LONDON,
April 13 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - As the U.S. forces
claimed full control over Baghdad, famous British writer Robert Fisk
wandered the Iraqi city as it is "at war with itself, at the mercy
of thieves and gunmen," saying that something truly terrible has
taken place in the city's most important museum.
They
lie across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless
antiquities of Iraq's history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf,
systematically pulling down the statues and pots and amphorae of the
Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians
and the Greeks and hurling them on to the concrete, the Independent
columnist wrote on Sunday, April 13.
"Our
feet crunched on the wreckage of 5,000-year-old marble plinths and stone
statuary and pots that had endured every siege of Baghdad, every
invasion of Iraq throughout history only to be destroyed when America
came to "liberate" the city".
"The
Iraqis did it. They did it to their own history, physically destroying
the evidence of their own nation's thousands of years of
civilization".
Fisk
said that not since the Taliban embarked on their orgy of destruction
against the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the statues in the museum of Kabul and
perhaps not since the Second World War or earlier have so many
archaeological treasures been wantonly and systematically smashed to
pieces.
"This
is what our own people did to their history," the man in the grey
gown said as we flicked our torches across the piles of once perfect
Sumerian pots and Greek statues, now headless, armless, in the storeroom
of Iraq's National Archaeological Museum, he wrote.
‘Saddam’s
Policemen’
Fisk
slammed the U.S. forces' recruiting Saddam Hussein's former policemen to
restore law and order to Baghdad.
"The
last army to do anything like this was Mountbatten's force in South-east
Asia, which employed the defeated Japanese army to control the streets
of Saigon with their bayonets fixed after the recapture of Indo-China
in 1945."
A
queue of respectably dressed Baghdad ex-cops formed a queue outside the
Palestine Hotel in Baghdad after they heard a radio broadcast calling
for them to resume their "duties" on the streets.
'Liberation'
Turned Into Occupation
In
the late afternoon, at least eight former and very portly senior police
officers, all wearing green uniforms the same color as the uniforms of
the Iraqi Baath party turned up to offer their services to the
Americans, accompanied by a U.S. Marine. But there was no sign that any
of them would be sent down to the Museum of Antiquity.
But
'liberation' has already turned into occupation, Fisk contended.
"Faced
by a crowd of angry Iraqis in Firdos Square demanding a new Iraqi
government 'for our protection and security and peace', U.S. Marines,
who should have been providing that protection, stood shoulder to
shoulder facing them, guns at the ready."
The
reality, he said, which the Americans and, of course, Rumsfeld fail
to understand is that under Saddam Hussein, the poor and deprived were
always the Shia Muslims, the middle classes always the Sunnis, just as
Saddam himself was a Sunni. So it is the Sunnis who are now suffering
plunder at the hands of the Shia.
"Civil
War"
 |
|
"By
failing to end this violence, by stoking ethnic hatred through
their inactivity the Americans are now provoking a civil war in
Baghdad," Fisk wrote
|
The
famous columnist accused the U.S.-led forces of igniting a civil war in
the Iraqi capital.
"The
gun-fighting that broke out yesterday between property owners and
looters was, in effect, a conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims. By
failing to end this violence, by stoking ethnic hatred through their
inactivity the Americans are now provoking a civil war in Baghdad."
"Too
little, too late. Yesterday, a group of chemical engineers and water
purification workers turned up at the U.S. Marine headquarters, pleading
for protection so they could return to their jobs. Electrical supply
workers came along, too. But Baghdad is already a city at war with
itself, at the mercy of gunmen and thieves."
There
is no electricity in Baghdad as there is no water and no law and no
order and so "we stumbled in the darkness of the museum basement,
tripping over toppled statues and stumbling into broken winged bulls.
When I shone my torch over one far shelf, I drew in my breath. Every pot
and jar "3,500 BC" it said on one shelf corner had been
bashed to pieces."
"Why?
How could they do this? Why, when the city was already burning, when
anarchy had been let loose and less than three months after U.S.
archaeologists and Pentagon officials met to discuss the country's
treasures and put the Baghdad Archaeological Museum on a military
data-base," Fisk wondered.
"Did
the Americans allow the mobs to destroy the priceless heritage of
ancient Mesopotamia? And all this happened while U.S. Secretary of
Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was sneering at the press for claiming that
anarchy had broken out in Baghdad."
"Decades"
Fisk
said it would take decades to sort through what they have left, the
broken stone torsos, the tomb treasures, the bits of jewelry glinting
amid the piles of smashed pots.
"The
mobs who came here Shia Muslims, for the most part, from the hovels of
Saddam City probably had no idea of the value of the pots or statues.
Their destruction appears to have been the result of ignorance as much
as fury. In the vast museum library, only a few books mostly
mid-19th-century archaeological works appeared to have been stolen or
destroyed. Looters set little value in books."
Even
as the Americans encircled Baghdad, Saddam Hussein's soldiers
"showed almost the same contempt for its treasures as the looters.
Their slit trenches and empty artillery positions are still clearly
visible in the museum lawns, one of them dug beside a huge stone statue
of a winged bull."
Half
an hour later, I contacted the civil affairs unit of the U.S. Marines in
Saadun Street and gave them the exact location of the museum and the
condition of its contents, Fisk said.
A
captain told Fisk that "we're probably going to get down
there". Bit too late. Iraq's history had already been trashed by
the looters whom the Americans unleashed on the city during their
"liberation", he said.
'You
are American!" a woman shouted at the British writer in English
Saturday morning, wrongly assuming he was from the United States.
"Go
back to your country. Get out of here. You are not wanted here. We hated
Saddam and now we are hating Bush because he is destroying our
city."
It
was a mercy she could not visit the Museum of Antiquity to see for
herself that the very heritage of her country as well as her city has
been destroyed, Fisk said.
