PARIS, FRANCE.- UNESCO experts have called for a trade freeze and export ban on all Iraqi antiquities, art and books after criminal gangs ransacked museums in Baghdad. The director general of UNESCO, Koichiro Matsuura, said the UN security Council should pass a resolution banning the sale of stolen artifacts. In Washington, two of Bush’s cultural advisers quit in protest against the failure of U.S. forces to prevent looters from stealing priceless ancient artifacts from Baghdad’s antiquities museum. A UN expert, McGuire Gibson, said the wholesale plunder might have been the work of organized criminal gangs. The FBI said it had issued Interpol alerts and sent agents to Iraq to try to help recover some of the looted treasures.  

The UNESCO has set up a special fund to protect the Iraqi cultural legacy and proposed that urgent measures be taken to this end, UNESCO director-general, Koichiro Matsuura, announced on Thursday.

The UNESCO chief said the fund will receive contributions from Italy, the first country to offer US$ 400,000, and from France, Qatar, Germany, United Kingdom, Egypt and some institutions.

Matsuura recommended the devising of an urgent action plan and the deployment in Iraq of a police in charge of protecting cultural sites and institutions.

After he recalled the adoption of a resolution that bans the importing of any cultural item stolen from Iraq and requires that these goods be returned to Iraq, he called all states to take measures against importing any archeological, cultural or historical items illegally taken from Iraq during the chaos that followed war.