Robbing
Iraq Of Its History
By Dr Mubarak Ali
Dawn
29 April, 2003
This 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.