Abstract
As the head of the investigation into one of the greatest art crimes in recent memory – the looting of the Iraq Museum in 2003 – I have spent more than 6 years attempting to recover and return to the Iraqi people their priceless heritage (Bogdanos 2005a, b). I have spent a significant amount of that time, however, attempting to correct the almost universal misconceptions about what happened at the museum in those fateful days in April 2003, to increase awareness of the continuing cultural catastrophe that is represented by the illegal trade in stolen antiquities, and to highlight the need for the concerted and cooperative efforts of the international community to preserve, protect, and recover the shared cultural heritage of all humanity.
Parts of the following chapter are adapted from Thieves of Baghdad: One Marine’s Passion to Recover the World’s Greatest Stolen Treasures (Bloomsbury 2005). Copyright © 2005 by Matthew Bogdanos. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury USA.
Colonel Bogdanos has been an assistant district attorney in New York City since 1988. A colonel in the US Marine Corps Reserves, middleweight boxer, author, and native New Yorker, he holds advanced degrees in law, classics, and military strategy. Recalled to active duty after September 11, 2001, he received a Bronze Star for counterterrorist operations in Afghanistan, served multiple tours in Iraq and the Horn of Africa, and received a 2005 National Humanities Medal for his work recovering Iraq’s treasures, before deploying again to Afghanistan in 2009. He has returned to the DA’s Office and continues the hunt for stolen antiquities. His royalties from his book, Thieves of Baghdad, are donated to the Iraq Museum.
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Notes
- 1.
His full quote was more colorful: “And the only problem with reports that the museum was ‘looted under the very noses of the Yanks, or by the Yanks themselves’ is that it’s nonsense. It isn’t true. It’s made up. It’s bollocks” (Aaronovitch 2003).
- 2.
Ahmed Kamel, the museum’s deputy director and head of the museum’s cuneiform section, shared his surprise, remarking that “we didn’t think anybody would come here and steal things because it has never happened before” (Harris 2004).
- 3.
See the “Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions” of August 12, 1949 (Protocol I), June 8, 1977; “Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions” of August 12, 1949 (Protocol II), June 8, 1977; “Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict,” The Hague, May 14, 1954; “Protocol for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict” (Protocol I), The Hague, May 14, 1954; “Second Protocol to the Hague Convention of 1954 for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict” (Protocol II), The Hague, March 26, 1999.
- 4.
An RPG, or Raketniy Protivotankoviy Granatomet, is a shoulder-fired weapon, using an 85-mm armor-piercing shaped warhead capable of penetrating up to 35 cm of armor. The ubiquitous RPG-7 weighs 8.5 kg with its warhead and is devastatingly effective up to 500 m against a stationary target and 300 m against a moving target. An RPG-7 can penetrate the US Army’s Bradley armored personnel carrier, and although it cannot penetrate the heavily armored portions of the US Army’s main battle tank, the M1A1 Abrams, there are areas of the tank that are vulnerable.
- 5.
An AK-47, or Automat Kalashnikova Model 1947, is an assault rifle capable of firing up to 600 rounds per minute in its automatic fire mode. Its 7.62-by-39-mm bullet can penetrate US body armor and is lethal to 300 m.
- 6.
For this well-researched account, Roger Atwood interviewed approximately 30 neighborhood residents in addition to museum staff.
- 7.
When we had arrived 2 weeks earlier, and I had seen the infamous hole in the façade of the Children’s Museum, I was furious and began to understand the world-wide condemnation. ThenI saw the evidence. The tank gunner had fired only after someone had fired an RPG, rocket-propelled grenade, at him from that building. On the roof, we found a stash of RPGs and, inside, blood splatter whose pattern suggested that at least two shooters had been on the third floor when the round hit its mark(s).
- 8.
“All it would have taken was a tank parked at the gate,” said Jane Waldbaum, president of the American Institute of Archaeology, in USA Today, April 14, 2003.
- 9.
