Museums and Looted Art: the Ethical Dilemma of Preserving World Cultures

The Egyptian Museum of Turin in Italy specialises in Egyptian archaeology and anthropology and houses one of the largest collections of Egyptian antiquities with over 30,000 artefacts. Photograph: ddp USA/Rex Shutterstock

Kanishk Tharoor

Monday 29 June 2015

Every month produces new cases of the “repatriation” of antiquities from American museums to their countries of origin.

In late May, Italian authorities displayed 25 looted artefacts retrieved from the United States. They included some objects smuggled by the infamous dealer Giacomo Medici, convicted in 2004 for selling thousands of stolen pieces of Greco-Roman art from Italy and the Mediterranean. A few weeks earlier, the Cleveland Museum of Art returned a 10th-century statue of the Hindu god Hanuman to Cambodia. The idol had been hacked from the Prasat Chen temple in Siem Reap in the 1960s before journeying via a litany of dealers into the holds of the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1982.

In April, homeland security agents relieved the Honolulu Museum of Art of seven ancient Indian artefacts believed to have been acquired through Subhash Kapoor, a New York-based art dealer.

Kapoor, who currently languishes in police custody in India, presided over a vast criminal operation whose full scope authorities are still trying to understand. An ongoing investigation dubbed Operation Hidden Idol spans four continents in trying to untangle Kapoor’s network. For decades, he funnelled stolen antiquities from India and south-east Asia to private collectors and major museums in the west to the tune of over $100m (and perhaps even more than that).

Some of the big American institutions connected to Kapoor include the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute in Chicago and the Asian Museum of Art in San Francisco.

Operation Hidden Idol has piled further pressure on American museums to ensure that their collections are not home to illegally acquired artefacts. In the last 10 years, public collections including the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Met have given up hundreds of tarnished objects. In acquiring these illicit antiquities, museums failed to do due diligence in determining the authenticity and provenance of objects. They have since lost millions of dollars.

But it’s not just the financial pain that worries curators and museum chiefs. The headlines generated by such scandals threaten the very acquisitive enterprise of western museums; mounting demands for repatriation make more difficult the project of building “universal” institutions presenting the art and history of the world.

Sometimes, these claims have little to do with the illicit trade. Writing in the New York Times, Hugh Eakin decried the strong-arming tactics of “art-rich” countries like Turkey, Greece and Italy. “Museums’ relationships with foreign governments have become increasingly contingent upon giving in to unreasonable, and sometimes blatantly extortionary, demands,” he wrote. As China and India grow on the geopolitical stage, so too have Chinese and Indian demands (often by private groups and individuals rather than governments) for the restitution of artefacts from the west.

As a result, defenders of museums believe that their diverse and cosmopolitan collections are under attack from governments and groups with narrow, nationalist agendas. Critics of western museums accuse them of complicity in the illicit trade, and at a more general level, of perpetuating the gross inequalities between the west and the rest of the world.

According to Jason Felch, author of Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum, “museum culture in the US has been slow to sensitize to the realities of the illicit trade”. He sees a parallel between the trade in antiquities and the drug trade: demand in western countries makes both possible. “As long as there’s a lucrative market for looted goods, for objects with uncertain provenance, there will be an illicit antiquities trade,” he said.

Tess Davis, a lawyer with the Antiquities Coalition, praised the Cleveland Museum of Art for voluntarily returning the Hanuman statue, but argued that it should never have been allowed to enter the collection in the first place. “The Hanuman first surfaced on the market while Cambodia was in the midst of a war and facing genocide,” she said. “How could anyone not know this was stolen property? The only answer is that no one wanted to know.”

American museums are largely self-regulated, though many subscribe to the stricter guidelines adopted in 2008 by the American Association of Museum Directors governing the acquisition of archaeological material. Museums have rarely been forced by legal rulings to give up artefacts; instead, they have voluntarily – sometimes pre-emptively – handed over the dodgy objects in their collections.

“No one wants to be promoting the illegal trade,” said James Cuno, CEO of the Getty Trust and a major proponent of universal museums. “Collectors have to be very careful about both the authenticity of the object and the legality of a transaction.”

But Cuno fears that universal museums in the west face a deeper challenge from nationalists around the world. Governments and their deputised national museums often couch their demands for repatriation in terms of “repairing the integrity of the nation”. Cuno argues that these claims are more theatrical than moral, making cultural property “about politics and the political agenda of ruling elites”.

