Student Organizations

Joining museums, schools and organizations around the world, faculty and students will pause to remember the fifth anniversary of the cultural crime of the century: the looting of the Iraq National Museum, which occurred in Baghdad on April 10th through 12th, 2003.

At venues from San Francisco to Baghdad, across the United States and around the world, the Global Candlelight Vigil will call attention to the thousands of stolen antiquities that are still missing from the Iraq Museum as well as the plunder of historical monuments and archaeological sites across Iraq and around the world.

Carleton College’s Candlelight Vigil event will consist of viewing the film, “Robbing the Cradle of Civilization: The Looting of Iraq’s Ancient Treasures,” followed by a candlelight vigil. “We felt it was important to be part of this effort to raise public awareness about the growing crisis of cultural heritage destruction, which is of increasing concern to museums, universities and archaeologists in order to recognize the need to preserve the ultimate non-renewable resource, the intact evidence of our ancient past,” says Nancy Wilkie, Professor of Classics and Anthropology and member of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee of the U. S. Department of State.

“By organizing a global event on the fifth anniversary of this great tragedy, we can call the world’s attention not only to the Iraq Museum, but to the ongoing destruction of global cultural heritage,”

says Cindy Ho, president of the US-based non-profit organization SAFE/Saving Antiquities for Everyone, Inc., which has organized the Global Candlelight Vigil event with the endorsement of the Iraq Museum’s former Director General, Dr. Donny George, who is featured in a ‘call to action’