Iraq Cultural Heritage Policy: The Kurdish Problem

Stuart Gibson, a longtime international consultant to museums, UNESCO, and cultural ministries in former socialist countries, shares the attached report on the conditions in museums in Kurdistan. Though the report is couched in diplomatic prose, and deals mainly with technical matters, a few policy issues stand out:

a) relations between regional antiquities authorities and national ones are problematic (and not just in Iraq -- witness the tug-of-war in England between Birmingham and the British Museum over the disposition of the recently discovered Staffordshire Hoard), but much more so in the case of Kurdistan, with its history of victimage and its aspirations towards autonomy. The report does not go into detail about "the disruption in the museum community over the past years" and why that should make it unfeasible for Kurds to send their finds to Baghdad to be registered, but it seems clear reading between the lines that what is really keeping the Kurds from doing so is less chaos within the National Museum than a desire to register items as Kurdish;

b) the priorities of tourism are clashing with those of museums and archaeologists within Kurdistan, as they do at the national level, and as at the national level, preservation is taking second place to the demands of economic development. This mess, it is important to recall, stems in large part from the failure of American postwar nation-builders early on to even think about how to help the Iraqis organize its governance of cultural heritage. The position of the State Department now is that any such issues are internal matters for the Iraqis to work out themselves, but one would hope that behind the scenes some pressure is being applied, especially since the US is pumping $13 million into conservation efforts.

c) Speaking of the State Department, it is mentioned only in passing, with a reference to the Erbil Institute's Cultural Heritage Project, whose newly-opened facilities were paid for by State. It would be interesting to learn more about this.

Good news/bad news: New Iraq Cultural Heritage Project

The good news: in its waning days, the Bush administration seems finally to have ponied up substantial money ($13 million) to assist Iraq in conserving and preserving its cultural heritage.

The bad news: the new initiative, the Iraq Cultural Heritage Project, appears at first glance at least to focus solely on professional development for conservators and other museum professionals, rather than also including some funding to improve security on Iraq's archaeological sites. In fact, the ICHP is premised on the assumption that there is no need to improve security on the sites, since supposedly this has already been accomplished, as part of the overall improvement in security in Iraq. As Laura Bush puts it in her remarks announcing the Project, "Recent security gains and increased stability have set the stage now for a more vigorous effort to promote Iraq's cultural history."

It is true that there have been recent security gains and increased stability. The gains and increases have brought civilian casualty rates down to 2004 levels. But we know that in 2004 Iraq's archaeological sites were being looted. What we do not know is how successful the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage's site police, developed since 2004, have been in tamping down the looting. We only know that this new initiative offers no assistance to SBAH's site protection efforts.

That is disappointing, but hardly surprising. The State Department's fact sheet on the new Project touts its having spent several million dollars since 2003 in support of "numerous activities relating to the protection and preservation of Iraq’s cultural heritage," including "emergency response to the looting of the Iraq National Museum, training of Iraqi museum professionals, support for archaeological site protection, and instituting legal measures to mitigate illicit trafficking in Iraq’s looted cultural property." The results, it is claimed, include "improved archaeological site security in Iraq." But there is no further information available on how much has been spent, on what site protection programs, with what results. And of course, without time-series aerial photos (which the State Department surely could force the military to share with archaeologists), we cannot know if archaeological site security has improved at all, much less whether the efforts by State have had anything to do with improving site security.

Will the State Department now take the next step and announce an initiative to assist the Iraqis in securing their sites against a future that may well be much less stable and secure than today's? Or will the Iraq Cultural Heritage Project serve as a cover for washing our hands of the problem?