Profile of State Department's Archaeologist in Afghanistan

Excellent profile of Laura Tedesco, who as the State Department's archaeologist in Afghanistan is doing even more dangerous duty than her colleagues in Iraq, the only other country, as the article notes, where the State Department has posted an archaeologist. It takes great courage and commitment to put one's body on the line as archaeologists in both countries have done, and they deserve our gratitude for that.

As a matter of policy, it is interesting to compare the approach taken in the two countries. In Iraq, the focus has been on redeveloping Babylon and restoring the Iraq Museum as heritage tourism destinations, with little attention paid to the massive destruction of other sites by looting or encroachment. In Afghanistan, in contrast, the focus has been on one extraordinary recently deiscovered archaeological site, at Mes Aynak, that is certain to be destroyed, even though it could in theory have become a major tourist attraction if it did not sit atop mineable natural resources worth far more than tourism could ever generate. Tedesco is coy about how much is being spent on salvaging what can be saved from Mes Aynak, but admits it runs into the millions. It is worth asking how much might have been saved from being destroyed by antiquities looters in Iraq if the policymakers at the State Department and in the Pentagon had recognized that there was an equivalent need to protect Iraq's threatened archaeological heritage, and not just to exploit the part of it that would generate tourist revenues.

The Long Tail of Cultural Policy, Cultural Diplomacy Division

A Pakistani version of Brubeck's "Take Five" here. The album is shooting up the charts in the UK, having gone viral. What is interesting, and moving, about this story is not just the music itself (I would have hoped for more drumming and some improv from the sitarist, and maybe a south Indian violinist solo as well, though perhaps the full version of the song, which I have not yet heard, goes further than the clip), but the spirit of "freedom, and live-and-let-live" that the millionaire Pakistani underwriter decribes, returning musicians to work after the repression that crushed them back in the 1980s.

This story also tells us several important things about cultural policy. First, that the longterm impact of cultural diplomacy can be very longterm: Brubeck, Ellington, et. al. visited Pakistan back in the 1950s as part of a State Department-run Cold War cultural diplomacy initiative. It is not completely clear how, or to what degree, that tour left seeds in Pakistani culture that emerged here, but that would be a story well worth pursuing.

The other interesting cultural policy feature of this story is what it says about the recording industry today. Marketing did not create the hit: building an Abbey Road-style recording studio in Pakistan made the hit possible, a hit that in turn helped strengthen so-called Western values associated with the music. So a cultural diplomacy initiative today might well draw lessons about how to encourage politically-progressive spirit in other countries by running programs that empower musicians and artists more generally to explore hybridized idioms of expression.

British Museum Raising $ for New Museum in Basra, Iraq

While the image of the Brits setting up a museum in Iraq to display artifacts removed from Iraq may leave one a bit queasy at the neo-colonialist overtones, this is actually a great idea worth emulating as a form of cultural diplomacy in other countries. One hopes that State Department officials are in discussions with the Met, the Art Institute, and other universal museums with holdings that could and should make visits to their countries of origin.

Kudoes to the indefatigable John Curtis and especially to Major General Barney White-Spunner for imagining and pushing this, and to the British Museum for backing the effort to raise funds.

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.

Iraq's Antiquities Police: The Bitter Fruit of US Indifference to the Looting of Iraq's Archaeological Heritage

I have been putting off posting about this front-page New York Times story. In part I've delayed because I needed to check some of its facts with colleagues; in part because I and others have been pushing the story to contacts in the US government asking them to do something (and Iraqi colleagues have been mobilizing to do the same for their government); in part because I try to make it a principle to not write when too angry to think straight.

