UNESCO to co-chair new experts meeting to retrieve looted Iraqi antiquities

In their second such meeting in less than two weeks in the effort to salvage Iraq's looted antiquities, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and top international experts will gather in London tomorrow to consolidate their plans.

The session, co-chaired by UNESCO's Assistant Director-General for Culture, Mounir Bouchenaki and the Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, will discuss ways to fight illicit trafficking in Iraqi cultural property, notably within the framework of the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, for which UNESCO is responsible.

The participants, including curators of the largest collections of Mesopotamian antiquities outside Iraq from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Middle East Museum in Berlin, the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the British Museum, will try to work out the best ways to rapidly help their colleagues in Baghdad and, in the longer term, curators and archaeologists in other parts of the country.

"I am very pleased to see, once again, the exemplary way in which heritage conservation professionals have mobilized to try to save Iraq's cultural property," UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura says in a message that Mr. Bouchenaki is scheduled to deliver to the meeting. "I would like this meeting to study all possible means of ensuring the restitution of artefacts stolen from Iraqi museums. The treasures of Iraq's cultural heritage, which bear witness to a particularly fertile history, are irreplaceable for the world scientific community, but even more so for the Iraqi people, for the conservation of their cultural identity and their confidence in the future."

The session follows up recommendations made at the first experts meeting at UNESCO headquarters on 17 April in Paris in the wake of the looting of major museums, libraries and other Iraqi cultural centres, principally in Baghdad and Mosul, with the loss of priceless antiquities stretching back 7,000 years.

That meeting called for an immediate ban on international trade in Iraqi cultural heritage and for an international effort to help Iraq's cultural institutions.