Robbing Iraq Of Its History
By Dr Mubarak Ali
Dawn
29 April, 2003This is a common phenomenon of history that imperial powers, after defeating their adversaries militarily, make systematic efforts to root out their historical heritage and thus reduce them to a state of intellectual and cultural powerlessness. By rendering the vanquished identity-less, the victors curb and stifle their spirit of resistance. This process, moreover, facilitates the assimilation of the defeated nation into the imperial culture. Thus they can be made subservient to the victorious forces.
This happened in South America where the Inca, Maya, and Aztec civilizations and their historical monuments and artifacts were looted and destroyed. After the indigenous people were delinked from their past, they were assimilated into the imperial Spanish system. The same model was followed in North America and Australia where the local people were forced to forget, abandon, and shun their cultural roots before they were absorbed in the melting pot of the dominant European culture.
In the second model, the occupying forces plunder the archaeological and historical antiquities, manuscripts and documents of the country attacked and deposit them in their museums and libraries in order to control history and make the occupied nations dependent on the scholarship of imperial powers. Having resources and sources, they distort, mould, interpret and construct the history of colonial countries as it suits their interest.
The colonial powers of the 18th and 19th centuries adopted this model in Asia and Africa to deprive their people of their historical heritage. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1799, he sent ships loaded with the Egyptians antiquities to France that are now on display in the Louvre museum. The British museum is another example that is the repository of looted archaeological and historical artifacts of the British colonies.
In the third model, which is followed by the Americans, the people are encouraged to steal and sell precious antiquities and manuscripts to their museums and libraries. It has become a booming business for private collectors to smuggle and get anything historically worth to purchase for high price. One example is Afghanistan. The Afghan museum was plundered by criminal gangs and its antiquities are now sold in the world markets.
Following different models, the Americans are trying to use different tactics to make the Iraqi people powerless, historyless, and bereft of any sense of their cultural past. In world history, Iraq is known as 'the cradle of civilization'. It produced the Sumerian, Assyrian, Akkadian, and Babylonian civilizations with such great cities as Ur, Nineveh, and Babylon. It was the first civilization that introduced the cuneiform script, the decimal system in arithmetic and a lunar calendar. The Iraqis are proud of their past. They regard themselves as the inheritors of the oldest civilization and benefactors to humankind.
The Americans are now trying to snatch their pride and historical consciousness and reduce them to non-entity? The imperial forces have defeated them militarily but not culturally.
The problem with America is that as a nation it has achieved scientific and technological supremacy over the world. It has military and economic power. But it does not have a past and no glorious historical heritage. When it compares itself with the ancient nations of Asia and Africa it appears before them a pygmy and an insignificant nation that has no past traditions and institutions. To rectify this weakness, the Americans are trying to collect and deposit in their own institutions important archaeological and historical antiquities and manuscripts by hook or by crook.
But this only makes them the collector but not the inheritor of past civilizations. In Iraq, their aim seems to be not so much to get hold of their antiquities and destroy them, though that was the initial impression one got from the reports of the looting and plundering of the museums and libraries by the mobs. But in reality the gangs of looters are organized by vested interests to take away precious artifacts and sell them to private collectors. According to a group of British archaeologists they are "persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects Iraq's heritage by preventing sales abroad".
In another report the American Council for Cultural Policy, a coalition of 60 collectors and dealers (like the coalition of occupying forces) met the Bush administration and argued that the post-Saddam Iraq should relax the antiquities laws. Now, there are confirmed reports that behind gangs of looters there is an organized mafia which is taking advantage of the anarchy to take away historical treasures from Iraq. All these activities have the blessing of the imperial and occupying forces.
The recent burning of the library in Baghdad which completely destroyed all precious manuscripts and documents is testimony to the policy of the occupying forces to deprive the Iraqi people of their history and their past. After giving details of the burning documents, manuscripts and rare books, Robert Fisk asked the question: why? The answer is in the American psyche. In the first Gulf war of 1991, George Bush Sr condemned Iraq's invasion of Kuwait saying "the entire civilized world is against Iraq". His son Bush Jr has repeatedly declared after 9/11 his aim to save and protect civilization. He has termed the present conflict as one between the civilized world that is America and the terrorists who are the people of the Middle East. The logical conclusion is that to preserve and protect its civilization, the west would like to eliminate and wipe out other cultures and civilizations. Make other nations, especially those who are resisting American imperialism, historyless, pastless, and after silencing them, push them back to the stage of barbarism.
The American occupying forces are attempting to create a new model in Iraq by depriving the people of their cultural heritage and thus reduce them to a conglomerate of Shias, Sunnis and Kurds, who are at loggerheads and need a balancing power to maintain peace. Experience shows that once people lose their history, culture, and identity, they can be moulded according to the designs of the occupying forces. Therefore, once, the Iraqi people are deprived of their historical sources, it would become impossible for them to reconstruct and reshape their history. It has been said that those who control the past also control the future. This is what the Americans are trying to do in Iraq.