[A-librarian-at-every-table] 'Iraq's Ruined Library Soldiers On' from The

[Kathleen de la Peña McCook]

In 2005 the American Library Association issued a
resolution on the connection between the Iraq war and libraries, 
calling for a full withdrawal of troops and a redistribution of 
funding but the conversation never extended much further than the 
bullet points.

The Nation.

    Iraq's Ruined Library Soldiers On
    by R.H. Lossin


The brutalities of the Iraq war accumulate so fast it is difficult to 
keep track. But in this season of fifth-year anniversaries, one 
largely forgotten crime demands to be recalled, in part because it 
relates directly to the politics of memory itself. Five years ago 
this week, US troops stood by as looters sacked the Iraq National 
Library and Archives (INLA)--one of the oldest and most used in the 
world. In Arab countries the old expression was "Cairo writes, Beirut 
publishes, and Baghdad reads."

American troops were under orders not to intervene. Library staff who 
requested protection from the GI's were told, "We are soldiers, not 
policemen" or "our orders do not extend to protecting this 
[building]." American military orders did, however, extend to 
guarding the Ministry of Oil, and the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, 
Saddam Hussein's secret police.

The selective passivity of US forces was not only ethically 
questionable, but also a violation of international law. The Hague 
Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of 
Armed Conflict (1954) makes clear that libraries should not only be 
spared attack in wartime but also actively protected.

Despite the sack of a major cultural institution and the collapse of 
the society around it, the library struggles on, continuing a long 
tradition of resurrection from the ashes of war. The world's first 
library was located in Mosul, in Northern Iraq. It was built in the 
7th century BCE and produced the first known catalog in history. In 
1927 a British archeological team unearthed it and, for "purposes of 
preservation", carried off many of its artifacts--including the 
oldest known copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the first great work of 
world literature.

Iraq's intellectual golden era came later and coincided with the 
Abbasid Dynasty (750-1258) whose capital was established at Baghdad. 
In 832, the construction of the Byat al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) 
established the new capital as an unrivaled center of scholarship and 
intellectual exchange.

The tradition of  research there brought advances in astronomy, 
optics, physics and mathematics. The father of algebra, Al-
Khawarizmii, labored among its scrolls. It was here that many of the 
Greek and Latin texts we accept as the foundation of Western thought 
were translated, catalogued and preserved. And it was from Baghdad 
that these works would eventually make their way to medieval Europe 
and help lift that continent from its benighted, post-Roman 
intellectual torpor.

In 1258, the Mongols descended on Baghdad and emptied the libraries 
into the Tigris, ending the city's scholarly preeminence enjoyed for 
nearly 500 years. "Hence the legend developed," as one scholar wrote, 
"that the river ran black from the ink of the countless texts lost in 
this manner, while the streets ran red with the blood of the city's 
slaughtered inhabitants."

But under the Ottoman Empire, the library recovered and carried on. 
And despite decades of repression and deprivation under Saddam, 
intellectual accomplishments were still regarded as a major aspect of 
Iraq's cultural identity.

The sacking of the library that began April 11, 2003, was a bad one. 
The current Director of Iraq's National Library and Archive, Dr. Saad 
Eskander, estimates that over three days, as many as "60 percent of 
the Ottoman and Royal Hashemite era documents were lost as well as 
the bulk of the Ba'ath era documents.... [and] approximately 25 
percent of the book collections were looted or burned." Other Iraqi 
manuscript collections and university libraries suffered similar 
fates.

Since then, Iraqis have once again tried to rebuild their library. 
The occupying powers have played along, but like so much about the 
Iraq War, their effort has been marked by ineptitude, hypocrisy and a 
cruel disregard for Iraqi people and culture.

Early in the occupation, L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional 
Authority (CPA), demonstrated an unwillingness to provide the basic 
funds necessary for the reconstruction of Iraq's educational and 
informational infrastructure. Dr. Rene Teijgeler, senior consultant 
for Culture for the Iraqi Reconstruction Management office at the 
American Embassy in Baghdad, left his position in February of 2005, 
not having "the supplies of ready cash that could be used to acquire 
something as simple as bookshelves." His position was left empty.

When John Agresto, the education czar of the CPA, asked for $1.2 
billion to make Iraqi universities viable centers of learning: he 
received $9 million. He asked USAID for 130,000 classroom desks, and 
received 8,000.

