Wednesday 25 February 2009
by: The Associated Press
The Iraq National Museum reopened on February 23, 2009. The museum in Baghdad was looted and vandalized during the 2003 US invasion. (Photo: Getty Images)
Baghdad - Iraq's restored National Museum reopened yesterday with a red-carpet gala in the heart of Baghdad nearly six years after looters carried away priceless antiquities as American troops largely stood by in the chaos of the city's fall.
The ransacking of the museum became a symbol for critics of Washington's post-invasion strategy and its inability to maintain order as Saddam Hussein's security network disintegrated.
But Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri Maliki chose to look ahead - calling the reopening another milestone in Baghdad's slow return to stability .
"It was a dark age that Iraq passed through," Maliki said at a dedication ceremony. "This spot of civilisation has had its share of destruction."
The museum - which holds artefacts from the Stone Age through the Babylonian, Assyrian and Islamic periods - opened to the public on Monday, but only for organised tours at first, officials said.
"We have ended the black wind [of violence] and have started the reconstruction process," Maliki told hundreds of officials and guardians of Iraq's rich cultural heritage as Iraqi soldiers with red berets stood guard.
Once the home of one of the world's leading collections of artefacts, the museum fell victim to bands of thieves who rampaged through the capital after the Americans captured Baghdad in April 2003. It was among many institutions looted across Iraq, including universities and cultural offices. But the richness of the museum's collection - and its importance as the caretaker of Iraq's historical identity - brought outcry around the world.
United States troops, the sole power in the city at the time, were intensely criticised for not protecting the treasures at the museum and other cultural institutions like the national library and the Saddam Art Centre, a museum of modern Iraqi art.
When asked at the time why US troops did not actively seek to stop the lawlessness, then-Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld famously said: "Stuff happens ... and it's untidy and freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."
Others claimed Washington had not given US troops a mandate to act.
US and Iraqi officials have said about 15,000 artefacts were stolen from the museum and about 8500 of those items had been recovered. A number of countries in the region, including Jordan, Syria and Egypt, have returned stolen objects to Baghdad - which was the scientific and literary hub of the Arab world in the 8th and 9th centuries.
The UN cultural body Unesco has said up to 7000 pieces are still missing, including about 40 to 50 considered to be of great historical importance.
Important artefacts were stored at secret locations away from the museum and were spared the looting.
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