In his view, the universal museum remains the best context in which to engage with art. “Works of art have not adhered to modern political borders,” he said. “They have always sought connection elsewhere to strange and wonderful things.”

The ongoing destruction of ancient sites in the Middle East by the Islamic State has galvanised the case for the universal museum, with advocates like Gary Vikan, the former director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, arguing that only institutions in the west can preserve the world’s cultural heritage. Isis’s cultural atrocities “will put an end to the excess piety in favour of the repatriation model”, he told the New York Times.

From another perspective, that defence smacks of western privilege. “Colonialism is alive and well in the art world,” Davis said. “So-called leaders in the field still justify retaining plunder in order to fill their ‘universal museums’ where patrons can view encyclopaedic collections from all over the world. A noble idea, in theory, but in practice, a western luxury. The citizens of New York, London, and Paris may benefit, but those of Phnom Penh? Never.”

Felch, who has spent years investigating the practices and acquisitions of institutions like the Getty Museum, understands the problematic history of universal museums in the west, but still sees great value in their encyclopaedic character. “Many collections were built during colonial times, but I’m not tilting at windmills, trying to undo history,” he said. “I wish there were encyclopaedic museums elsewhere in the world.” He suggests that the many large, well-resourced museums in the west must help facilitate loans and exchanges with museums in other parts of the world.

While at odds with Felch on other counts, Cuno agrees that institutions like his have a global mission. “Any museum that argues for cosmopolitanism and cultural diversity has the obligation to encourage that access everywhere,” he said. “There is no reason to believe that people elsewhere are not curious about the world.”

PDF of the article here

How We Can Prevent ISIS From Pillaging Palmyra

BY  MATTHEW HALL ON 6/14/15 AT 1:04 PM

Tourists walk in the historical city of Palmyra, April 14, 2007. Islamic State fighters in Syria entered the ancient ruins of Palmyra after taking complete control of the central city, but there are no reports so far of any destruction of antiquities, a group monitoring the war said on May 21, 2015.NOUR FOURAT/REUTERS

If the United States and its partners are serious about defeating the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL), they must deny the terror group a major source of its funding: proceeds from the illegal antiquities trade.

Until now, the effort to halt the looting and resale of Iraq and Syria’s heritage has been piecemeal and peripheral to the overall “degrade and destroy” strategy; the effort to choke the multimillion-dollar black market for antiquities should be seen as on par—and taken in tandem—with the effort to choke the black market for oil.

In late March, a Syrian rebel coalition captured the northern city of Idlib, compelling the regime to reposition troops from central Syria. ISIS seized the moment to launch a major offensive on the strategically located city of Palmyra, which serves as a gateway for Damascus and Homs to points further east.

The ISIS victory, which underlined the regime’s decreasing ability to wage a multi-front war, was a major windfall for the terror group: ISIS captured oil fields, munition depots, phosphate mines and, to the alarm of all, the ancient city of Palmyra—a UNESCO World Heritage site containing some of the most magnificent Hellenic ruins in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The threat to Palmyra’s heritage is not new—the site has been looted since the beginning of the war—but the city falling under ISIS control raises this threat considerably. A signature of ISIS’s violent expansion throughout Syria and Iraq has been the targeted destruction of certain sites of religious and cultural significance—a deliberate, systematic program of iconoclasm.

To reinforce the group’s image as enforcers of a strict Sunni fundamentalism, ISIS produces glitzy propaganda videos of its henchmen destroying cultural artifacts deemed insufficiently Islamic. Ever attuned to media exposure, ISIS is keenly aware that Palmyra offers a prominent stage—quite literally, in fact, as the group has reportedly conducted executions in the ancient amphitheater.

As yet, the ruins remain mostly unharmed. But the local ISIS commander (purportedly a Saudi national) has pledged to pulverize the statues “that the miscreants used to pray for.” (When the early Muslim general Khalid ibn al-Walidcaptured Palmyra in 634 A.D. he left the same statues untouched, but apparently ISIS is more rightly guided than the Prophet’s companion.)

ISIS’s pillaging of Syrian heritage is motivated not only by ideological purity but also by profit. Western intelligence officials estimate that the antiquities trade is second only to oil. Antiquities have become so central to ISIS’s cash flow that in some areas the looting of cultural heritage forms a department within the ISIS bureaucracy.

