storage areas) and three different groups of perpetrators (professional thieves, targeting pre-ordered collectors’ lists of prestige items; petty thieves and mob looters venting anger at institutions associated with the Ba’athist regime; and ‘insiders’, that is corrupt and/or coerced members of the Museum staff). In his professional life, Bogdanos states that he inhabits the binary universe of guilty or not guilty: ‘No one is treated with suspicion, but everyone is a suspect until proven otherwise.’ (p. 133, author’s emphasis) — the concept of innocent until proven guilty does not seem to register, possibly because he is a prosecutor. It is also noteworthy that the book is riddled with references to ‘the bad guys’, although as early as p. 14 he states that ‘Nothing hinders a good investigation more than trying to affix moral labels such as good or bad, right or wrong, to the actions or actors in the mystery you are trying to solve’ (author’s emphases). Bogdanos also uses Thieves of Baghdad to repeat his stout defence of the actions of the Coalition’s ground troops during the ‘chaos of regime change’, reserving some of his most withering criticisms for journalist and archaeologist ‘armchair generals’ — an example of those in his sights is Prof. (sic.) Eleanor Robson, whose article in The Guardian of 18 June 2003 Bogdanos describes as being ‘wrong in every respect’ (p. 200), but the quote Bogdanos uses is not precisely accurate4 — court cases have been lost for less. His plea for archaeologists not to fall into the trap of using hyperbole when talking to the media (p. 274) is somewhat ironic in the light of this exaggeration! Bogdanos notes that American archaeologists briefed the Pentagon prior to the war about the threats to Iraq’s cultural heritage, as did British archaeologists, and accepts that criticism of the delay between the first appearance of Coalition forces near the Museum on 12 April, and securing the compound on 16 April is fair, although he assures the reader that nothing was taken during this period. The primary blame for the looting does lie with the looters, and as Bogdanos details, the looting of antiquities does have a long history, particularly in times of conflict. Many museums around the world do possess artefacts that by modern standards were acquired by looting — a disturbing number of these objects have been acquired in recent years, when the well-worn explanations/excuses for objects with vague or no provenances have been unacceptable. And whoever used the Iraq Museum as a military outpost did break the Geneva and Hague Conventions and protocols which ‘… absolutely prohibit the military use of otherwise protected cultural sites…’ (p. 202, author’s emphasis). Presumably, although he neglects to mention it, Bogdanos is similarly outraged by the Coalition’s establishment of a military camp on part of the archaeological site of Babylon and all the resultant damage5, particularly since he made a detour to Babylon whilst en route to Baghdad, to impress upon his team the importance of the cultural heritage of Iraq. Some readers might quibble over the extrapolations and ‘leaps of faith’ concerning the extent of military activity in the Iraq Museum compound, or question why, if the basement looters did have Museum staff accomplices, they did not anticipate the lack of electricity — were they really so incompetent and/or under-resourced that they did not bring a single torch, and thus had to rely on makeshift lighting from burning hunks of foam? Whatever, the archaeological world has to be thankful that the keys, which ‘torment’ (p. 277) Bogdanos so much, appear to have been dropped and lost amidst the disarray of boxes, preventing the theft of thousands of more artefacts. Bogdanos is convinced of the, at best, complicity of some Museum staff to some of the thefts (suspicions stated as early as p. 11 and oft repeated thereafter), and at the end of the book, he alludes to whom the guilty ones might be. To my non-legal mind, this section of the book (pp. 276–8) verges on the libellous and in one case offensive — none of the Museum staff have formally been charged nor given the chance to clear their names and reputations. Ultimately, the success of any investigation is determined by its results. Bogdanos presents details of how many objects were stolen, and how many have since been recovered, although it is unclear why he uses figures dating to December 2003 for some of these data. One conviction for attempting to import artefacts from the Iraq Museum into the USA is discussed, and other international customs seizures are briefly mentioned. But ‘… at least 8,500 pieces — many of them truly priceless — are