Another article, more first-person about the destruction of the Iraq
National Library:
Robert Fisk: Library books, letters and priceless documents are set ablaze
in final chapter of the sacking of Baghdad
15 April 2003
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Library and Archives a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical
documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq were turned to ashes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?
http://argument.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=397350&host=6&dir=140
Elisabeth McKechnie
Associate Librarian
UC Davis Law Library
(530) 752-3327
emckechnie@ucdavis.edu
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