Iraqi museum reopens six years after looting

BAGHDAD - Iraq's restored National Museum reopened yesterday with a red-carpet gala in the heart of Baghdad nearly six years after looters carried away priceless antiquities as American troops largely stood by in the chaos of the city's fall.

The ransacking of the museum became a symbol for critics of Washington's post-invasion strategy and its inability to maintain order as Saddam Hussein's security network disintegrated.

But Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri Maliki chose to look ahead - calling the reopening another milestone in Baghdad's slow return to stability .

"It was a dark age that Iraq passed through," Maliki said at a dedication ceremony. "This spot of civilisation has had its share of destruction."

The museum - which holds artefacts from the Stone Age through the Babylonian, Assyrian and Islamic periods - opened to the public on Monday, but only for organised tours at first, officials said.

"We have ended the black wind [of violence] and have started the reconstruction process," Maliki told hundreds of officials and guardians of Iraq's rich cultural heritage as Iraqi soldiers with red berets stood guard.Once the home of one of the world's leading collections of artefacts, the museum fell victim to bands of thieves who rampaged through the capital after the Americans captured Baghdad in April 2003. It was among many institutions looted across Iraq, including universities and cultural offices. But the richness of the museum's collection - and its importance as the caretaker of Iraq's historical identity - brought outcry around the world.

United States troops, the sole power in the city at the time, were intensely criticised for not protecting the treasures at the museum and other cultural institutions like the national library and the Saddam Art Centre, a museum of modern Iraqi art.

When asked at the time why US troops did not actively seek to stop the lawlessness, then-Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld famously said: "Stuff happens ... and it's untidy and freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."

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