A NATION’S HISTORY is its identity. And Iraq, the cradle of civilisation and birthplace of writing, medicine, astronomy, mathematics and codified law, has been pillaged of its history and looted of its identity.

Archaeologists believe the ransacking of the magnificent National Museum in Baghdad is a catastrophe on the scale of the burning of the library at Alexandria. Some 170,000 items, dating back thousands of years and worth billions of pounds, have been stolen or destroyed. Priceless artefacts have vanished overnight from Baghdad and Mosul. Masterpieces from the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Islamic cultures have been taken at gunpoint from their display cases and 5,000-year-old tablets bearing some of the earliest known writing stuffed into sacks to be smuggled abroad for rapacious collectors.

The tragedy has provoked international uproar. Western museums have launched an urgent rescue mission to trace and return the missing treasures. Downing Street has demanded a list of the antiquities that can be circulated to British troops in Iraq. Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, has promised a military guard on remaining museums and important archaeological sites. And Unesco is to hold an emergency meeting tomorrow to prepare an action plan.

For many, it is too late. Shards of antique pottery, smashed stone sculptures and scattered bits of parchment abandoned in the museum galleries make clear that little care will be taken with the stolen antiquities. Many may be deliberately broken to conceal their origins, or cut up so that they can be more easily transported.

After the shock, however, comes the anger. Iraqis are furious that negligence or indifference by coalition forces left their museums unguarded at the most vulnerable moment. The vaults that had protected man’s earliest sculptures and jewellery against the bombing were ransacked under the noses of American troops.

Many will see this not as a lapse or the inevitable result of wartime chaos but as a deliberate attempt to humiliate and demoralise Iraq. It is not simply the historians or the educated who are upset. In all countries whose histories stretch back millennia — China, Greece, Egypt, India — there is universal awareness of the past. Every ordinary Egyptian takes pride in the Pyramids; every Chinese feels enriched by what his ancient ancestors left behind.

Throughout history armies wanting to destroy their enemies have attempted to obliterate their history. This cultural genocide reached its peak in Europe under the Nazis. The armies that swept through Poland and Russia systematically burnt or pulled down those monuments to civilisations that the Nazis considered sub-human. The tsarist palaces on the outskirts of Leningrad were torched and gutted; the royal palace in Warsaw was blown up. And when the war ended, one of the first acts of the Polish and Soviet governments was to order the reconstruction of what was lost.

Many Iraqis already believe that allied forces targeted ancient sites during the first Gulf War out of malice; this new destruction of Iraq’s cultural heritage may soon be attributed not to Iraqi criminals but to coalition intentions.

Certainly war is incompatible with antiquity, as Mostar, Dubrovnik and Dresden have all found. During the 1991 Gulf War the great arch of Ctesiphon, the widest unsupported brick arch in the world, was cracked by the rumble of American bombing. The ancient spiral ziggurat at Ur was raked with machine-gun fire when the GIs last passed that way. There was a fair amount of what Dr John Curtis, keeper of the department of the Ancient Near East at the British Musum, drily calls “bayonet archaeology”.

In this war US commanders were already provided with a list of the most important of an estimated 10,000 ancient sites in Iraq. The Americans claim that they took great care to avoid hitting these but say that Saddam Hussein deliberately sited many of his defences near such places to give them cover.

Ironically, Saddam’s regime was one of the best at protecting Iraq’s heritage. Money was spent on excavations, grave robbers were summarily executed and the ancient treasures of the many peoples of Mesopotamia were adduced as evidence of Iraq’s glorious history. It may have been megalomania that prompted Saddam, like Hitler, to mythologise the past and compare himself with Nebuchadnezzar, but it certainly protected sites that foreign archaeologists insist belong to all mankind.

The response of Western museums in putting out an SOS to warn anyone against buying the looted treasures may go some way to deflecting Iraqi anger. But it may, ironically, prompt a new and wholly unwelcome situation: the demand for the return of artefacts long held in the British Museum and other leading collections of Mesopotamian treasures.

Unlike Greece, Iraq has, up till now, never made any demand for the return of what may be considered its patrimony and heritage. Most of the vast holdings — some 250,000 items in the BM alone — were acquired long ago, either being bought from the Ottoman rulers or excavated by expeditions that had full Iraqi approval. There is no Lord Elgin to fuel any ongoing dispute with Baghdad.

But such a movement may well begin. Throughout the world, museums are struggling with the implications of the Unesco conventions that now forbid the theft of archaeological treasures and discourage the removal of national heritage. China has already demanded the return of treasures now scattered worldwide.

Unesco, which insists that it is neutral in the growing number of disputes between museums and the governments of archaeology-rich nations, has proposed setting up an office in the Iraqi capital immediately. It is lobbying for the protection of all main sites where robbers may now move in to seize artefacts not catalogued. It is trying to reconstruct a catalogue of what was lost. And it will mobilise the search for the missing treasures through Interpol, the World Customs Organisation, the Assocation of Antique Dealers and national governments.

Many Iraqis are too traumatised by the war and too preoccupied with the struggle of daily life to focus on their lost heritage. But the blow will soon sink in — and the anger will be intense. After Saddam, Iraq wants a new democratic identity. But it also wants its history back.

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Should cultural artefacts be repatriated?

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