*EPF408 09/11/2003
Tea and Amnesty Recover Thousands of Antiquities for Iraq
(The New York Times 09/10/03 article by Brian Knowlton) (1130)

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Tea and Amnesty Recover Thousands of Antiquities for Iraq
By Brian Knowlton

Washington, Sept. 10 - Through a far-reaching international investigation built on traditional detective work, raw luck and the consumption by investigators of vast amounts of tea, more than 3,400 items looted from the national antiquities museum in Baghdad have been recovered, the head of the inquiry said today.

The tea came into the picture as investigators parlayed with Iraqis who, in one case, knew the location of a secret trove of art but had sworn on the Koran not to reveal it.

Now just over 10,000 items are known to be missing from the museum, Col. Matthew Bogdanos of the Marines said at the Pentagon. He was explaining the near-final findings of a five-month investigation by a 13-member team from 10 United States agencies, aided by foreign investigators and private art specialists.

Colonel Bogdanos, a former New York homicide prosecutor with a graduate degree in classical studies from Columbia University, confirmed much of what has come out since the original, highly exaggerated, reports that more than 170,000 artifacts had been looted from the museum.

He provided new details, however, on the extent of losses, on the often-fortuitous process of recovery and on ongoing efforts to find still-missing pieces of exceptional value. To date, items have been recovered not only in Iraq, but in Jordan, Britain, Italy and the United States.

Nearly all those recovered - 99 percent, Colonel Bogdanos said - were items taken randomly by indiscriminate looters, and not those taken by those who had clearly acted with intimate, inside knowledge of the museum's holdings from areas that outsiders would have been hard-pressed to find.

Investigators' work has been complicated by what Bogdanos called the museum's "antiquated manual and incomplete inventory system," and the fact that no photographs were available of many items, making it harder for dealers, customs officials and museum curators to watch for them.

An amnesty program - a no-questions-asked promise not to prosecute those returning looted items - has yielded 1,731 items, including a few of extreme value, such as the Sacred Vase of Warka, an exquisite white limestone votive vase dating to 3,200 B.C., "arguably the most significant piece possessed by the museum."

This program, Colonel Bogdanos said, did not simply consist of "someone walking up to the gate and saying, `Here, I have a bag.' " More often, someone would say, "If I know a friend who knows a friend who might have a piece, what would happen?"

"Well," the answer would come, "why don't we meet the friend? Let's have some tea. Let's talk about it."

Such tea-filled talks led to the recovery of the Warka Vase.

Colonel Bogdanos was even contacted while on leave in Manhattan by an individual who "told me he had something to turn over."

"A meeting was arranged, a package was turned over, and a 4,000-year-old Akkadian tablet is now in the hands of the Iraqi museum," he said. He declined to identify the individual, or say whether tea had been consumed at the meeting.

It was, however, in important negotiations between Colonel Bogdanos's staff and five senior museum staff members, who had sworn on the Koran not to reveal the secret location where they had moved 8,366 of the "more priceless artifacts" from museum display cases for safekeeping.

"After weeks of trust-building and more tea than I can count," the colonel said with a chuckle, "yes, we were granted access to the secret place, entered the secret place, saw the items, saw that they were complete, saw that they were there, and then sealed the secret place back up." There, he said, they will remain until sufficient security is restored at the museum.

A similar process led to a visit to a bomb shelter in western Baghdad, where museum staff had moved boxes containing nearly 40,000 manuscripts, parchment and other materials.

"More tea, more trust-building," Colonel Bogdanos said. The documents were found to be in good shape, and community members vowed to protect them "as a point of pride and honor" until they can be returned to the museum.

Among the more valuable recoveries, reported earlier, was that of the royal family collection of gold and jewelry, more than 6,700 pieces, from an underground vault of the central bank, along with "the fabled Treasure of Nimrud and the original golden bull's head from the Golden Harp of Ur," the latter damaged but restorable.

That recovery came only after the investigative team, along with a National Geographic crew, had spent three weeks pumping water from around the flooded vaults. "In a moment that can only be characterized as sheer joy," Colonel Bogdanos said, "we opened each of those boxes and found the treasure of Nimrud completely there, intact."

Other recoveries have involved considerable luck.

More than 400 pieces had been returned by Ahmed Chalabi, who headed the exile Iraqi National Congress and now holds the interim Iraqi presidency, after his forces stopped a car at a checkpoint near the city of Kut in southern Iraq.

While a few large items remain missing, such as the Basitki statue from 2300 B.C., many are small enough to be smuggled easily, such as the thumb-sized, but often invaluable, cylinder seals, elaborately carved or inscribed stone cylinders that could be rolled on clay to leave miniature scenes. One of these sold at a Christie's auction in 2001 for $424,000. Colonel Bogdanos said some were sold in Iraqi marketplaces for $30, or three for $200.

But 30 items from the museum's main gallery - "30 display-quality, irreplaceable pieces," Colonel Bogdanos said - are still missing. His group has issued a poster bearing photographs of the items, and has provided other photos and identifying information to Interpol and various national police authorities.

"The goal here is simple," Colonel Bogdanos said. "I want a Chilean border official, a Lithuanian customs official or an Okinawan police officer to see an item, recognize it as a cylinder seal, say very simply, `You shouldn't have that. It's stolen from the Iraq museum in Baghdad, and you are under arrest.'"

(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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