On Fri, 18 Apr 2003, Matt A Love wrote:

> I just heard Elizabeth Stone,an archaeologist at State University of
New York at Stony Brook say on Science Friday on NPR that UNESCO people
will NOT be allowed into Iraq to inventory losses from the museum, etc.
Does anybody have any further information about this?  Documentation?
Insight into the thinking of the people (the state department?) that
made this decision?

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I have not heard this report, though Secretary Powell in his Wednesday new
conference said he had spoken personally to UNESCO to see help.

However:

(1)  A very reliable Pentagon source told me on Wednesday that - contrary
to all the media (and political?) hype assuming that the war is over, the
Coalition has so far secured only THIRTY PERCENT of Baghdad, (and I
therefore presume far less than this of Iraq as a whole).  Consequently,
the security of any civilian experts going to Baghdad for any purposes
must be a genuine concern.  (Only two weeks ago, I was waiting around in
Belgrade for days hoping for United Nations and NATO permits to go into
Kosovo for two days or so on an official mission to review cultural
protection.  However, despite official requests and representations this
was refused by the UN on security and safety grounds, and the Kosovo war
was supposed to have finished on 20th June 1999 - almost four years ago.)

(2)  Iraq has a large and expert Antiquities and Museums staff, with
almost 80 years experience and records. (The country has a higher
proportion of PhDs in the region - even higher than Israel, the second
highest.)

(3) On the basis of recent experience in similar post-war situations in a
"developed" country such as Iraq, particularly Croatia and Bosnia &
Herzegovina after 1990 - 1995, and Serbia after 1999, I'm sure the top
in-country priorities will be the supply of technical equipment and
materials, followed by money, as staff will not have been paid for weeks,
and the Iraqi dinar is now worthless, and will presumably be withdrawn
completely.  Most of the devastation of the museum collections of
Armenia took place when because of the political and security situation, the
government more or less totally stopped paying the museum staff, so that
they all had to go and find other work elsewhere, leaving the museums
without either security or even professional staff.

(4)  When Sarajevo was under siege in 1993-5, the two top priorities
actually requested by the severely damaged Zemalksi (now National) Museum
was for large supplies of good polyethylene bags of different sizes for
temporary storage, and of both tie-on and tray museum quality specimen
labels - to enable the museum's own staff to secure temporarily the
damaged specimens and to record whatever fragments of data survived. (In
response one of the English regional museum federations immediately raised
a just few hundred pounds and immediately bought and shipped out several
thousands of each through British diplomatic channels.)

(5)  Longer term, it's very likely that the Iraqi Museums will need extra
help with conservation and restoration in the form of additional specialist
labour, or perhaps even conservation abroad, but short term we should be
aiming to get in basic conservation and packing materials immediately, and
computer systems (including scanners - to try to record damaged documents
and records - Internet communications, and printers) once the electricity
and telephone systems are restored.

(6)  Thinking back to Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, etc., there is obviously a need
for some basic expert fact-finding and then continuing liaison with
professional colleagues in Iraq.  However, let's not repeat late 1995 and
1996, when something approaching a dozen "fact-finding" expert missions
flooded into Sarajevo over a period of just a few months, costing a total
of tens of thousands of dollars, most of which were never heard from
again. Rather than spend the money on air fares and hotel expenses for the
visiting experts, it would have been far better to have sent most of the
money to the Sarajevo staff to use locally on the recovery of the Museum and
monuments.



Patrick Boylan

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