Professor Jens Hanssen’s office is a cramped room on the third floor of U of T’s Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. Stacked bookshelves line three walls, forming a library in a variety of languages, but mostly English and Arabic. A few titles stand out: The Economy of Cities, Problems of Everyday Life, and Transforming Loss into Beauty. These three books represent a cause close to Hanssen’s heart, the preservation of Iraqi cultural institutions in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion.
Hanssen was part of a group of Middle East Studies professors who traveled to Baghdad in June 2003, just weeks after the end of the “shock and awe” bombing campaign by Coalition forces.
The group, known as the Iraqi Observatory, produced a 30-page report on their fact-finding mission, describing the conditions of the city’s libraries, archives, and universities, and recommending what must be done to save Iraq’s cultural history from destruction.
“The decision [to go] was made even before the invasion,” he says. “We anticipated that the universities were going to suffer. I was watching like everyone else, with tears in my eyes as Baghdad went up in flames. I just had to go.”
Hanssen downplays the obvious risks involved.
“This was before the UN headquarters were bombed. It was even before critics could imagine how horribly wrong the US occupation would go. In hindsight, it was perhaps the only window that was safe.”
Upon his arrival, Hanssen found a city torn apart by the bombing campaign, and a society degenerating into chaos and civil disobedience.
“At the border, there were no visas or passport controls. The way we got through was [my colleague] Keith Watenpaugh, the only American, would ask these young kids, the soldiers, ‘Where are you from?’ They would say mainly southern states, Texas or Arkansas, and Keith would say, ‘Oh, I have a cousin there.’ And that was our carnet de passage.”
“The Americans were just not in any position to guard the border at the most basic level. That’s to be blamed for the insurgency coming across the borders.”
Over the course of this nine-day fact-finding mission, Hanssen documented what he saw with a handheld video camera. Upon his return, the footage was edited down to two 10-minute videos entitled The Destruction of Baghdad’s Cultural Heritage.
The videos, which Hanssen has made available for public viewing on YouTube, provide a unique perspective of post-war Baghdad—one that’s impossible to find on the evening news.
While the Western media focuses on the monumental tasks of installing an autonomous government and ultimately, the withdrawal of Coalition troops, Hanssen’s work highlights the challenges faced once the bombings subside—the reconstruction of Iraqi culture.
He begins at the Iraqi National Library and Archive, burned and heavily looted in the chaos that followed the Coalition invasion. In his video, the salvaged books are piled six feet high, without any attention paid to classification.
An official from the Iraqi Academy of Sciences suggests that the looting was perpetrated by specialists who sought the most priceless volumes for sale on the black market.
Looking back, Hanssen disagrees. “To be honest, for textual and archival stuff there’s not a great market. I don’t think it was market-driven. But many of the libraries that we visited had very valuable editions, and we still haven’t really got a sense of what went missing. There are other people, Iraqis, who are [working that out].”
Dr. Saad Eskander is one of those people. Named the director of the INLA in 2004, Eskander took on the task of restoring the library’s collection, even if it meant conspiring to steal back thousands of volumes.
The subject of features in the Washington Post, The Guardian, and GQ, Eskander has become the face of the movement to rebuild Iraq and preserve its cultural heritage. He’s also put his life at risk in doing so, as the INLA has become a primary target of insurgents who aim to disrupt Iraq’s reconstruction.
Hanssen is sympathetic to the struggle of Eskander and his colleagues.
“We tried to get a sense of not just the destruction, but also the sense of powerlessness on the part of these librarians,” he says. “It’s natural that [they] should blame dark forces, how else to comprehend this cultural looting that wasn’t in anybody’s interest? And that it would be done by Iraqis themselves…”
Politics play a role in every aspect of Iraq’s reconstruction, especially with the Hawza, a secretive group of non-state officials who form a volunteer security force at the INLA.
“The Hawza is the religious college of Shiites. We asked ourselves, ‘Why would these well-organized, well-drilled young men come in and cart books into their mosque in Sadr City?’”
Hanssen believes they acted with political interests in mind.
“These guys were extremely loyal and organized. They probably wouldn’t have done the looting, they were genuine. But it wasn’t necessarily out of a greater sense of the historical and cultural value of these books. To guard these books was a bargaining chip—the Hawza can present itself as a guardian of Iraq’s heritage. Groups were forming in anticipation of some future Iraqi state.”
The building of such a state would include a strengthening of not only libraries and archives, but academic institutions as well. Hanssen recalls the strong sense of community he perceived at Baghdad University and Iraqi Academy of Sciences in 2003.
“It was a period where everybody was pretty hopeful. Anxious, but hopeful. Most people, even the thousands who held Ba’ath membership, were genuinely happy that Saddam’s regime was gone. You had men and women sitting on benches, laughing, socializing. It didn’t feel any different from other campuses in the middle of the summer.”
Hanssen conducted his report during the period between the fall of the Ba’athist regime and the rise of the violent insurgency that threw Iraq into turmoil.
“Our report was critical, but if we’d written it three months later, we would have been far more critical. We were so optimistic. We made these recommendations thinking it would only be a matter of time before we can start rebuilding. We couldn’t foresee just how bad things were going to go. Since we spoke to these professors, some of them have been killed, others went into exile.”
The principal recommendation of the Iraqi Observatory’s report was to integrate Iraqi universities into the international community of higher education. In the five years since Hanssen’s trip, many initiatives have been proposed, including a plan to build a state of the art American campus in northern Iraq.
Given the strength of the insurgency, Hanssen believes current prospects are grim.
“These are isolated [ideas]. To build a parallel, Americanized higher education system I don’t think will work. When Obama withdraws, should he withdraw, any treaties and contracts might be null and void. Even if there are all the right intentions, people are hedging their bets. The [Iraqi government]—I don’t think it stands on firm ground. The future will tell us.”
