http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentID=2010020161978
Counting the cost of cultural cleansing in Iraq By Susannah Tarbush
One of the most enduring sound-bites from the April 2003 invasion of
Iraq was the then US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s dismissive
phrase “stuff happens.” He was responding to questions over the chaos
in which ministries, museums and other institutions were ransacked,
looted and burned while US troops stood by and failed to intervene.
Rumsfeld suggested that the looting was a positive sign, an
understandable targeting of the hated symbols of the ousted regime.
In
the nearly seven years following the invasion, the culture of Iraq has
continued to be ravaged. A collection of papers newly published by
Pluto Press of London and New York explores the different facets of the
onslaught on culture. The book has the provocative title “Cultural
Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums were Looted, Libraries Burned and
Academics Murdered.”
The editors of the book are Raymond W. Baker,
a politics professor of both Trinity College in the USA and the
American University in Cairo; Shereen T. Ismail, Associate Professor at
the School of Social Work, Carleton University, Canada, and Tariq Y.
Ismail, Professor of Political Science at the University of Calgary,
Canada.
The book is dedicated to the late Professor Issam Al-Rawi,
Professor of Geology at Baghdad University and Chairman of the
Association of University Teachers (AUT) who was assassinated in
October 2006. Al-Rawi had founded the register of murdered academics.
The editors of “Cultural Cleansing in Iraq” write that the destruction
of the Iraqi state has killed over a million civilians, displaced some
four million refugees abroad and internally, and led to the targeted
assassination of more than 400 academics and professionals. “All of
these terrible losses are compounded by unprecedented levels of
cultural devastation, attacks on national archives and monuments that
represent the historical identity of the Iraqi people,” they write.
They
see Iraq as a country in which the ending of the state was an objective
of the occupiers. “State destruction went beyond regime change and
included the dismantling of state institutions and the launching of a
prolonged process of political reshaping.” They draw parallels with
1980s Central America where death squads were “a foreign policy tool.”
Zainab
Bahrani – the Edith Porada Professor of Art History and Archaeology at
Columbia University, New York – argues that the damage and destruction
to Iraq’s heritage was not just due to poor planning and collateral
damage. She asks why the occupiers chose to locate military bases at
main cultural heritage sites such as Babylon, Ur and Samarra. The
establishment of these bases has causes severe damage, destroying
thousands of years of archaeological material. “Like human rights
abuses, the destruction of a people’s cultural heritage and history has
elsewhere been regarded as a war crime.”
Some contributors note
that damage to Iraqi culture started well before 2003. The former
director general of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage of
Iraq, Abbas Al-Hussainy, considers that the modern assault on Iraq’s
cultural heritage began in the second half of the 19th century. At that
time there were illegal exports of artifacts to Asia, Europe and
America.
The country’s heritage later suffered during the
Iraq-Iran war and, from 1991 onwards, under sanctions. At the same time
the regime sponsored “restoration” projects for propaganda purposes. A
notorious example was Saddam’s restoration of Babylon with his name
inscribed on each brick, in the style of Nebuchadnezzar II. The
regime’s punitive actions against the south and the destruction of the
salt marshes laid waste to the cultural riches of that area. “However,
these earlier assaults on Iraq’s Mesopotamian heritage pale in
comparison to the wreckage inflicted by the occupation of Iraq from
2003 onward,” the editors write.
The destruction of Iraq’s
collective memory is a theme running through the book. Nabil Al-Takriti
of the University of Mary Washington in the USA cites the scholar Keith
Watenpaugh’s use of the word “mnemocide” to mean the murder of cultural
memory. The push to remake Iraq has been destructive to the country’s
collective memory. As Al-Takriti puts it: “In Iraq’s case, during a
period of great chaotic flux, one country under occupation lost a great
deal of its connection to its past while certain occupying powers
profited from that loss in a variety of ways.”
Al-Takriti surveys
the huge toll looting, burning and flooding has taken on the precious
collections of documents in the Iraqi National Library and Archives
(INLA), the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs Central
Library (Awqaf Library), the Iraqi House of Manuscripts, the Iraqi
Academy of Sciences, the House of Wisdom and the Iraqi Jewish Archive.
There
are disputes over the ownership of some of the surviving documents. The
controversial Iraqi academic Kanan Makiya, who was a strong proponent
of the invasion, removed the Baath Party Archives from the Party
headquarters in 2003 and eventually took them to California. His Iraq
Memory Foundation (IMF) claimed stewardship of the archives and then
turned them over to the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. But
the director general of INLA Saad Eskander challenges the IMF’s right
to dispose of the collection.
Eskander is also involved in a
tussle between Iraq and certain Jewish claimants over the Iraqi Jewish
Archive of books, manuscripts and records that was recovered by US
troops from a sewage-flooded basement. The Iraqi Culture Ministry
agreed that the collection should be moved to the US for preservation,
but it was supposed to be returned after two years. Now Iraq is
pressing for its return. Explaining why the archive should be returned,
Eskander has said: “Iraqis must know that we are a diverse people, with
different traditions, different religions, and we need to accept this
diversity...To show it to our people that Baghdad was always
multiethnic.” But certain influential Jewish personalities and circles
in the US object to the return to Iraq.
Philip Marfleet, Reader in
Refugee Studies and Director of the Refugee Research Centre at the
University of East London, warns that the scattering of Iraqi
intellectuals worldwide is “making the prospect of return and
reconsolidation of the country’s academic, professional and technical
cadres increasingly difficult, leaving a gaping hole in its human
resources. A loss of this magnitude will certainly affect the wider
society for generations to come.”
The Iraqi intelligentsia is in
effect being evacuated; hence the presence in Iraqi refugee communities
of disproportionately large numbers of academics, writers, journalists
and artists. - SG
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