[MSN] Minerva editorial

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

Crisis in Iraq:  Both Archaeology and Secular Education in Peril

(Editorial in November/December 2006 issue of Minerva, the 
International Review of Ancient Art & Archaeology)

Dr Donny George, the Director of the National Museum of Iraq and the 
President of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, resigned from 
his posts in August due to his inability to secure funds and because of 
the rapidly increasing interference from the hard-line Shiite party 
that has taken increasing control of his jurisdiction.  The funding for 
the specially trained force of more than 1400 policeman organized for 
the protection of archaeological sites and put into operation only in 
November 2005 will have run out by September.  In addition, the 
continuing turmoil in Baghdad, including the neighborhood where the 
museum is located, has placed the museum and its employees at such 
great risk that it has been closed and the front doors sealed off by Dr 
George with a concrete barrier. Over 50 people were kidnapped nearby 
shortly before he resigned.

    In an interview with The Art Newspaper he stated that over the past 
year his position had become intolerable.  “The board has come under 
the increasing influence of al-Sadr [the militant Shiite party which 
now controls several ministries]…I can no longer work with these people 
who have come in with the new ministry. They have no knowledge of 
archaeology, no knowledge of antiquities - nothing”.   According to Dr 
George the State Board has become increasingly Islamist and 
anti-western over the past year.   Its new President, Haider Farhan, is 
a young al-Sadr party member with no relevant experience in this field 
– he has a master’s degree in Islamic manuscripts.  Dr George 
complained,  “They are only interested in Islamic sites and not Iraq’s 
earlier heritage.”  To bear witness, the Nasiriyah Museum was looted 
and burnt in 2004 by militants tied in with al-Sadr, the museum guards 
reporting that the militants said that they intended to treat the 
antiquities as the Taliban did in Afghanistan.  The just-appointed 
Director of the National Museum of Iraq, Amira Eidan, appears to be 
unknown in archaeological or museum circles.

    The State Board, which has been under the supervision of the 
Ministry of Culture, will now be governed by a new Ministry of Tourism 
and Antiquities headed by a dentist, Liwa Sumaysim, a relative by 
marriage to Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric who heads the 
al-Sadr party.  The State Board’s research and restoration departments 
would be eliminated, suggesting that secular scholarship and 
conservation would no longer be of importance.  In fact, according to a 
recent United Nations report, hundreds of Iraqi academics and other 
professionals have been assassinated in the past three years, including 
several art historians, in an apparent attempt to destroy the secular 
intellectual community in this country.  Over 4000 professionals, 
including many of the most prominent scholars, have fled the country 
since the end of the Second Gulf War.  It has been estimated that 
literacy in Iraq has dropped from more than 90% to about 50%, and even 
lower in the outlying provinces.   (And in Iran, in early September the 
President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stated in an address to 
students “Our educational system has been affected by 150 years of 
secular thought and has raised thousands of people who hold Ph.D.s.  
Changing this system is not easy, and we have to do it together”.)

    Dr George had been under mounting pressure to cut off his contacts 
with foreign archaeologists and even the Coalition officials.  Further, 
in the past two years the work of site preservation and museum 
conservation has ground to a halt.  The director of excavations at the 
museum, Burhan Shakur, fired last spring, has moved to Germany.  Dr 
George, who was a mid-level official in the Sunni-dominated Baath 
Party, as were most government employees of any consequence during 
Sadaam Hussein’s rule, had apparently been under attack by the 
conservative Shiites.  He also reported that his son had been 
threatened.  He has departed with his family for Damascus, perhaps to 
seek asylum in Europe or the US.  It is unlikely that he will now 
return to Iraq – a country to which he has devoted thirty years in the 
preservation of its antiquities.

    What hope for Iraq now?  The present Ministry of Tourism and 
Antiquities may do more to damage the record of the country’s precious 
cultural heritage than all of the past armies and looters combined.  
Even the strongest measures taken by the international community may 
not possibly halt this slow slide into the partial destruction of an 
incredible civilization.   Hopefully we may not face another 
Afghanistan, its long pre-Islamic history wiped out by religious 
zealots.

Jerome M. Eisenberg, Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief
Minerva

www.minervamagazine.com




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