[MSN] Iraq: Ruined Library Soldiers On

[MSN]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080421/lossin

Iraq's Ruined Library Soldiers On

by R.H. LOSSIN

[posted online on April 9, 2008]

The brutalities of the Iraq war accumulate so fast it is difficult to keep
track. But in this season of fifth-year anniversaries, one largely forgotten
crime demands to be recalled, in part because it relates directly to the
politics of memory itself. Five years ago this month, US troops stood by as
looters sacked the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA)--one of the
oldest and most used in the world. In Arab countries the old expression was
"Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads."

American troops were under orders not to intervene. Library staff who
requested protection from the GI's were told, "We are soldiers, not
policemen" or "our orders do not extend to protecting this [building]."
American military orders did, however, extend to guarding the Ministry of
Oil, and the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein's secret police.

The selective passivity of US forces was not only ethically questionable,
but also a violation of international law. The Hague Convention for the
Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954) makes
clear that libraries should not only be spared attack in wartime but also
actively protected.

Despite the sack of a major cultural institution and the collapse of the
society around it, the library struggles on, continuing a long tradition of
resurrection from the ashes of war. The world's first library was located in
Mosul, in Northern Iraq. It was built in the 7th century BCE and produced
the first known catalog in history. In 1927 a British archeological team
unearthed it and, for "purposes of preservation", carried off many of its
artifacts--including the oldest known copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the
first great work of world literature.

Iraq's intellectual golden era came later and coincided with the Abbasid
Dynasty (750-1258) whose capital was established at Baghdad. In 832, the
construction of the Byat al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) established the new
capital as an unrivaled center of scholarship and intellectual exchange.

The tradition of research there brought advances in astronomy, optics,
physics and mathematics. The father of algebra, Al-Khawarizmii, labored
among its scrolls. It was here that many of the Greek and Latin texts we
accept as the foundation of Western thought were translated, catalogued and
preserved. And it was from Baghdad that these works would eventually make
their way to medieval Europe and help lift that continent from its
benighted, post-Roman intellectual torpor.

In 1258, the Mongols descended on Baghdad and emptied the libraries into the
Tigris, ending the city's scholarly preeminence enjoyed for nearly 500
years. "Hence the legend developed," as one scholar wrote, "that the river
ran black from the ink of the countless texts lost in this manner, while the
streets ran red with the blood of the city's slaughtered inhabitants."

But under the Ottoman Empire, the Library recovered and carried on. And
despite decades of repression and deprivation under Saddam, intellectual
accomplishments were still regarded as a major aspect of Iraq's cultural
identity.

The sacking of the library that began April 11, 2003, was a bad one. The
current Director of Iraq's National Library and Archive, Dr. Saad Eskander,
estimates that over three days, as many as "60 percent of the Ottoman and
Royal Hashemite era documents were lost as well as the bulk of the Ba'ath
era documents.... [and] approximately 25 percent of the book collections
were looted or burned." Other Iraqi manuscript collections and university
libraries suffered similar fates.

Since then, Iraqis have once again tried to rebuild their library. The
occupying powers have played along, but like so much about the Iraq War,
their effort has been marked by ineptitude, hypocrisy and a cruel disregard
for Iraqi people and culture.

Early in the occupation, L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA), demonstrated an unwillingness to provide the basic funds necessary
for the reconstruction of Iraq's educational and informational
infrastructure. Dr. Rene Teijgeler, senior consultant for Culture for the
Iraqi Reconstruction Management office at the American Embassy in Baghdad,
left his position in February of 2005, not having "the supplies of ready
cash that could be used to acquire something as simple as bookshelves." His
position was left empty.

When John Agresto, the education czar of the CPA, "asked for $1.2 billion to
make Iraqi universities viable centers of learning: he received $9 million.
He asked USAID for 130,000 classroom desks, and received 8,000."

