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Recent
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April
10, 2003
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April 15,
2003
The Sacking
of Baghdad
Burning the
History of Iraq
by
ROBERT FISK
Baghdad.
So yesterday was the burning of books. First came
the looters, then the arsonists. It was the final chapter in
the sacking of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives ?
a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents, including
the old royal archives of Iraq, were turned to ashes in 3,000
degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry
of Religious Endowment was set ablaze.
I saw the looters. One of them cursed
me when I tried to reclaim a book of Islamic law from a boy
of no more than 10. Amid the ashes of Iraqi history, I found
a file blowing in the wind outside: pages of handwritten letters
between the court of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who started the
Arab revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia, and the
Ottoman rulers of Baghdad.
And the Americans did nothing. All over
the filthy yard they blew, letters of recommendation to the
courts of Arabia, demands for ammunition for troops, reports
on the theft of camels and attacks on pilgrims, all in delicate
hand-written Arabic script. I was holding in my hands the last
Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history. But for Iraq, this
is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the
Museum of  Archaeology on Saturday and the burning
of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural
identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires?
For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?
When I caught sight of the Koranic library
burning--flames 100 feet high were bursting from the windows--I
raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines'
Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a colleague that
"this guy says some biblical [sic] library is on fire".
I gave the map location, the precise name--in Arabic and English.
I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it
would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later,
there wasn't an American at the scene--and the flames were shooting
200 feet into the air.
There was a time when the Arabs said
that their books were written in Cairo, printed in Beirut and
read in Baghdad. Now they burn libraries in Baghdad. In the
National Archives were not just the Ottoman records of the Caliphate,
but even the dark years of the country's modern history, handwritten
accounts of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, with personal photographs
and military diaries,and microfiche copies of Arabic newspapers
going back to the early 1900s. But the older files and archives
were on the upper floors of the library where petrol must have
been used to set fire so expertly to the building. The heat
was such that the marble flooring had buckled upwards and the
concrete stairs that I climbedhad been cracked.
The papers on the floor were almost too
hot to touch, bore no print or writing, and crumbled into ash
the moment I picked them up. Again, standing in this shroud
of blue smoke and embers, I asked the same question: why? So,
as an all-too-painful reflection on what this means, let me
quote from the shreds of paper that I found on the road outside,
blowing in the wind, written by long-dead men who wrote to
the Sublime Porte in Istanbul or to the Court of Sharif of Mecca
with expressions of loyalty and who signed themselves "your
slave". There was a request to protect a camel convoy of
tea, rice and sugar, signed by Husni Attiya al-Hijazi (recommending
Abdul Ghani-Naim and Ahmed Kindi as honest merchants), a request
for perfume and advice from Jaber al-Ayashi of the royal court
of Sharif Hussein to Baghdad to warn of robbers in the desert.
"This is just to give you our advice for which you will
be highly rewarded," Ayashi says. "If you don't take
our advice, then we have warned you." A touch of Saddam
there, I thought. The date was 1912.
Some of the documents list the cost of
bullets, military horses and artillery for Ottoman armies in
Baghdad and Arabia, others record the opening of the first telephone
exchange in the Hejaz--soon to be Saudi Arabia--while one recounts,
from the village of Azrak in modern-day Jordan, the theft of
clothes from a camel train by Ali bin Kassem, who attacked his
interrogators "with a knife and tried to stab them but
was restrained and later bought off". There is a 19th-century
letter of recommendation for a merchant, Yahyia Messoudi, "a
man of the highest morals, of good conduct and who works with
the [Ottoman] government." This, in other words, was the
tapestry of Arab history--all that is left of it, which fell
into The Independent's hands as the mass of documents crackled
in the immense heat of the ruins.
King Faisal of the Hejaz, the ruler of
Mecca, whose staff are the authors of many of the letters I
saved, was later deposed by the Saudis. His son Faisel became
king of Iraq--Winston Churchill gave him Baghdad after the French
threw him out of Damascus--and his brother Abdullah became the
first king of Jordan, the father of King Hussein and the grandfather
of the present-day Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah II.
For almost a thousand years, Baghdad
was the cultural capital of the Arab world, the most literate
population in the Middle East. Genghis Khan's grandson burnt
the city in the 13th century and, so it was said, the Tigris
river ran black with the ink of books. Yesterday, the black
ashes of thousands of ancient documents filled the skies of
Iraq.
Why?
Yesterday's
Features
Zoltan
Grossman
The Perils of Occupation: the Easier
the Victory, the Harder the Peace
Uri
Avnery
The Night After
Wayne Madsen
The Telltale Signs of Empire
David Krieger
Before You Become Too Flushed with Victory, Think of Ali Ismaeel
Abbas
Jeremy
Brecher
What Can the World Do Now That Tanks Prowl Baghdad?
Robert
Jensen
The Unseen War
Geoffrey
Neale
Ashcroft's War on the Constitution:
A Patriot Attack on America
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Last Tango in Baghdad
Hammond
Guthrie
Rumors of War
Joseph
Heller
Nately's Old Man
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/10
Website
of the Day
The
Third Page
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