The gist of the story is that the Iraqi antiquities police force is a miserable failure. The article focuses on the failure of the Iraqis to fund the force. But the key point is that this new force was not established until 2008 — that is, after years of unsuccessful efforts by Iraqi cultural heritage officials — in particular, Donny George Youkhanna -- to build policing capacity with almost no assistance from the US. From 2004 on, Youkhanna struggled to create a 1,400-strong antiquities police, which might have done quite a bit of good had the US provided some help even if only in the way of things like gas, trucks, walkie-talkies, etc., but Youkhanna's force was starved budgetarily until it was shut down. Of course, under Bush this was hardly surprising, given that the US military itself did almost nothing to address the problem of massive looting of archaeological sites during the occupation period.

Many of us had hoped that with a change in administrations, attention would now be paid, at long last to beefing up Iraq's capacity to police its sites. But the Obama administration does not look much different than the Bush administration on this issue. As reported repeatedly on this blog, it has failed to train or fund or provide logistical support for Iraqi antiquities police: the military has done next to nothing, as the article makes clear enough, and the State Department, which has money to spend on Iraqi cultural heritage, refuses to spend more than a smidgeon of it on security issues. In short, where stopping the looting of Iraq's archaeological heritage is concerned, to paraphrase Obama, we seem to be as careless getting out as we were careless getting in.

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.

The Waters of Babylon

The New York Times reports on a major undertaking by the World Monument Fund and Iraq's State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, financed (at least for the assessment and preliminary management planning phase) by the State Department. The last paragraph raises obliquely a criticism of the way in which postwar funding for archaeological concerns may have skewed towards producing more archaeologists, to the neglect of beefing up other kinds of expertise also needed to do the dirty, unglamorous jobs of shoring up buildings, pumping out or diverting water -- and, one might add, securing, monitoring and patrolling sites against looters:

The site was returned to Iraqi control more than a year ago. Ms. Ackerman and Mr. Allen said the project had already surveyed the remains, building by building, and started the restoration of two museums. Although Iraq has a large corps of trained archaeologists, they said, an immediate need is to instruct others in the conservation of ruins and bring in structural engineers and hydrologists to handle the water problem.

New Damage to the Iraq Museum

From Lamia al-Gailani Wehr, via the Iraqcrisis listhost:

SBAH and the Iraq Museum were victims to the bombing of the Foreign Ministry last week. Many of the glass windows were broken, part of the roof of the children’s nursery collapsed, fortunately there was no fatality, just bruises and minor injuries. One of the accounts was at the Ministry of Finance when it was also bombed, he was injured and taken to hospital. I understand some of the exhibited antiquities in the the Museum were also damaged. I hope they have already been photographed.

Worrying issue, I heard that most of the staff ran away. Was there any emergency plan to deal with this kind of situation, such as the closure of all the doors, particularly the ones leading to the Museum and the storerooms? Apart from the police guards, is there a team whose duty to take charge whenever the Museum is under threat?

Prof. al-Gailaini Wehr raises a very important question, one that it is to be hoped will be asked as well by all those who wish to help the Iraqi government do what it can to secure the museum for a future that may well involve more bombings and even, god forbid, a breakdown of civil order on a much larger scale. Until now, the State Department has blithely pursued a Pollyannish policy that has ignored repeated warnings by archaeologists that it was too dangerous to reopen the museum. Instead of focusing on security for the museum (or archaeological sites for that matter), we have acceded to the Maliki government's desires to use it for propaganda purposes as a symbol that things are returning to normal. As part of that fantasy, US money has been plowed into site assessments, sustainable tourism planning, and training for archaeologists -- all good ideas but surely secondary in importance to the need for far better protection of Iraq's cultural heritage against looting and bombing. If the report of damage to exhibited artifacts is true, our negligence has once again borne bitter fruit, albeit on a much smaller scale than the looting of the museum and archaeological sites in the 2003-2007 period.

Speaking recently about the State Department's involvement in a site assessment of the ancient city of Ashur, a Public Diplomacy Officer remarked,

As the U.S. forces look toward our draw down out of the country, this is a great potential legacy that we can leave behind; showing that we took proper care of the ancient sites and history of the Iraqi people. When the security situation arrives at the point when there is an opportunity for wide-spread tourism, our good stewardship of these sites will pay off because we will have met the immediate needs to preserve these sites now.

