I think some of the paintings were used as target practice
Posted in General on 30. Jul, 2010
I think some of the paintings were used as target practice.”What the researchers found after the war was pitiful. Professional thieves took the catalogues so that there is no way to find out what has been lost – Mr Saidi suspects up to 500 precious works may have been stolen out of a collection of 2,000. “During the war, the books and paintings were stored beside the parliament building downtown,” he remembers “The militias came in and there was a lot of fighting It was the front line. A painting entitled “View of the Port of Beirut” – a generous oil of the French-built harbour executed in 1867 – has been torn apart at the top by a bullet.By chance or on purpose? Nabil Saidi, the documents expert who has been researching what is left of the Lebanese national library – now the National Archives – is uncertain. So, you see, I can imagine the effect this has on a human body.”A work in the Syriac language has a bullet hole through every page. “It enters the book with such a small hole through the cover, but then it gets bigger as it tears its way through, damaging the paper with the shock of its entry, so that the edges of the paper inside are burnt, and then it exits with such a big hole on the other side.
Anna Czajka is trying to repair the country’s history and its heritage, nine years after the war that almost destroyed it.
“Look at this,” she says, holding up a fragment of steel which winks at us in the sunshine that streams into her laboratory. All have shredded their way through Lebanon’s heritage, cut through the oil paintings of its elder statesmen or burrowed through the leather covers and soft paper of hand-written 14th-century Korans and works of Arab astrology. ANNA CZAJKA empties the contents of an envelope over the table, and out tinkle small shards of metal. One is snub-nosed and silvery, another a thin curl of steel like a broken thimble. John Wadham, director of Liberty, said they were a “fundamental breach of the right to privacy”. “Information that we are all forced to provide belongs not to the Government but to us and they have no right to pass it on,” he said..
“That could apply to anything from medical records to applications for fishing licenses.”Civil liberties campaigners reacted furiously to the proposals last night. “The idea is that we should be able to look at people’s applications to different arms of Government to see if they add up and are consistent,” one ministerial source said. “We depend on their honesty to declare this and some are not honest,” one DSS source said.The Inland Revenue could also use the access to financial details to clamp down on black market workers who fail to declare their earnings in full.The aim of the drive to extend data matching is to effectively create a single Government “file” for each person by cross-checking claims made to different departments.There is a growing problem of people defrauding the system by creating multiple identities and claiming benefits under different names. Although ministers admit this would be politically sensitive, they believe there is a strong case for pressing ahead.The target would be income support claimants who become ineligible for the benefit if they have more than pounds 8,000. For example, they want to give the Benefits Agency access to claimants’ medical records, so it can identify people wrongly claiming incapacity benefit, and to their tax files so it can go on “fishing expeditions” to identify those lying about their income.More controversially still, the Government is considering extending the principle to the private sector by giving the Department for Social Security access to bank and building society accounts. “The exchange of information poses no threat to the law abiding citizen,” one senior Government source said.Legislation introduced by the last Conservative Government in 1997 allows some cross-checking between the Department for Social Security, the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise in certain narrowly-defined cases. But there are very strict criteria about the conditions in which facts can be passed on and information can only be released if there is a suspicion of fraud.Ministers want to change the law to allow much more proactive investigations and extend data-matching across Whitehall.