From Syria, ISIS taps into a global market hungry for artifacts of the ancient Near East, whatever their provenance. The illicit goods typically cross into Lebanon and Turkey, where they are laundered and resold to brokers before their final point of sale to auction houses and private collectors in Europe, the United States and the Gulf.

For those who proffer the faint silver lining that the black market is at least removing priceless objects from harm’s way, Sam Hardy of Conflict Antiquities reminds us, “We must not be misled by antiquities collecting lobbyists’ insinuation that Syria or Iraq’s antiquities are better smuggled than burned by the various groups of militants—the smuggling pays for the burning.”

What can the United States and its partners do to halt this significant source of terror funding?

In short, the United States must choke the antiquities black market with the same zeal it has worked to choke the black market for oil. While the most visible aspect of the U.S.-led Coalition to Counter ISIS has been the targeted bombing of ISIS refineries and depots, the effort to cripple the oil infrastructure involves a much broader approach.

Speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, David Cohen, the Department of Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, outlined its many targets and his department’s aggressive moves against them:

Cohen, recognizing the many moving parts in the operation, emphasized the necessary coordination between counterparts in the State Department, the Department of Defense, law enforcement and the intelligence community. “This is a whole-of-government effort,” he said.

Recently, Treasury announced the formation of the multi-national Counter-ISIL Finance Group (CIFG), which aims to track and disrupt the terrorist group’s economic sustainment. As the CIFG draws up its action plan, the United States should advocate for the centrality of addressing cultural property theft.

A new senior level official to run a task force representing the various agencies targeting the illicit antiquities trade would better coordinate the administration’s anti-trafficking efforts. This is not a new idea, and it has been floated before in various forms: Leaders of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs propose in H.R. 1493 that this official be a State Department employee “at the Assistant Secretary level or above”; Deborah Lehr and Wendy Chamberlin have proposed the official sit at the National Security Council.

The task force would develop an aggressive “whole-of-government” strategy for combatting antiquities trafficking. Currently, some agencies have a very passive approach (the State Department has focused mostly on “raising awareness”), while other agencies are woefully under-resourced (the FBI’s Art Crime Team, assembled after the 2004 looting of the Baghdad Museum, has only 13 dedicated agents).

The task force would look at pending U.S. legislation and measures adopted by other countries, such as Germany’s strict guidelines for importing artifacts.

The administration could also step up coordination with its international partners. Building on efforts like Antiquities Coalition’s recent Cairo conference, the United States must work to strengthen the regional anti-trafficking network. Collaboration is key between transit countries such as Lebanon and Turkey, demand-side countries in the Gulf and countries with extensive experience policing antiquities smuggling networks, such as Egypt.

Supporting UNESCO’s program to train regional police and customs officials and attending summits such as last week’s meeting of anti-ISIS foreign ministers in Paris, the United States could advocate for antiquities to occupy a central part of the agenda.

Working with regional governments, however, is not sufficient, especially in places like Syria, where the government controls less than half the territory. Only collaboration with relevant non-state actors—including activists, opposition organizations and certain armed groups—can stem the cash flow from illegal artifacts trade.

Under the Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act (ratified in the 1970 U.N. convention on trafficking cultural property), the State Department can impose heightened restrictions on the import of archaeological material if the United States reaches an agreement with the source country. Because striking such an agreement with Assad’s government is politically unfeasible—not to mention Assad’s lack of control over sites like Palmyra—the United States should reach a substitute agreement with the Arab League (a creative solution proposed by Deborah Lehr).

Increased collaboration with international museum authorities would also ensure that illicit goods do not find a home in their display cases. Fueled by oil money and the desire to become the new capitals of Arab culture, Gulf states are hurriedly building major new museums—several of which still need collections to fill them. The United States ought to work with the relevant authorities to ensure that new museums do not inadvertently become exhibitions of an eviscerated Syria and Iraq.

Although ISIS provides the current catalyst for action, this epidemic of cultural theft will surely outlive any particular group. Given the instability in Syria and Iraq, artifacts will remain susceptible to ongoing, large-scale, systematic looting for years. But through a muscular anti-trafficking effort and linking the issue to core international efforts to stabilize Iraq and Syria, the United States can help mitigate the damage to our shared human history.

If we are to promote a return to civility in the Near East, we must not be idle bystanders to a fire sale of Near Eastern civilization.