still missing’ (p. 271). Bogdanos and his team should be congratulated for their efforts to unravel the complexity of the case and the retrieval of thousands of the looted objects. He is totally justified in correcting the inaccurate figures and reports that were bandied about in the aftermath of the looting, and to feel irritated by the antagonism some archaeologists and others have directed his way, rather than at his employers. Thieves of Baghdad makes a valuable contribution in demonstrating the benefits that can be derived from different agencies and academics working together in the pursuit of the illicit trade in antiquities. His call for a four-fold global strategy to address the problem is, in my opinion, eminently sensible. Bogdanos should also be commended for raising the touchy subject of archaeological involvement in Iraq, as the brutality of the regime became clear (see also Steele 2005, 55–616), although he neglects to mention that Donald Rumsfeld twice met Saddam during the 1980s7, when Iraq was the West’s ally against what was perceived as Islamic fundamentalism emanating from Iran. As Bogdanos rather frustratedly notes: ‘In truth, everything about the war had become politicized and “spun” long before we ever got to Baghdad. Everyone had his or her own agenda …’ (p. 195). The narrative flows well and has been generally well-edited — most readers would probably not pick up on the occasional errors that caught my eye: for example, the comment that Iraqis had invaded two other Arab countries (surely he is not referring to Iran as an Arab nation?! p. 141); the reference to the Hazara being around in Afghanistan during Alexander the Great’s campaigns (p. 71) is dubious — many Hazara trace their ancestry back to Chingiz Khan’s Mongol hordes; and to say that the Taliban filled the vacuum after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 (p. 67) is simplistic — Mullah Omar cited the movement’s birth as dating to July 1994. Whether you buy (in both senses of the word) this book will depend on your empathy (or lack of) for the central character, which despite his protestations, is Bogdanos himself. He repeatedly states that he is not a hero, and seeks to present a ‘warts and all’ portrait, although his references to Alexander the Great (p. 167) and Eliot Ness (p. 91), and abundant, inevitably selective, quotes from Classical authors and philosophers verge on the tedious. The frequent vignettes of ‘Bogdanos, the family man’ are of questionable relevance, other than to remind armchair generals of the personal costs of serving one’s country. To my mind, examples of Bogdanos’s blinkered view of the world and internal contradictions are strewn throughout Thieves of Baghdad — for example, the discovery of smouldering Ba’ath party files and identification cards in the Museum compound (p. 15) is sinister, whereas the fact that he was declared medically non-deployable and shredded the evidence after gaining possession of a ‘second opinion’ (p. 60) is merely an example of his circumvention of what he regards as petty military bureaucracy. More serious, given his emphasis on due process, international law and the sanctity of crime scenes is his confession to having disturbed one of Saddam’s mass graves, albeit to give succour to a grieving mother, and the fact that his team confiscated over $9 million during their investigations in the south of Iraq, and repatriated the money (surely the rightful property of the people of Iraq?) back to US military Camp Udari in Kuwait (pp. 106–7). Ultimately, however, as Bogdanos somewhat defensively says in the case of the evacuation a burnt Iraqi girl, his team did what they could, and the archaeological world should be grateful for that. Notes1. http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/05/01/bush.transcript/index.html. 2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4736768.stm. 3. The pdf file of the report can be downloaded from: http://www.ajaonline.org/index.php?ptype=content&aid=5 4. Bogdanos inserts the word ‘nest’ in his quote – cf. Dr Robson’s original text, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,979734,00.html. 5. See Dr John Curtis’s summary report of the damage done to the archaeological site, available at: http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/iraqcrisis/reports/babylon.htm. 6. Steele, C., 2005. Who has not eaten cherries with the devil?, in Archaeologies of the Midde East: Critical Perspectives, eds. S. Pollock & R. Bernbeck. Malden (MA): Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 7. National Security Archives: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/. First posted December 2006 |
