It is exactly five years since the infamous and shameful invasion of Iraq. What so many of us feared at that time has become a tragic reality: hundreds of thousands of human lives torn apart by weapons, the physical and moral destruction of an entire country, billions of dollars poured into what has been a colossal business for a few, and the feeling that this modern crusade was a point of no return for the West’s already jaded ambitions to portray itself as the champion of a culture based on values, justice and respect for the rights of the individual.

In the midst of this planetary absurdity, at Musikeon we wish to remember today one very specific aspect of that tragedy which has not been given the attention that it deserves. As we all know, the war destroyed thousands of documents which were genuine treasures of the historical memory of mankind: the looting of the National Archaeology Museum on 10th April, 2003, and the burning of the National Library three days later were the two most tragic moments in the fate of so many archives, museums and emblematic buildings and sites. Music was not immune to the disaster: among the archives which have been lost forever, destroyed by the bombs of the United States military, were the Sound Archives of Baghdad, with its recordings of traditional Arab music, both classical and popular, which over decades had painstakingly been gathered and conserved by local ethnomusicologists under the auspices of UNESCO. All of that work was lost. Many of us were unaware of what had happened until July, 2007, during the International Conference of the ICTM (the International Council for Traditional Music) held in Vienna. The two representatives from Musikeon who took part in that conference will not easily forget the address given by Schéhérezade Qassim Hassan, who had devoted twenty years to gathering the materials in the archive. We will long remember the silence that fell over the huge lecture hall, and the prolonged, sincere, intense applause which broke out a few seconds after her intervention, enfolding her like a long embrace. But we will also remember the hesitant explanations given by the UNESCO representative, who seemed not to be in possession of all the facts and was honest enough not to raise the hopes of the Franco-Iraqi ethnomusicologists who had requested that UNESCO demand an official explanation from the United States army.

We all came away from that conference with a strange sense of unease: an indescribable sadness that the work of our colleagues had been swept away by the madness of war, but also a sense of the fragile nature of things that went beyond just music. It is often said that we are impotent and helpless. It is true, we are impotent when faced with the infinite wickedness that human beings all too often inflict on each other. And today, five years after the onset of that horror, we wish to remind ourselves of that fact.

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