File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0304, message 294


From: "Anthony Crifasi" <crifasi-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: [fyi] History ? That's yesterday !
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 01:42:16 +0000


Jan .... how should I say this, books, letters, documents, and artificats 
... compared to THIS: http://www.rense.com/general37/jailed.htm

Anthony Crifasi

>From: Jan Straathof <janstr-AT-chan.nl>
>Reply-To: heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>To: heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: [fyi] History ? That's yesterday !
>Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 21:59:27 +0100
>
>Robert Fisk: Library books, letters and priceless documents are set ablaze
>in final chapter of the sacking of Baghdad [15 April 2003]
>
>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?
>
>-------
>From:
>http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=397350
>
>
>
>
>      --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---


_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail



     --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005