The danger is that if we do not recognize that taking proper care means worrying about security first and foremost, the legacy that we leave behind will be of a country whose heritage remains inexcusably vulnerable.Let us hope that we learn from it and refocus our cultural policy in Iraq.

State Department Admits No Mechanism Exists for Providing Ongoing Security for Sites or Museums, Defends Its Efforts

What has the State Department done to protect sites?

As readers of this blog already know, in October the State Department issued a fact sheet laying out its support of what was described as “numerous activities relating to the protection and preservation of Iraq’s cultural heritage”:

These include 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. Since 2003, several million dollars have been applied to these needs resulting in professional and infrastructure improvements to the National Museum as well as other museums and institutions, and improved archaeological site security in Iraq.

As usual, the issue of site protection was lumped together with others, leaving it unclear how much money has been applied to supporting archaeological site protection, for what programs, protecting how many sites, with what results.

Addressing the problem? Not exactly.

In response to my request, Darlene Kirk, a spokesperson from the State Department’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs, has amplified on the fact sheet’s summary, and kindly permitted me to share this information with the public. Kirk admits that “the Department of State has no mechanisms at its disposal to provide ongoing security at archaeological sites and museums in Iraq,” but she goes on to argue that State “has taken steps to address the problem in a variety of ways:

• The Department of State is funding the newly announced Iraq Cultural Heritage Project (ICHP) and the development of a site management plan for Babylon. Together, these initiatives include programs that will focus on, inter alia, building Iraqi professional capacity for conservation, for preservation of sites including archaeological sites, and for museum governance and administration. It is expected that strengthening the ability of responsible entities within the Iraqi government and its citizens to serve as the responsible stewards of their rich heritage will have a positive impact on site and museum security on a sustainable basis.

• In April 2008, the Department of Homeland Security promulgated U.S. import restrictions on all Iraqi cultural property after a decision to do so was made by the Department of State acting under authority delegated by the President. This import restriction is in addition to the ongoing OFAC regulations banning importation of Iraqi cultural property since 1990.

• The Department of State supported two security assessments of the National Museum in Baghdad which resulted in $1 m. in contracts to implement security measures at the Museum.

• In 2004, in response to evidence of serious looting of archaeological sites in southern Iraq, the State Department used funds donated by the Packard Humanities Institute to purchase 20 trucks and communications equipment for site guards in Dhi, Qar, Diwanyah, and Babil provinces. It was determined that these guards needed such tools to monitor the sites and deter the pillage that was being carried out by very well equipped looters. These vehicles and equipment were given to the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) which in turn issued them to the provinces for use by the site guards. According to SBAH officials in the affected provinces, this resulted in a substantial diminution of the looting in those provinces.

• U.S. personnel responsible for the Ministry of Culture during the period of the Coalition Provisional Authority until July 2004 worked closely with the SBAH and with the Department of State to build and train a Facilities Protection Service (FPS) Archaeological Site Protection Force devoted to site protection under the administration of SBAH.

• Throughout the past several years the Department has acted to address the problem of looting in other ways such as promoting coordination within the international law enforcement community and funding the development, publication and distribution of the Red List for Iraqi Antiquities at Risk which is produced by the International Council of Museums in Arabic, English and French. Now in its third printing, this publication helps raise awareness about the problem among law enforcement entities and would be collectors. The US Embassy in Baghdad recently distributed new copies of the Red List throughout the country and in particular at border crossings.

• The State Department has funded satellite imagery acquisition for large areas of Iraq to allow archaeolgists at SUNY Stony Brook to assess site looting. The Department has also funded training programs in satellite imagery analysis for Iraqi archaeologists.

