cultural cleansing in iraq

Counting the cost of cultural cleansing in Iraq
by Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette February 1 2010

One of the most enduring sound-bites from the April 2003 invasion of Iraq was the then US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s dismissive phrase “stuff happens.” He was responding to questions over the chaos in which ministries, museums and other institutions were ransacked, looted and burned while US troops stood by and failed to intervene. Rumsfeld suggested that the looting was a positive sign, an understandable targeting of the hated symbols of the ousted regime.

In the nearly seven years following the invasion, the culture of Iraq has continued to be ravaged. A collection of papers newly published by Pluto Press of London and New York explores the different facets of the onslaught on culture. The book has the provocative title “Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered.”
The editors of the book are Raymond W. Baker, a politics professor of both Trinity College in the USA and the American University in Cairo; Shereen T. Ismail, Associate Professor at the School of Social Work, Carleton University, Canada, and Tariq Y. Ismail, Professor of Political Science at the University of Calgary, Canada.

The book is dedicated to the late Professor Issam Al-Rawi, Professor of Geology at Baghdad University and Chairman of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) who was assassinated in October 2006. Al-Rawi had founded the register of murdered academics.

The editors of “Cultural Cleansing in Iraq” write that the destruction of the Iraqi state has killed over a million civilians, displaced some four million refugees abroad and internally, and led to the targeted assassination of more than 400 academics and professionals. “All of these terrible losses are compounded by unprecedented levels of cultural devastation, attacks on national archives and monuments that represent the historical identity of the Iraqi people,” they write.
They see Iraq as a country in which the ending of the state was an objective of the occupiers. “State destruction went beyond regime change and included the dismantling of state institutions and the launching of a prolonged process of political reshaping.” They draw parallels with 1980s Central America where death squads were “a foreign policy tool.”

Zainab Bahrani [pictured] – the Edith Porada Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, New York – argues that the damage and destruction to Iraq’s heritage was not just due to poor planning and collateral damage. She asks why the occupiers chose to locate military bases at main cultural heritage sites such as Babylon, Ur and Samarra. The establishment of these bases has causes severe damage, destroying thousands of years of archaeological material. “Like human rights abuses, the destruction of a people’s cultural heritage and history has elsewhere been regarded as a war crime.”

Some contributors note that damage to Iraqi culture started well before 2003. The former director general of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage of Iraq, Abbas Al-Hussainy [pictured], considers that the modern assault on Iraq’s cultural heritage began in the second half of the 19th century. At that time there were illegal exports of artifacts to Asia, Europe and America.

The country’s heritage later suffered during the Iraq-Iran war and, from 1991 onwards, under sanctions. At the same time the regime sponsored “restoration” projects for propaganda purposes. A notorious example was Saddam’s restoration of Babylon with his name inscribed on each brick, in the style of Nebuchadnezzar II. The regime’s punitive actions against the south and the destruction of the salt marshes laid waste to the cultural riches of that area. “However, these earlier assaults on Iraq’s Mesopotamian heritage pale in comparison to the wreckage inflicted by the occupation of Iraq from 2003 onward,” the editors write.

The destruction of Iraq’s collective memory is a theme running through the book. Nabil Al-Takriti of the University of Mary Washington in the USA cites the scholar Keith Watenpaugh’s use of the word “mnemocide” to mean the murder of cultural memory. The push to remake Iraq has been destructive to the country’s collective memory. As Al-Takriti puts it: “In Iraq’s case, during a period of great chaotic flux, one country under occupation lost a great deal of its connection to its past while certain occupying powers profited from that loss in a variety of ways.”

Al-Takriti surveys the huge toll looting, burning and flooding has taken on the precious collections of documents in the Iraqi National Library and Archives (INLA), the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs Central Library (Awqaf Library), the Iraqi House of Manuscripts, the Iraqi Academy of Sciences, the House of Wisdom and the Iraqi Jewish Archive.
There are disputes over the ownership of some of the surviving documents. The controversial Iraqi academic Kanan Makiya, who was a strong proponent of the invasion, removed the Baath Party Archives from the Party headquarters in 2003 and eventually took them to California. His Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF) claimed stewardship of the archives and then turned them over to the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. But the director general of INLA Saad Eskander [pictured] challenges the IMF’s right to dispose of the collection.

Eskander is also involved in a tussle between Iraq and certain Jewish claimants over the Iraqi Jewish Archive of books, manuscripts and records that was recovered by US troops from a sewage-flooded basement. The Iraqi Culture Ministry agreed that the collection should be moved to the US for preservation, but it was supposed to be returned after two years. Now Iraq is pressing for its return. Explaining why the archive should be returned, Eskander has said: “Iraqis must know that we are a diverse people, with different traditions, different religions, and we need to accept this diversity...To show it to our people that Baghdad was always multiethnic.” But certain influential Jewish personalities and circles in the US object to the return to Iraq.

Philip Marfleet, Reader in Refugee Studies and Director of the Refugee Research Centre at the University of East London, warns that the scattering of Iraqi intellectuals worldwide is “making the prospect of return and reconsolidation of the country’s academic, professional and technical cadres increasingly difficult, leaving a gaping hole in its human resources. A loss of this magnitude will certainly affect the wider society for generations to come.” The Iraqi intelligentsia is in effect being evacuated; hence the presence in Iraqi refugee communities of disproportionately large numbers of academics, writers, journalists and artists.