So the NLA staff have looked elsewhere, occasionally finding pieces 
of the old collection for sale there on Al Mutanabi street, home to 
Baghdad's booksellers. In fact Al Mutanabi is the source of 95 
percent of the books purchased to replace the looted collection of 
Iraq's National Library and Archive. But Al Mutanabi was destroyed by 
a car bomb in March of 2007.

In a speech to the Internet Librarian International conference in 
2004, Dr. Eskander described the state of the INLA: "When I was 
officially appointed as the new DG, INLA faced several challenges. It 
was the most damaged cultural institution in the country. The 
building was in a ruinous state; there was no money, no water, no 
electricity, no papers, no pens, no furniture (apart [from] 50 
plastic chairs). The morale of employees [was] very low. Three 
departments out of 18 were half-functioning."

Despite this state of near-total ruin, the budget awarded by the CPA 
for the INLA in 2004, was only $70,000.

In addition to material and financial obstacles, Dr. Eskander has had 
to contend with the problems arising from the immaterial legacy of a 
totalitarian dictatorship. In sharp contrast to the de-Baathification 
of Iraqi society by the CPA, a purely negative process of removing 
ranking members of the party from civil service positions, the INLA 
has adopted a comprehensive approach to restructuring institutional 
relations.

"I removed all corrupt and lazy elements from positions of 
responsibility, while promoting a number of qualified young female 
staff to higher positions...The culture of taking orders was 
dominant," Eskander said. "Staff members were unable to and sometimes 
afraid of taking initiative. I have encouraged them to be proactive 
and creative. The new culture has begun gradually but steadily to 
take root in the internal life of NLA. I radically changed the 
mechanisms of decision-making and implementation by democratizing 
them. Now, librarians and archivists elect their own representatives 
who will participate at the meetings of the council of managers, 
where decisions are made. These representatives can monitor all 
activities within NLA and meet the DG anytime they want."

The INLA now provides transportation for all of its 425 employees (up 
from 95 and not counting a security staff of 36) despite the rising 
costs of private security. It houses a functional nursery in order to 
maintain its female staff. (American libraries, whose staff is 85 
percent female and whose directors are 45 percent male, could take a 
cue.)

Many dedicated people have offered important solidarity. In Florence, 
the city government underwrote construction of a conservation lab. 
The Czech government funded the training of Iraqi archivists. With 
the exception of invaluable training sessions organized by private 
educational institutions such as Harvard University, American support 
has been limited to a relatively small number of individual scholars, 
a few dedicated nonprofit agencies, nominal USAID support and the 
cooperation of a handful of private corporations. In 2005 the 
American Library Association issued a resolution on the connection 
between the Iraq war and libraries, calling for a full withdrawal of 
troops and a redistribution of funding but the conversation never 
extended much further than the bullet points.

The US State Department has created the Iraq Virtual Science Library, 
which provides access to a large number of health and science 
databases to institutions throughout the country. But Internet 
access, like electricity, is intermittent at best. Iraq is, after 
all, a largely collapsed society.

Many other more promising projects have been abandoned or left in a 
state of limbo for lack of funding. Efforts at book donation have 
become ever more challenging as the security situation worsens and 
thus have largely stopped.

The British National Library has provided recently published English-
language social science texts and donated microfilm copies of its 
colonial administrative records from its last occupation of Iraq. But 
the replacement of physical documents largely ends here.

It would be unfair and frankly absurd to blame American librarians 
and their shrinking budgets, rising legal costs and increasingly 
costly dependence on proprietary databases for the state of Iraq's 
infrastructure. But the increasingly unstable position of American 
libraries is actually part of the same logic that produced that war. 
The disdain for cultural institutions does not stop at the border--
bombs there, budget cuts here.

That said, the lack of solidarity from the American community of 
librarians and scholars for their Iraqi counterparts is shameful. 
Rousseau suggested that empathy is the basis of language and 
communication.

If the raison d'être of the library profession is the 
preservation and dissemination of information, and thus the 
communication of ideas and the promotion of open discourse, then this 
question of empathy and solidarity should be the profession's guiding 
purpose. Books might seem like an afterthought for people facing 
violent death, poverty and shattered future, yet the library now 
receives 750 patrons a month. If there is any hope for stability and 
reconstruction in Iraq, a little more library solidarity is due.



This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080421/lossin



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