• The State Department has recently allocated funding for meetings of a proposed Iraq archaeological site protection working group, to be composed of SBAH senior officials from Baghdad, and senior archaeologists and FPS commanders from governorates most affected by looting. The possibility of convening an international law enforcement working group on Iraqi cultural property is also under consideration. (Kirk added in a followup message that “$93,000 has been allocated for the site protection working group meetings. The budget for the international law enforcement working group on Iraqi cultural property has not yet been determined, as this meeting is in the early planning stages.”)

• In July 2008, State Department and US Embassy Baghdad personnel arranged a helicopter overflight of 40+ sites in Qadissiya, Dhi Qar, and Wasit governorates to assess current looting. The results of this mission are being analyzed and will be shared with SBAH authorities for followup. (Kirk later added that “the July 2008 overflight of 40+ sites was conducted by a pair of US military helicopters at the request of the US Embassy in Baghdad. The expert participants were the Cultural Heritage Liaison Officer of the US Embassy and the State Department Special Coordinator for Iraqi Cultural Heritage. The sites were extensively photographed from the air by both experts. The data are being analyzed by the expert participants.”)

This list says volumes about the failure of American policy to deal with the problem of site looting. Import restrictions, Red Lists, site management programs, and security efforts at the Iraq Museum do not secure archaeological sites. The funding for trucks by the Packard Foundation in 2004 was never supplemented by any governmental assistance, nor was any effort made to solicit additional support from other foundations. The FPS force was never given the funding and logistical support it needed, and I believe it has now been disbanded. The funding for satellite imagery was not for large areas of Iraq, but only for southern Iraq, and was provided only in part by the State Department; given that the US military certainly has time-series satellite images available for all sites, it remains puzzling why the State Department did not arrange for those images to be provided to archaeologists, rather than paying for a private company to provide images for only a fraction of sites (and not in a coherent time series even for those sites).

A hopeful development

Only the last two of these bullet points deal directly with contemporary site-protection efforts. Most welcome is the news that a working group on site protection has finally been proposed and allocated funding for meetings. It would have been even more welcome if the working group included some experts on securing and protecting sites (not archaeological sites but all kinds of sites) from the military or State Department.

Where's the Report?

The final bullet point raises interesting questions of its own. A similar helicopter tour of eight sites was conducted in June 2008, leaked almost immediately, and published in mid-July. Why is it taking so long to release the findings from the helicopter overflight in July? Could it be because they would contradict the message that both the US and the Iraqi governments want to present, that the looting is over? One hopes not, and it is always possible that the “expert participants” (presumably John Russell and Diane Siebrandt, neither of whom to my knowledge is an expert at analyzing imagery though both are highly competent, dedicated, and indeed heroic individuals putting their lives on the line in Iraq) simply are better at keeping things under wraps than the British Museum, but the delay certainly raises suspicions.

Another "news story" out as part of the public relations campaign to make it appear that the Provincial Reconstruction Teams are mopping up, now that the looting is over (or never happened).

This past May, Iraqi archaeologists were able to visit the areas for the first time since the start of the war. While sites like the carved walls of Nineveh were in drastic need of protection from the sun and wind, the fact that many areas were largely unexcavated probably protected them from looters, according to Diane Siebrandt, cultural heritage officer for the U.S. State Department in Baghdad.

It is nice to hear from the State Department that many areas around Mosul were spared the looting that has devastated thousands of archaeological sites in Iraq. But is it really true as a general statement? We have no time-series photos of all the areas around Mosul to verify this. And the sites that have been visited are among a small number that came under US military protection. They have been spared not, as the State Department officer claims, because Mosul's sites are largely unexcavated -- unexcavated sites elsewhere in Iraq have been decimated -- but because we have guarded them. That is something the State Department and the military have been unwilling to acknowledge, since it would obviously point to the  need to put military and security resources into guarding sites at a point when the overall administration policy has been to reduce our footprint. We owe it to the Iraqis, and to ourselves, to do more to secure the sites from the looting that is daily destroying more and more of the record of our origins.