Six years on

The reopening of Iraqs National Museum in Baghdad,almost six years after the world first despaired at news of its vandalising and looting,is cause for celebration. The National Museum will hopefully be once more the indescribable repository of human history and culture that it was. Iraq,in its Mesopotamia avatar,gave birth to the script; to mathematics,art and artisanship; to agriculture and to the city. These went on to constitute the fundamental attributes of civilisation; and Iraq itself,through the passage of millennia,became an archaeological site that the world called the cradle of civilisation.

But immediately after the US-led invasion in 2003,thousands of antiquities were lost from the museum. Debate has raged over who exactly was responsible: the looting mobs driven by poverty or hatred for the Baath party that had offices in the museum and whose brutality the building also symbolised; the coalition troops who stood by watching and waiting for an order to intervene; some of the museum staff themselves who might have colluded with professional gangs supposedly working for international dealers and collectors. Now,the museum has reopened with about a quarter of the estimated 15,000 stolen artefacts retrieved. But since it didnt have an inventory,well never know exactly how much was lost. Nevertheless,the restoration of some of the stolen items testifies to a global outrage and effort that tried to ban their trafficking and sale. The plunder of April 2003 was indeed an assault on human civilisation.

But this reopening has been the subject of another dispute that between the Iraqi tourism ministry which needed the revenue and officials of the culture ministry who believe the move is premature and will endanger freshly recovered antiquities lying about. In the last analysis,the event symbolises Iraqs embarking on a new era,in keeping with the renamed,renovated and more humane Baghdad Central Prison,aka Abu Ghraib,which has just accommodated new inmates.