PDF of the article here

Save our stones
As well as killing people, Islamic State is smashing up ancient works of art. Only a little can be done to prevent its acts of barbarism.
Jun 13th 2015 | From the print edition

SINCE Abraham first adopted monotheism and smashed his father’s idols, the Middle East has seen more than its fair share of cultural vandalism. The prophet Samson, an antecedent of the modern suicide bomber, brought down a pagan temple full of Philistines. Iconoclasts destroyed holy Byzantine images. The followers of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab spilled out of the Arabian peninsula at the start of the nineteenth century and pillaged Iraq’s Shia shrines at Najaf and Karbala. Venerating burial sites, they declared, encouraged Muslims to worship men not God, and were thus places ofshirk, or polytheism. When in the 1920s they took over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, they destroyed the graves of Muhammad’s companions, wives and family. His own grave was only just spared.

Since the Arab spring of 2011 gave way to chaos and war, the doctrine has spread. Abu Qatada, a radical Islamist deported by Britain to Jordan in 2013, has penned a 44-pagefatwa pronouncing that mosques built over graves should be “torched”. Hundreds of landmarks, from Libya’s Tripoli to Tikrit in Iraq, have since lost their shrines. Jihadists have attacked tourists at pagan monuments, targeting Tunis’s Bardo Museum with its unparalleled collection of Roman mosaics in March this year (and earlier, Luxor in 1997). On June 10th a suicide-bomber struck again in Luxor, but killed no one. Islamic State’s vandals invoke Abraham’s name when sledgehammering lamassus, winged bulls with human heads, or shooting at the Gorgon heads that graced the palaces of Assyrian tyrants who thought they were God.

The scale is unprecedented. Four of Syria’s six world heritage sites lie in ruins. In May IS swept into control of a fifth—Palmyra, an ancient city famed for its thousand columns. So far, IS does not seem to have harmed the site, though it is early days. But archaeologists fear for it, and for Petra’s sculpture-decked caves, which are close to another hotbed of IS support, the Jordanian city of Maan. Along the Libyan coast, jihadists are in shooting range of the world’s best preserved Roman cities of Cyrene, Leptis Magna and Sabratha.

The justification for all this has scholars stumped. Muhammad ended many ancient rituals at the Kaaba in Mecca, but continued to let worshippers perambulate around the granite cube. His companions, on whom IS claims to model itself, spared the pyramids. Ibn Jubayr, a medieval travel writer, so marvelled at the Nile valley’s temples that “spending a lifetime wondering at their adornment, decoration and beauty would be too short”. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab himself passed Ur’s ziggurat by.

IS’s own literature is short of clues. Its monthly magazine, Dabiq, suggests that it may come down to mere gloating. The destruction “served to enrage the kuffar (unbelievers)”, declared its March issue, “a deed that in itself is beloved to Allah.”

Iraqi archaeologists offer more mercenary explanations. By advertising their attacks on supply, IS hopes to increase demand. One dealer says that Israel’s authorities have approved his purchase of ancient Hebrew inscriptions whatever their provenance, so fearful are they of losing the antiquities for ever. Tellingly, the jihadists ransacking Mosul’s museum with chainsaws earlier this year did not show the destruction of its most precious artefacts, says an archaeologist from Mosul—because they had already been spirited abroad. While mining the best sites with earth-diggers themselves, they leave petty smugglers to explore elsewhere, piously taking 20% of their earnings as khums, an Islamic tax. The contents of the museum in Raqqa, IS’s capital in Syria, were carted off by the box-load.

Cash is king

So great is the racketeering, says one Iraqi official, that antiquities trafficking is now a prime source of IS revenue. And as Western air strikes bomb the oil installations IS has captured, the need for antiquities-dollars will only rise.

IS is not alone. In an ancient region where state authority has in many places collapsed, armed groups, from the rebel Free Syrian Army to criminal gangs, maintain warehouses stuffed with antiquities, says René Teijgeler, who runs a Dutch-funded NGO, Heritage for Peace, operating on the Turkish side of the border with Syria. Poverty also boosts supply. “A lot of this is subsistence looting,” says James Ratcliffe of the Art Loss Register, a London-based monitor. Gangs have been at work around the step pyramid of Zoser, Egypt’s oldest. A collection of 7,700 ancient gold coins, jewellery and statuettes disappeared from Libya’s main commercial bank in Benghazi.

