François Hollande has asked the Louvre to send a mission to Baghdad in order to assess the damages caused to national heritage by Islamic State. The French President made his announcement Wednesday 18 March in the Mesopotamian gallery of the Louvre. Accompanied by heavy security, Holland said his visit was a gesture to show that “France will do everything to stop terrorist attacks on culture”. His speech was all the more timely and dramatic because it was delivered as reports came in of the attack at the Bardo Museum in Tunis.
The Louvre also announced an exhibition on Mesopotamia planned with the museums of Iraq for fall 2016, at its northern satellite in Lens. The Paris museum promised to help train young Iraqi archaeologists and to digitise its archives on ancient sites to make this information available to researchers. Holland did not discuss any practical measures to control the sale of antiquities in France, although the culture minister Fleur Pellerin told The Art Newspaper that she will examine ways to monitor the growing market more closely.
Irina Bokova, the director general of Unesco, also appeared at the Louvre to announce a meeting in Paris on 1 April with Interpol and the World Customs Organization, along with other UN agencies and non-governmental cultural bodies, to discuss ways to stop the illegal trafficking of antiquities. She called on all Iraqis, “Muslims, Christians and others”, as well as those in other countries in the Middle East and North Africa, to stand up for their cultural heritage, since all are “the children of Mesopotomia, the mother of all civilisations”. Bokova asked the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor in the Hague to open an investigation against Islamic State’s recent “wars crimes” at ancient sites such as Mosul, Nineveh and Hatra, in order to “sanction the perpetrator”. Bokova previously called for a UN Security Council meeting, but French diplomatic sources now say they are more confident in bringing the matter in front of the UN General Assembly in New York.
Jean-Luc Martinez, the president of the Louvre, also spoke at Wednesday’s press conference about France’s long history of archaeological research in the Mesopotamian region, including six missions currently working in Kurdistan. The Louvre was the first to show Sumerian and Assyrian culture to the world in the mid-19th century, Martinez said, before the British Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.