ZGram - 4/15/2003 - "A very sad day for civilized man!"
irimland@zundelsite.org
irimland@zundelsite.org
Tue, 15 Apr 2003 14:01:41 -0700
ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny: Now more than ever!
April 15, 2003
Good Morning from the Zundelsite:
This is just so incredibly sad! In war, not only people die.
History dies. Memory dies. Germans of all people should know!
Robert Fisk recounted what he saw:
[START]
Books, Priceless Documents
Burn In Sacking Of Baghdad
By Robert Fisk
The Independent - UK
4-14-3
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historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq - were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?
(SOURCE:
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=397350
)
[END]