Baghdad guardian of literary treasures braves bombs

BAGHDAD, Feb 16 (Reuters) Saad Eskander is a slim, bespectacled man who wears corduroy jackets and has the quiet footfall of one who has spent many years in library reading rooms.

But, asked to name his biggest headaches as director of Iraq's National Library, Eskander's response is not one you would expect from a typical librarian: snipers and car bombs.

The National Library, whose rich collection of ancient Islamic texts was looted as invading US forces rumbled through Baghdad in 2003, sits on one of the most dangerous fault lines of the violence sweeping the capital.

Last month, Eskander evacuated his staff as US fighter jets roared over his two-storey building during a raging gunbattle with suspected Sunni Arab insurgents.

Five staff members have been killed in the last year and more than a dozen abducted by gunmen. Ageing librarians have taken medical leave after suffering heart problems made worse by blasts and machinegun fire shaking the reading and archive rooms.

''We live and work in war conditions,'' said Eskander, whose office is unhappily located between Haifa Street, one of Baghdad's most dangerous roads, and Shorja market, a frequent target of suicide bombers. Fragments of mortar bombs sit on his desk as keepsakes and there are bullet holes in his windows.

''I lost count of the bombs that have exploded in our area,'' said Eskander, 44, who was appointed to head the library in December 2003.

Before the invasion the library housed 1 million items, including centuries-old books and rare documents, part of the heritage of a city founded in the 8th century and the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate under Harun al-Rasheed, in whose time the ''One Thousand and One Nights'' tales were collected.

THIEVES AND LOOTERS When the Mongols sacked the city in the 13th century, they dumped thousands of books into the river Tigris, whose waters legend says turned black with ink.

Manuscripts that survived the Mongol onslaught were stolen or destroyed during the chaos that engulfed Baghdad when US troops entered the city in April 2003.

The library lost 90 percent of its rare books to looters as Saddam Hussein's rule crumbled. Literary and religious texts of Iraq's once-thriving Jewish community, and records from the time of the Ottomans and the British-installed monarchy also disappeared.

Eskander blamed professional thieves working for overseas collectors for the loss of unique books, among them a treatise written about 1,000 years ago by Ibn Sina, an Islamic thinker whose works were studied for centuries at European universities.

Minutes of Saddam-era military courts and national security documents were burned, apparently to destroy evidence of his abuses, Eskander added.

The library building has since been renovated, but Eskander said the looting of its collection was a disaster not only for its record of Iraq's past but also for the future of a country gripped by sectarian and ethnic strife.

''When you destroy a library you destroy an identity which in Iraq is in the process of taking root. Without a historical memory you cannot unify a country by force,'' he said.

''Our history has always been written from one point of view. We need to go back to our past to rewrite a history that has been distorted by one group or the other, and that includes the views of the Sunnis, the Shi'ites, the Kurds, the Christians, the Jews,'' said Eskander, himself an ethnic Kurd.

The fall of Saddam's secular government, which banned writings that did not subscribe to the Sunni-dominated pan-Arab outlook of his Baath party, brought a new form of oppression, he said.

Shi'ite and Sunni clerics, filling the vacuum left by the sudden removal of Saddam's centralised state, wield enormous influence in post-war Iraqi society, and this has turned the library into a ''stronghold of secularism'', he said.

''We are living not only in a security vacuum but also in a cultural vacuum,'' Eskander said. ''You cannot build the new Iraq without going back to the old Iraq.'' REUTERS PB VC0840