Frank Kermode: a remembrance

Frank Kermode was a gentle, kindly, slightly sad mentor-figure for me and other grad students at Columbia in the early 1980s. By then he was already turning against theory, at a moment when post-structuralism was beginning to flower into what became cultural studies. He was averse to intellectual hurlyburly. In a seminar attended, if memory serves me right, by (among lots of other really smart people) Max Rudin (now the publisher of Library of America) and future documentary-maker Ric Burns, Kermode appeared taken aback to hear the argument made by one of us that Heidegger's Origin of the Work of Art, assigned for the class, was deeply compromised by Nazism, as Meyer Schapiro had shown. But he was a true, pure man of letters. I remember walking through campus with him on the way to class. I told him I was writing an article on the great nineteenth-century French critic Sainte-Beuve, and Kermode said, with an air of ineffable pathos, he had memorized a line from one of Sainte-Beuve's diaries:"De jour en jour je suis devenu de plus en plus triste." A real smoothie, he also taught me a big lesson at what might have been my first panel presentation, something cooked up at Columbia. I had slaved over my five minute talk, of course. Kermode was to speak second, before me, and he had his paper folded in his hand. When it was his turn to speak he moved to the lectern, unfolded the paper, and spoke eloquently, about what I cannot recall. How am I going to follow that, I thought despairingly. As Kermode sat down, I glanced over at the pages he had been reading from. They were blank.

Donny George speaks out on the evacuation of the Kuwait Museum in 1991

Donny George released a statement, via Looting Matters, detailing what happened to the contents of the Kuwait Museum during the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. his account is a fuller version of what he described to me when I interviewed him for my book, The Rape of Mesopotamia, and is corroborated in the following sources, noted in the footnotes to that book: Jonathan M. Bloom and Lark Ellen Gould, “Patient Restoration: The Kuwait National Museum,” Saudi Aramco World, September/October 2000, http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200005/patient.restoration-the.kuwait.national.museum.htm. Kirsty Norman, “The Invasion of Kuwait, and the Subsequent Recovery of its National Museum: A Conservator’s View,” Museum Management and Curatorship 16, no. 2 (1997): 180-191; Selma Al-Radi, “War and Cultural Heritage: Lessons from Lebanon, Kuwait and Iraq” (lecture, Cultural Emergency Response, Prinsenhof Museum, Delft, The Netherlands, September 26, 2003), De Kracht Van Cultuur, October 2003, cached text of Web site retrieved by Google, July 25, 2007, http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:U9M2HK2MjlYJ:www.powerofculture.nl/nl/artikelen/war_and_cultural_heritage.html (accessed September 21, 2007); and, authoritatively, McGuire Gibson and Augusta McMahon, Lost Heritage: Antiquities Stolen from Iraq's Regional Museums, fasc. 1 (Chicago: American Association for Research in Baghdad, 1992). See also Gibson's 1991-92 Annual Report on the Nippur Expedition.

Why is it necessary to provide these references? Because media misreporting back in the 1990s, probably encouraged by supporters of Kuwait, mixed up the real and inexcusable looting of private Kuwaiti collections with the entirely legal and indeed required removal of the holdings of Kuwait's National Museum by heritage professionals from Iraq. This misreporting has a long tail.

One more reason why monitoring archaeological sites aerially is worth doing

News from Italy that a large Roman-era settlement has been discovered. Nothing special about that, except that according to the report this discovery was made by analyzing aerial photos taken during a helicopter reconnaissance flight conducted by the carabinieri and officials from the Italian Ministry of Culture's archaeological service as part of their regular monitoring of archaeological sites for possible looting.

Iraqi Official Says Thousands Of Artifacts Recovered

File this under "Get out there and tell them we're doing something": following the damning front-page New York Times story of a few weeks ago pointing out that his government has funded only 100 or so of the many thousands of antiquities police needed and that as a result site looting is surging, Iraq's Tourism and Antiquities Minister announces that more than 36,000 ancient artifacts have been recovered since 2003. Radio Free Europe's crack reporter apparently failed to ask how many of these were recovered in-country (the figure seems to refer only to artifacts returned by other countries), or whether the rate of seizures abroad has increased or decreased recently, or what the Iraqi response is to the Times story, or whether the government there has any plans to fund more antiquities police.

New Ambassador to Iraq Confirmed -- No Help for Iraq's Endangered Archaeological Sites Likely

The Senate has just confirmed James Jeffrey as the new ambassador to Iraq. As part of the confirmation process, Jeffrey was posed a few questions in writing about the State Department's policies regarding the protection of archaeological sites. Here are the questions, and Jeffrey's responses:

Questions for the Record Submitted to
Ambassador - Designate James Jeffrey by
Senator John Kerry (#5)
Senate Foreign Relations Committee
July 20, 2010

A recent front-page story in the NY Times reports that looting of Mesopotamian archaeological sites is surging again, as it did in the 2003-2006 period. In 2008, the Iraqi government shifted responsibility for protecting archaeological sites from the Federal Protection Police to a new antiquities police force that was supposed to field 5000 officers. As of December 2008, however, State acknowledged that it “has no mechanisms at its disposal to provide ongoing security at archaeological sites and museums in Iraq,” and a major $13 million initiative, the Iraqi Cultural Heritage Project, announced in October 2008 by First Lady Laura Bush, did not include any funding for site security assistance.

a. What is the State Department’s policy for assisting the Iraqi government in protecting Iraqi antiquities?
b. How actively committed to the antiquities police force has the Iraqi government been? How large is the antiquities police force?
c. What personnel and what level of resources are being allocated to the specific issue of antiquities policing? Will antiquities policing be included in the police training program, when the State Department takes over next year?


