GuardiansPress

Considerable Damage To Historic Babylon

Jul 10, 2009 Documentary, Foreign News, People

Kim Gamel, AP – Iraq’s U.S.-led invaders inflicted serious damage on Babylon, driving heavy machinery over sacred paths, bulldozing hilltops and digging trenches through one of the world’s greatest archaeological sites, experts for UNESCO said Thursday.

“The use of Babylon as a military base was a grave encroachment on this internationally known archaeological site,” said a report which the U.N. cultural agency presented in Paris.

UNESCO officials stressed that the damage didn’t begin with the U.S. military’s arrival nor fully end after it left. Archaeologists took away some of Babylon’s finest treasures in the 19th century, Saddam Hussein embellished the site with his own structures, and looters returned when the Americans handed the site back to the Iraqis 21 months after the March 2003 invasion.

Now Babylon is the object of turf war between newly empowered Iraqi officials. At the national level, Iraq’s state antiquities office, focused on conservation, is up against officials of the province surrounding Babylon who want to attract tourists. They have already provoked concern by leveling a section of the site to create a picnic area.

UNESCO aims to make the 4,000-year-old city fit for the coveted title of World Heritage site, and will work to enforce international conventions on the protection of historic sites “so that what happened to Babylon can’t ever happen again,” said Francoise Riviere, the agency’s undersecretary general for culture.

Archaeologist John Curtis of the British Museum, who inspected the site just after it was returned to Iraqi control, said it was too soon to assess the cost of restoring and fully protecting the site.

Several initiatives to save Babylon have been announced in recent years, but have made little headway. Now, with the decline of violence in Iraq, hopes are pinned on a two-year, $700,000 project financed by the U.S. State Department to develop a program aimed at balancing tourism and archaeology at Babylon.