Art dealers in London insist that, with few exceptions, the loot has yet to surface in Western auction houses, leading some to question the extent of the losses. But Christopher Marinello of the London-based Art Recovery Group was shown a Roman vase from Syria he valued at tens of thousands of pounds. Other dealers report finding Mesopotamian antiquities on eBay, an internet auction site. Deborah Lehr of an American association, the Antiquities Coalition, estimates that $3 billion worth of Egyptian antiquities have been lost since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Between 2012 and the IS advances of 2013, America’s International Trade Commission reported that the import of declared antiquities from Iraq and Syria soared by 672% and 133% respectively.

Small steps only

A chorus of local and foreign experts have demanded military action to save the precious sites. UNESCO’s boss, Irina Bokova, terms the destruction of heritage a war crime and calls for the creation of “protected cultural zones”. With an eye on Libya, Italy’s foreign minister, Paolo Gentiloni, wants to form a “blue helmets of culture” force that could parachute in when conflict or natural disaster threatens. Others call for America to extend the “responsibility to protect” not just to human victims of genocide, but to inanimate objects of “cultural genocide”. The Hague Convention of 1954 provides legal cover of sorts. It requires signatories “if necessary, [to] put a stop to any form of theft, pillage or misappropriation of, and any acts of vandalism directed against, cultural property”.

But military commanders are wary. In March the chairman of America’s joint chiefs of staff, Martin Dempsey, said he would consider protecting heritage sites, but ruled out immediate air strikes. Defending such places by force could turn them into battlefields, advisers worry. Moreover, military action for the sake of antiquities might only further turn the region against Western powers, after they stood by while tyrants with chemical and conventional weapons killed hundreds of thousands of human beings. “Let’s not worry about the ruins just yet,” tweeted an American archaeologist as news bulletins reported the capture of Palmyra. “Over 90 people, including 11 children, executed by ISIS in Palmyra in 1 week.”

Black flag over Palmyra

Short of ways to restrict supply, international agencies have tried instead to curb demand. In February the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2199 banning the sale of antiquities from Syria as well as Iraq. Law enforcers have had some success recovering artefacts, returning much of what was stolen from the Mallawi museum in Minya, a city in upper Egypt, in 2013. But more can be done to tighten controls. Turkey’s border remains wide open. And for 60 years Britain, a hub of the global art market, has declined to ratify the Hague Convention. It has only three policemen assigned to tracking illegal sales, says Robert Jenrick, a former director of Christie’s, now a Tory MP. No one is sure how charges for heritage crimes might be brought.

Hoping to prick consciences, UNESCO has staged a host of conferences and helped publish red-lists of endangered heritage aimed at “awareness building”. The Assad regime and Iraq’s government have jumped on the bandwagon, trying to drum up support in their struggle between civilisation and the barbarians, while locating missile batteries atop the vantage point of hills with ancient shrines. Iraq has debated the issue in parliament, and is putting its antiquities back on display for the first time since America ousted Saddam Hussein. “Our response to IS’s destruction of museums is to open museums,” says Iraq’s tourism and antiquities minister. But all the publicity may only encourage IS to grab more headlines.

For want of alternatives, many opt for the defensive posture of shoring up what they have got. Western museums long under pressure to repatriate the loot of an earlier age now promote themselves, in the words of the Louvre’s boss, Jean-Luc Martinez, as “asylums for Iraqi heritage”. Some regional opinion-makers only half-jokingly call on the West to plunder more. “Let them steal our artefacts,” wrote Abdulrahman al-Rashed, a prominent Arab journalist, in March. “We do not deserve them.”

From the print edition: Middle East and Africa

PDF of article here

Islamic State isn’t just destroying ancient artifacts — it’s selling them

People observe ancient artifacts at the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad on March 15, 2015, after its reopening in the wake of the recent destruction of archaeological sites by Islamic State. (Karim Kadim/AP)

By Loveday Morris June 8, 2015

BAGHDAD — Islamic State militants have provoked a global outcry by attacking ancient monuments with jackhammers and bulldozers. But they also have been quietly selling off smaller antiquities from Iraq and Syria, earning millions of dollars in an increasingly organized pillaging of national treasures, according to officials and experts.

The Islamic State has defended its destruction of cultural artifacts by saying they are idolatrous and represent pre-Islamic cultures. Behind the scenes, though, the group’s looting has become so systematic that the Islamic State has incorporated the practice into the structure of its self-
declared caliphate, granting ­licenses for digging at historic sites through a department of “precious resources.”

