Gender and the right to memory

When US and UK troops invaded Iraq in 2002 many of the Iraqi National Museum’s 5,000 year old treasures were destroyed and looted. The then U.S Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was quoted as saying, ‘freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.’ The reopening of the museum in Bagdad in 2009, established in 1926 by a British woman, Gertrude Bell, was hailed as a return to stability: a national public memory institution on the road to democracy.