As flames engulfed Baghdad's
National Library yesterday, destroying manuscripts many centuries old, the
Pentagon admitted that it had been caught unprepared by the widespread looting
of antiquities, despite months of warnings from American archaeologists.
But defence department officials denied accusations by British archaeologists
that the US government was succumbing to pressure from private collectors in
America to allow plundered Iraqi treasures to be traded on the open market. Almost nothing remains of the library's archive of tens of thousands of
manuscripts, books, and Iraqi newspapers, according to reports from the
scene. It joins a list that already includes the capital's National Museum, one of
the world's most important troves of artefacts from the ancient Sumerian,
Babylonian and Assyrian civilisations. Calling the looting of historical artefacts "a catastrophe for the cultural
heritage of Iraq", Mounir Bouchenaki, the deputy director-general of the UN
cultural body Unesco, announced an emergency summit of archaeologists in Paris
on Thursday. In Washington Colin Powell, the secretary of state, said the US "will be
working with a number of individuals and organisations to not only secure the
facility, but to recover that which has been taken, and also to participate in
restoring that which has been broken _ the United States understands its
obligations and will be taking a leading role with respect to antiquities in
general, but [the museum] in particular". A Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said no plans had
been made to protect antiquities from looters, as opposed to ensuring that
historical sites were not caught up in the fighting itself. But the official rejected charges in a letter from nine British
archaeologists, published in the Guardian yesterday, that private collectors
were "persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects Iraq's heritage
by prevention of sales abroad". The American Council for Cultural Policy, a New York-based coalition of about
60 collectors, dealers and others, had received "no special treatment," the
official insisted, despite reports that members of the group met with Bush
administration representatives in January to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq
should have relaxed antiquities laws. Last night the group denied that it was lobbying for plundered Iraqi
treasures to be traded. "The ACCP will seek _ to find ways to shut off the
import of objects that may have been taken from Iraq, and to close the domestic
market in such material," Ashton Hawkins, the organisation's president,
said. John Henry Merryman, a law professor at Stanford University and a member of
the ACCP, said allowing a private trade in the artefacts would better protect
them until they could be returned to Iraq at a later date.