ZGram - 4/15/2003 - "A very sad day for civilized man!"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

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historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq - were 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]