By Jim Quilty
Daily Star staff
Friday, December 09, 2005

BEIRUT: For most people these days, "Iraq" means the insurgency against American occupation, the threat of ethnic-sectarian civil war, and the contending interests, ideologies and justifications of those involved. In some corners, though, Iraqis are preoccupied with rehabilitating the country's cultural life after decades of authoritarian rule. This may seem a mundane matter when the new state is unable to guarantee basic security and services.

It is equally pressing, nevertheless, since national culture is the very stuff of democratic practice. If the rhetoric is to be believed, this is what Washington's intervention in Iraq was all about.

Kamel Shiah Abdullah has been a key player in this process. A communist intellectual, he left Iraq in 1979 expecting to return a couple of years later. Travels in North Africa and Europe led to a PhD in philosophy but he drifted from the academy to journalism, then on to opposition activism.

He returned to Iraq in 2003 and went to work for the new regime's Culture Ministry. For 19 months he was director-general - the functionary who runs things - and now serves as adviser. He was in Beirut recently, during a regional forum on cultural funding.

"Two challenges confront Iraq's Culture Ministry," he said, "financial and political."

Some of the ministry's financial woes reflect the problems of public administration around the region - "a huge number of employees doing nothing," for instance. "[There are] self-financing and centrally financed directorates within the ministry. The self-financing ones, like for visual art, suffer from poor organization."

Other challenges are unique to Iraq: the haemorrhage of precious objects during the sanction years; the destruction stemming from the 2003 American invasion; the loss from subsequent looting and the general state of lawlessness since.

Preoccupied with fighting insurrection and state-building, the new Iraqi state has few resources for culture. Abdullah notes that, with a sliding budget of around $1 million per annum, his is the poorest ministry.

"[Ultimately,] the budget looks entirely inappropriate compared to the huge task of cultural rehabilitation we're up against," he said.

Iraq's list of cultural casualties is grim indeed. The untold destruction arising from the looting of the National Library; 6,000 artworks missing from Markaz al-Funun, many smuggled out of the country; 15,000 pieces reported stolen from the National Museum - an unreliable number, since its inventory wasn't properly documented.

"Fortunately some of the stolen museum pieces have been returned. Many are still outside Iraq, waiting for security to improve. We need further help from Interpol and Unesco to make more progress."

Unfortunately the haemorrhage of precious objects continues, market opportunities outweighing loyalty to the national patrimony.

"Thugs have stolen untold numbers of items from archaeological sites around the country," he said. "At first we had no means to safeguard them. Now we're having local tribesmen guard the sites, though it's difficult to pay them more than what they'd make selling these artefacts on the market.

"We're trying to instil loyalty in the tribes by settling them in new villages, with all the modern conveniences. So far they're doing a good job, though it's not ideal.

"We've been counting on public good will until now. In 2006 we hope to start working with an NGO dedicated to recovering looted art works."

The other side of the ministry's rehabilitation struggle lies in managing and preserving what it has.

"We've renovated two floors of the National Library and the reading room is ready. The library's official opening will take place in a couple of months. Our first priority is to buy books. We have only 150,000 titles; we must acquire a million more."

He says donors like Unesco have made piecemeal rehabilitation of the National Museum possible and Japanese and Italian experts have done much of the restoration work. The Assyrian room is now complete; a Children's Museum is nearing completion and scholarly outreach programs are being organized.

"But there is still no strategic plan for reconstituting the museum," he said. "We struggle to help administrators understand what their needs actually are."

The second challenge Abdullah faces is the hyper-politicized environment in which the ministry has to work.

"Different interest groups want to appropriate the ministry for their own goals.

"Some items the National Museum and Library were recovered and are being held in Northern Iraq, where they're regarded as part of the local heritage. We're happy to lend out these pieces, but that they must first be returned to Baghdad.

"Once a committee of Shiite shaykhs approached us with a request to fund ceremonies commemorating the birth of Husayn. 'No,' I told them, 'you have the Shiite waqf for this.' If we were to fund Husayn's birthday, all the confessions would want similar funding.

"The ministry must concern itself with matters of high culture - music, theater, literature, scholarship. Later the shaykhs agreed with us."

Abdullah also fears that the ministry's projects will be waylaid by changes at the ministerial level and shifting political agendas.

Culture is more than patrimony and, after some decades of authoritarian rule, "cultural rehabilitation" requires direct action in the realm of contemporary cultural production. Since regime-change, then, several book series have been sponsored, with the ministry absorbing up to half the cost.

"The idea," said Abdullah, "is to reawaken the memory of Iraqi scholarship and literature before Saddam."

One series, written by a liberal Iraqi Islamist, addresses Islamic tolerance. Another, 'Alam wa Athar' ('Figure and Work'), re-issues classic Iraqi scholarship - history, economics, linguistics, politics, literature - each with a new introduction. Another series will focus on new work, including writing of ?migr? authors.

Abdullah regards this sort of direct intervention in cultural production to be necessary after Saddam, but exceptional. It better evokes the ministry's past role - a place where writers and artists could secure patronage or a bureaucratic sinecure - than its future place in the country's cultural life.

"The ministry can't dominate cultural production the way it once did," he said. "We want it democratized. Artists and writers have called us looking for administrative jobs. Better they make art."

Abdullah says he's been disappointed, though, with the input of Iraqi writers and artists on the ministry's work. "They just brought personal grievances ... The poets complained that little poetry has been published."

He sees NGOs playing a key role in promoting Iraqi cultural production. "We see NGOs as a counterweight to the state.

"In the future we'll support these organizations not as institutions but as producers of projects. In the short term, at least, we're going to practice positive discrimination - in favour of organizations outside Baghdad, women's groups, children's organizations and so forth.

"[Iraqi poets and thinkers] must stop relying on the state to do everything for us."

As Abdullah describes ministerial priorities - effectively the retrenchment of state patronage from the cultural sector - it's possible to hear echoes of neo-liberal policy imperatives.

He says the U.S. played no role in setting the ideological tone of ministry policy, however. "The Americans try to play an intermediary role among the various actors," he says, "but they're ultimately ineffectual."

Removing the ministry from cultural production, he says, is about liberating Iraqi culture from authoritarian habits of mind.

"I dislike this term 'de-Baathification'. It paints all party members with the same brush," he said. "The major task confronting us is rooting-out Baath ideology. We must rehabilitate Iraqis to take responsibility for themselves.

"Some, for instance, wanted to destroy all Baath-period iconography. Believe me, I don't want to see these ugly statues in our public squares. But they should be kept, in museums. We mustn't destroy our past but keep it as a unified whole. Those who would erase the Baath period are as fundamentalist as the Islamists."

"'Aqlam Magazine' used to be the Baath Party mouthpiece. Some wanted to change its name. I argued, 'We need an archive of how things were and how they've changed.'

"I wasn't happy with the first post-Baath issue of the magazine, though. It just ran stories and poems: the contributors didn't take up their experiences of persecution.

"There are very few Iraqi intellectuals willing to discuss their responsibilities," he said, "to speak about their own role in propagating the ideology even while being victimized by it. But it's very important for them to consider what their role was.

"It's important that we have this conversation in Iraq, as a catharsis, so we don't misunderstand that period.

"Intellectuals keep silent because they fear that, if they speak, they'll be seen as coming out in favor of one party or another. As we move into a democratic society, things will improve."