So the NLA staff have looked elsewhere, occasionally finding pieces of the
old collection for sale there on Al Mutanabi street, home to Baghdad's
booksellers. In fact Al Mutanabi is the source of 95 percent of the books
purchased to replace the looted collection of Iraq's National Library and
Archive. But Al Mutanabi was destroyed by a car bomb in March of 2007.

In a speech to the Internet Librarian International conference in 2004, Dr.
Eskander described the state of the INLA: "When I was officially appointed
as the new DG, NLA faced several challenges. It was the most damaged
cultural institution in the country. The building was in a ruinous state;
there was no money, no water, no electricity, no papers, no pens, no
furniture (apart [from] 50 plastic chairs). The morale of employees [was]
very low. Three departments out of 18 were half-functioning."

Despite this state of near-total ruin, the budget awarded by the CPA for the
INLA in 2004, was only $70,000.

In addition to material and financial obstacles, Dr. Eskander has had to
contend with the problems arising from the immaterial legacy of a
totalitarian dictatorship. In sharp contrast to the de-Baathification of
Iraqi society by the CPA, a purely negative process of removing ranking
members of the party from civil service positions, the INLA has adopted a
comprehensive approach to restructuring institutional relations.

"I removed all corrupt and lazy elements from positions of responsibility,
while promoting a number of qualified young female staff to higher
positions...The culture of taking orders was dominant," Eskander said.
"Staff members were unable to and sometimes afraid of taking initiative. I
have encouraged them to be proactive and creative. The new culture has begun
gradually but steadily to take root in the internal life of NLA. I radically
changed the mechanisms of decision-making and implementation by
democratizing them. Now, librarians and archivists elect their own
representatives who will participate at the meetings of the council of
managers, where decisions are made. These representatives can monitor all
activities within NLA and meet the DG anytime they want."

The INLA now provides transportation for all of its 425 employees (up from
95 and not counting a security staff of 36) despite the rising costs of
private security. It houses a functional nursery in order to maintain its
female staff. (American libraries, whose staff is 85 percent female and
whose directors are 45 percent male, could take a cue.)

Many dedicated people have offered important solidarity. In Florence, the
city government underwrote construction of a conservation lab. The Czech
government funded the training of Iraqi archivists. With the exception of
invaluable training sessions organized by private educational institutions
such as Harvard University, American support has been limited to a
relatively small number of individual scholars, a few dedicated nonprofit
agencies, nominal USAID support and the cooperation of a handful of private
corporations. In 2005 the American Library Association issued a resolution
on the connection between the Iraq war and libraries, calling for a full
withdrawal of troops and a redistribution of funding but the conversation
never extended much further than the bullet points.

The US State Department has created the Iraq Virtual Science Library, which
provides access to a large number of health and science databases to
institutions throughout the country. But Internet access, like electricity,
is intermittent at best. Iraq is, after all, a largely collapsed society.

Many other more promising projects have been abandoned or left in a state of
limbo for lack of funding. Efforts at book donation have become ever more
challenging as the security situation worsens and thus have largely stopped.

The British National Library has provided recently published English
language social science texts and donated microfilm copies of its colonial
administrative records from its last occupation of Iraq. But the replacement
of physical documents largely ends here.

It would be unfair and frankly absurd to blame American librarians and their
shrinking budgets, rising legal costs and increasingly costly dependence on
proprietary databases for the state of Iraq's infrastructure. But the
increasingly unstable position of American libraries is actually part of the
same logic that produced that war. The disdain for cultural institutions
does not stop at the border--bombs there, budget cuts here.

That said, the lack of solidarity from the American community of librarians
and scholars for their Iraqi counterparts is shameful. Rousseau suggested
that empathy is the basis of language and communication.

If the raison d'être of the library profession is the preservation and
dissemination of information, and thus the communication of ideas and the
promotion of open discourse, then this question of empathy and solidarity
should be the profession's guiding purpose. Books might seem like an
afterthought for people facing violent death, poverty and shattered future,
yet the library now receives 750 patrons a month. If there is any hope for
stability and reconstruction in Iraq, a little more library solidarity is
due.