Question:

a. What is the State department’s policy for assisting the Iraqi government in protecting Iraqi antiquities?

Answer:

Our policy for assisting the Iraqi government in protecting antiquities includes training and developing the capacity of the Iraqi police broadly. While the small antiquities police unit has yet to become effective, we will give this issue due attention. In addition, in the “Strategic Framework Agreement,” Section IV, Cultural Cooperation, the United States committed to “Promote Iraqi efforts and contributions to international efforts to preserve Iraqi cultural heritage and protect archeological antiquities, rehabilitate Iraqi museums, and assist Iraq in recovering and restoring its smuggled artifacts through projects such as the Future of Babylon Project and measures taken pursuant to the U.S. Emergency Protection for Iraqi Cultural Antiquities Act of 2004.” Our assistance to Iraq in the antiquities field therefore falls under the policy umbrella of the Strategic Framework Agreement.

The U.S. Embassy is playing a leadership role in helping Iraqis preserve their cultural heritage and antiquities. The $12.9 million Iraqi Cultural Heritage Project (ICHP) will upgrade the Iraqi National Museum, train Iraqi conservationists, and partner with Iraqi institutions to protect the priceless heritage of Mesopotamia.

Question:

b. How actively committed to the antiquities police force has the Iraqi government been? How large is the antiquities police force?

Answer:

The Iraqi government has established an office to address protection of archeological sites, and to our knowledge, this office has hired approximately 100 officers. The officers have not yet assumed an active role in protecting archeological sites. Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) has held meetings with the Ministry of Interior (the agency responsible for Iraqi police) and other Iraqi government agencies to discuss nationwide protection of archeological sites. If confirmed, I will press for the antiquities police to play an active role, and for the SBAH to make further progress.

Question:

c. What personnel, and what level of resources are being allocated to the specific issue of antiquities policing? Will antiquities policing be included in the police training program, when the State Department takes over next year?

Answer:

The decisions on personnel and resources for the entire Police Development Program (PDP) are currently under discussion. The PDP will include broad, multi-purpose training for investigators, but does not envision a separate component for antiquities police.

A number of prominent archeological sites, such as the world-famous ruins at Babylon, Samarra, and Ur have Iraq-supported police and army guard forces in place to protect them. Some other sites, where there is no Iraqi police presence, are protected by Iraqi army units. The State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) has held meetings with the Ministry of Interior and other Iraqi government agencies to discuss nationwide protection of archeological sites. We are not aware of Iraqi governmental plans to include antiquities policing in future training programs, although SBAH has requested this. If confirmed, I will look into this.

I would be interested to know if any readers of this blog have a more sanguine interpretation of these remarks than I do, but to me they are very saddening. It sounds as if "due attention” to the problem of looting means jawboning the Iraqis, and that’s about it -- no targeted funding for site protection or even specialized training for antiquities police (or any other material support – walkie-talkies, vehicles, weaponry, satellite photos, gasoline, etc. -- that is also desperately needed by those few Iraqis who are now deployed). How likely is it that the Iraqi government will respond to ambassadorial pressing without any carrots? I’m glad the ambassador is at least saying he’s going to press, but unless we put our money where our mouth is, it seems very unlikely that the dysfunctional Iraqi government will move on this issue.

It is particularly galling to see the ICHP presented as having something to do with the issue of protecting sites from looting, since the introductory paragraph before the questions points out that the ICHP includes no money for site policing. And its money has almost certainly been spent already by now; this was the Bush administration's (only) initiative. But it is understandable that Jeffrey's assistants went to the well of the ICHP to defend themselves, because they were given an opening by the way the question was posed. It did not say protecting archaeological sites, just “protecting antiquities.” If you don’t specifically distinguish the policing of antiquities on sites from “protection of antiquities,” State will continue to do what it has done since 2003: disingenuously point to the good work done at the Museum, and fudge the fact that while they have been doing this good work but doing almost nothing to help secure and police archaeological sites, a huge disaster has taken place out in the countryside.

Let's tally this up: The Museum holds 170,000 pieces, and lost 15,000 in the invasion; anywhere from 200,000 to half a million artifacts are estimated to have come out of the ground (or been destroyed by diggers) since 2003. The disaster is going to accelerate again as the Obama administration pulls out. It won't be the dramatic public relations black eye that the Iraq Museum turned out to be for Bush, because the damage is not as vividly concentrated, but it is in some ways even more inexcusable.

Pace Pres. Obama, where keeping Iraq's archaeological heritage safe is concerned, we appear to be as careless getting out as we were careless getting in.