In a similar vein, some critics complained about how coalition forces protected the oil ministry, but not the museum. What those critics failed to take into account is that to “secure” a building in combat, you usually have to physically occupy it, at least temporarily. If the building is fortified, that means a battle. In this comparison, there are three facts that such critics blithely ignore. First, the “securing” of the oil ministry began with US air strikes on April 9. It was a lawful target, and coalition forces dropped a bomb on it. No one was going to bomb the museum. Second, the oil ministry did not contain soldiers – it had not been turned into a fortress that housed armed combatants. The museum was filled with Republican Guards shooting at Americans with automatic weapons and tank-killer rocket-propelled grenades. Finally, the oil ministry is just one building – the coalition “secured” it in less than an hour. The museum was an 11-acre complex of interconnecting and overlapping buildings and courtyards. Securing it would have required a serious firefight that would likely have reduced the place to expensive rubble. Comparing the museum with the oil ministry, then, is more politics-based than fact-based.
- 10.
Although the use of nonlethal measures such as tear gas might have satisfied legal standards, several factors would have argued against their employment. First, even “nonlethal” measures sometimes result in death, particularly among the elderly and children. Second, there is the question of effectiveness. Nonlethal measures would have dispersed the looters (and have caused them to drop larger items). But most of the looted items were the smaller excavation-site pieces, and the use of tear gas, for example, would not necessarily have caused the looters to empty their pockets or drop their bags as they ran away. Finally, while it is easy to judge these events with the benefit of hindsight, any argument that US military should have used force, nonlethal or otherwise, to disperse a crowd at the museum, must first consider the extraordinarily negative reaction it would have been expected to cause among a people that in April 2003 believed that such governmental sponsored violence had ended with the fall of the Hussein regime.
- 11.
Both of the standard-issue rifles for US forces, the full-size M16A2 as well as the smaller M4 carbine, fire a NATO bullet that measures 5.56 mm in diameter and 45 mm in length, weighs 3.95 g, and leaves the muzzle at a velocity of 905.5 (M4) or 974.1 (M16A2) m per second. The bullets return to the ground at lethal terminal velocity.
- 12.
See, for example, Rule 4.1: “800th Military Police Brigade Rules of Engagement for Operations in Iraq,” (declassified on November 1, 2003). As is standard procedure in all US military operations, all US forces deployed to Iraq were given a pocket card providing guidance for the use of force. Such rules of engagement were, as is usually the case, more restrictive than those permitted under international law.
- 13.
In 2005, Rule 4.1 was replaced by Rule 4.2 (b) (4), which permitted a warning shot under very specific circumstances.
- 14.
As will be made clear farther on, this tripartite scheme of criminality does not include tens of thousands of items that were removed from the museum in the weeks, months, years, and – in some cases – decades prior to the war, removal that was sometimes altruistic and sometimes not.
- 15.
The 27 bricks with royal inscriptions had been placed in chronological order from the cuneiform tablets of Eannatum I (ruler of Lagash, ca. 2470 bc), Naram-Sin (king of Akkad, ca. 2250 bc), and Hammurabi (king of Babylonia, 1792–1750 bc) to Assurnasirpal (ruler of Assyria, 885–858 bc), Nebuchadnezzar (king of Babylon, 605–562 bc), and – the most recent – a Latin-inscribed brick from a Roman barracks of the first century bc. The nine that were stolen were carefully selected.
- 16.
“Glass cutters left behind at the scene are viewed as another indication of professionals at work alongside the mob” (Rose 2003). Another popular claim is that these professionals “brought equipment to lift some of the heavier pieces” (Deblauwe, quoted in Elich 2004). No one brought any such equipment to the museum. At least, no one used any such equipment. In the case of the Bassetki Statue, we followed the cracks in the floor made by thieves who dropped it several times, and who certainly had no equipment at hand to assist them.
- 17.
The Sacred Vase of Warka, dating from ca. 3200 bc, depicts Sumerians offering gifts to Inanna, the patron goddess of Uruk (modern Warka, the biblical Erech). The 1.06-m alabaster vase was discovered by a German archaeological team in 1940 at Warka, near al-Samawa, in southern Iraq, and was justifiably the pride of the Iraq Museum.
- 18.
The gold bull’s head that adorned Queen Puabi’s Golden Harp of Ur, from the Early Dynastic III period (ca. 2600–2500 bc), was discovered in 1929 by a joint British–American archaeological team led by the archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley.
- 19.
