BBC's troubling look at Iraq museum

When U.S. forces invaded Iraq in 2003, archaeologists, scholars and museum specialists around the world feared for the safety of ancient artifacts and cultural monuments throughout the region. As the war progressed, wildly varying news reports hit front pages about the pillaging of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad, some claiming up to 170,000 objects had been taken with U.S. forces doing little to curb the looting.

Tonight at 10, a BBC documentary takes us inside the ransacked museum with British historical buildings expert Dan Cruickshank, who was allowed into Iraq to visit the museum in late April 2003.

A cameraman at his heels, Cruickshank toured the building and grounds — now guarded by American tanks and soldiers — through wrecked and looted offices, broken glass, smashed pottery and toppled statues, a scene he described as "mindless, mindless, mindless vandalism."

Oddly, though, parts of the museum where rare Sumerian sculptures were displayed did not look pillaged and display cases were unbroken — yet the objects were missing. Cruickshank believed they had been removed before the war. But where were they?

"Raiders of the Lost Art" is an intriguing, off-the-cuff documentary that goes looking for answers and finds "terror among the staff" of the museum, along with evidence of Baath party loyalties. Cruickshank discovers evidence that the museum was used as a military position and that early reports of the number of missing objects were misleading.

The show is well worth watching for many reasons, but it left me wondering why we are only getting to see it now, nearly two years later. What has happened in the meantime? What has been recovered and who is now in charge of the museum?

Cruickshank had visited the Baghdad museum before the war, in November 2002, and taped interviews with museum officials about plans for preserving the artifacts during combat. The documentary interspersed footage of the tidy, well-tended museum prior to the invasion with the rubble-strewn corridors and fortified grounds Cruickshank encountered on his return. We see grenades and parts of guns lying about.

As Cruickshank continued to question the museum staff and U.S. soldiers present during the initial combat, he began to find irreconcilable differences in the information he was getting. Keys for locked storage rooms went missing and leads about off-site storage areas turned up boxes of books, not golden treasures.

U.S. Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos, in charge of investigating the museum's losses, told Cruickshank, "Eight days into the investigation we are still struggling to get an accurate inventory as to what was in the museum prior to the war."

As Cruickshank's questions to museum officials ran into stonewalls and U.S. investigators began to break locks to access chaotic storage areas, the reporter discovered mounting evidence that Saddam loyalists on the museum staff may have been involved in the disappearance of some of the most precious artifacts. At the same time, he was finding looted artifacts for sale on the streets.

Let's hope, with the conflict in Iraq still unresolved, there will be a follow-up to this documentary that provides more current news on the situation.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com