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Posted on 07/08/2003 4:46:36 PM PDT by Pokey78
Looters are systematically stripping many of Iraq's 10,000 archaeological sites and should be shot on sight by coalition forces, an expert said yesterday.
Gangs of up to 400 people are stealing antiquities for the international market and some sites have been largely destroyed, said Elizabeth Stone, an American archaeology professor.
"I would like to see helicopters flying over there shooting bullets so that people know there is a real price to looting this stuff," said Prof Stone, of Stony Brook University, New York. "You have got to kill some people to stop this."
Prof Stone, who has been at the British Museum addressing a conference session on antiquities looting, said so many treasures were being stolen that specialist local markets were now being held by the thieves.
However, when she visited Iraq recently, she discovered that coalition forces were reluctant to intervene in the markets because they have no powers to arrest offenders and "because people were going to get killed".
The stolen antiquities are smuggled on to the international market where the main buyers are Europeans, including British collectors.
Prof Stone said that because wealthy international collectors have access to good lawyers they are rarely prosecuted for possessing looted antiquities.
"Apart from Babylon and Ur, pretty much all the other archaeological sites had been looted in one way or another.
"Looting of archaeological sites was very rare before the first Gulf war but it has escalated since the last war and there is not a lot of structure there to protect them.
"Some sites are almost completely gone. The impact in archaeology is enormous."
At least 10 per cent of the contents of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad are missing, Dr Nawalaal Mutawalli, its director, said. About 13,000 objects have disappeared from the storage rooms although only 47 pieces are missing from the main exhibition hall. "Seven are very important masterpieces," he said.
Here we go again with these numbers.
Is it 13,000 objects, of which 12,997 are ancient babylonian buttons which the museum kept in a big jar? Or is it 13,000 objects, each with individual significance?
I wish someone would nail this down once and for all.
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This is what I heard: the "thousands" of objects were mostly from a few special boxes in locked storage - speculated to be part of the "inside job". A lot of the objects are small items that can be sold in the black market in Europe. The thiefs who stole these things knew what they were doing. The ones who stole the famous objects were greedy fools - those items were famous and never could be sold without immediate arrests - they were too hot.
Also, the items in the count include pieces - if a post was broken into 50 pieces, it would count as fifty items, not one.
I heard this from the American investigator interviewed on the BBC.
Hmmm. You know he's a liberal, to boot.
Funny how guns are ok to take lives to protect material goods they cherish, but not ok to protect one's own life.
SHE is an American. Isn't that special?
Of course.
Like all good pacifists and "progressives", she prefers that someone else hang his/her butt out to get shot in return.
All to "save" her non-productive hobby.
Here I thought we were talking about looters in American cities.
Looters should be shot not because of what they do, but for what they are: ruthless scum who will kill to get whatever they need to generate money, or satisfaction, or to satisfy primitive ideology.
I do agree with her; looters should be shot. But not because it threatens her playpen.
For a while there, the looting of the museum was the only thing about the Iraq war that the Left could take any pleasure in.
They're using backhoes and bulldozers to rip apart ancient sites that have yet to be examined by archaeologists. The country is loaded with these sites. Most of these sites are known by archaeologists.
Reminds me of anthropologists who hate to see the free market bring wealth to all the third world hellholes that had been their quaint, desperate little private backwater up till then.
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