The Mask of Warka is an exquisite life-size limestone head from ca. 3100 bc. Unearthed by a German expedition in 1938 it possibly represents the goddess Inanna. The “Lioness Attacking a Nubian” is an extraordinary eighth century bc chryselephantine ivory plaque inlaid with lapis and carnelian and overlaid with gold. Joan Oates, a fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, recalled for me Sir Max Mallowan’s 1951 discovery of the 10.4-by-9.8-cm plaque atthe bottom of a well at Nimrud. Two such plaques are known to exist; the other is in the British Museum.
- 20.
In the absence of any master inventory, the numbers of missing items are based on the museum’s staff’s hand counting – shelf by shelf, aisle by aisle, room by room – those items still present and comparing those objects with the excavation catalogue for the particular site represented by that shelf and then writing out in longhand a list of the missing items by designation. Thus, the numbers will change as each shelf and box in each aisle in each room is inventoried and is likely to take many years.
- 21.
Altogether, the museum had approximately 15,000 cylinder seals in its collection in four different locations. One-third, then, was stolen by the insiders.
- 22.
The Bassetki Statue, so called because it was discovered by a road construction crew in the 1960s near the town of Bassetki, in northern Iraq, dates to the Akkadian period (ca. 2250 bc). Cast in pure copper and weighing about 150 kg, it has three columns of text inscribed on the base that record the building of a temple and suggest that the statue once stood in the palace of Sargon’s grandson, Naram-Sin, king of Akkad (ca. 2254 bc). The museum housed twin bulls from the façade of a temple in Tell al-Ubaid, in southern Iraq, built by Mesannipadda, king of Ur (ca. 2475 bc), and dedicated to the mother goddess Ninhursag. Among the oldest known bulls in relief, they were ripped from the wall in the Sumerian room on the second floor of the museum.
- 23.
Jordan (2,450 items, see Mcelroy 2008); United States (1,046 items); Italy (833 items, see Reuters 2008 and Bogdanos 2005b); Syria (701 items, see Associated Press 2008); Dubai (100 items, see McClenaghan 2008); Lebanon (57 items, see Agence France-Presse 2008); Kuwait (38 items); and Saudi Arabia (18 items). Shockingly, no antiquities have been seized (or, to be more precise, acknowledged to have been seized) by the two border nations of Turkey and Iran. Nor have we ever been able to verify any seizures by French or Swiss authorities – despite reports of such seizures in 2005.
- 24.
From 1922 to 1934, Sir Leonard Woolley excavated approximately 1,850 graves near the Sumerian city of Ur, describing 16 of them (ca. 2600–2500) as “royal tombs” based on their wealth, architecture, and evidence of ritual, to include human sacrifice. Among the most spectacular was the so-called Great Death pit, containing 6 male and 68 female attendants. The treasure of Nimrud is a spectacular collection of more than 1,000 pieces of gold jewelry and precious stones from the eighth and ninth centuries bc that had been discovered between 1988 and 1990 by Iraqi archaeologist Muzahim Hussein Mahmud during his excavation of four royal tombs, and is considered by many to be one of the greatest archaeological finds of the last century. Both treasures had been removed from the museum by the Hussein regime in August of 1990 and not been seen publically since then.
- 25.
The female deity was the only statue whose head the thieves cut off. Discovered in a Hatrene temple dedicated to the worship of Hercules, it may, therefore, represent his wife (Basmachi 1975–1976: 309). The three heads of Poseidon, Apollo, and Eros were exquisite Roman copies of ca. A.D. 160 after Greek originals of the fourth century bc.
- 26.
See generally The Metropolitan Museum of Art at http://www.metmuseum.org.
- 27.
UNESCO’s “Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property,” November 14, 1970, 823 U.N.T.S. 231.
- 28.
See, for example, ABA “Model Code of Professional Responsibility and Code of Judicial Conduct,” adopted August 12, 1969, amended though August 1980, American Bar Association. Chicago, IL: National Center for Professional Responsibility, 1982, KF 305.A2 1986.
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Bogdanos, M. (2011). Thieves of Baghdad: The Global Traffic in Stolen Iraqi Antiquities. In: Manacorda, S., Chappell, D. (eds) Crime in the Art and Antiquities World. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7946-9_9
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