The growing trade reflects how Islamic State fighters have entrenched themselves since seizing the Iraqi city of Mosul a year ago Wednesday, in a dramatic expansion of the territory they control in this country and neighboring Syria.

The extremist group’s recent capture of Syria’s majestic 2,000-year-old ruins at Palmyra threw a spotlight on the risk that the Islamic State poses to the region’s rich cultural heritage. It is, however, just one of 4,500 sites under the group’s control, according to the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force.

“They steal everything that they can sell, and what they can’t sell, they destroy,” said Qais Hussein Rasheed, Iraq’s deputy minister for antiquities and heritage.

A calcareous stone statue is displayed at the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad. (Hadi Mizban/AP)

“We have noticed that the smuggling of antiquities has greatly increased since last June,” he added, referring to the month in which Islamic State militants took control of Mosul and large parts of northern Iraq.

At that time, militants also seized the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh. In a video released earlier this year, the Islamic State showed its fighters drilling off the faces of the mighty stone-winged bulls on the gates of the city. The militants also filmed themselves destroying statues at Mosul’s museum. But many of those items were actually replicas of antiquities kept in Baghdad, Iraqi officials said. Anything genuine and small enough to move was likely sold off or stockpiled by the militants, they said.

Iraq has suffered from years of despoilment of its historic sites, as thieves have taken advantage of instability in the country. The sacking of the poorly guarded National Museum in Baghdad after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 was decried around the world.

The Islamic State’s plundering began in a haphazard fashion when the extremists first gained a foothold in Syria. But the trade has become more organized as the group has conquered territory.

The Islamic State grants licenses for the excavation of ancient sites through its “Diwan al-Rikaz” — a governing body for overseeing resources in the “caliphate.” The body has a department for oil and gas, as well as antiquities, documentation from the group shows.

“Islamic State has incorporated the activity of excavation into its bureaucracy,” said Aymenn al-Tamimi, a researcher on jihadist groups at the Britain-based Middle East Forum who has compiled an archive of Islamic State administrative documents.

Video from April 2015 purports to show Islamic State militants destroying the ancient city of Nimrud in Iraq. (Reuters)

How much the Islamic State earns from the trade is difficult to estimate. Iraqi officials say it is the group’s second most important commercial activity after oil sales, earning the militants tens of millions of dollars.

With the extremist group struggling to maintain its oil revenue in the wake of U.S. airstrikes that damaged infrastructure, experts and officials worry that the Islamic State — also known as ISIS or ISIL — might focus even more on illegal excavations.

“It’s a dependable source of revenue, which makes it very attractive, and it’s surprisingly untapped,” said Michael Danti, a professor of archaeology at Boston University. “Over time, we’ve seen ISIL and organizations like it increase their ability to draw revenue from these crimes.”

Danti, who advises the State Department on the trade in plundered antiquities from Iraq and Syria, said some looted items have made their way to U.S. and other Western markets — especially antiquities in the lower- and medium-price ranges, such as stone seals with cuneiform inscriptions.

Larger, more conspicuous items will probably go through a laundering process that takes years and involves the forging of documents to suggest a legal provenance. To be traded legally, the items must have been excavated or exported before 1970, when a UNESCO convention came into force prohibiting trade in such cultural property. But the market is poorly regulated and the Archaeological Institute of America estimates that as many as 90 percent of classical artifacts in collections may be stolen antiquities.

Smaller items from Iraq and Syria are now “flooding the ­market” and are widely sold online, said Deborah Lehr, the co-founder of the Antiquities Coalition, which aims to end “cultural racketeering.” She said her organization has been e-mailed by brokers selling smuggled antiquities who mistakenly took her group for collectors.

“There needs to be better education and better regulation,” she said. “The public needs to know that by purchasing these items, people are potentially funding terrorism.”

Old Smuggling Networks

In Baghdad, officials say they are doing what they can to stem the flow, but the Islamic State is utilizing decades-old smuggling networks that have sprung up as the robbery of artifacts increased.

During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and uprisings that followed it, thousands of items were lost as thieves took advantage of Saddam Hussein’s loosened grip on the country’s heritage sites.

The U.S.-led invasion in 2003 brought more looting, as sites were left unprotected. Thieves stole thousands of ancient objects from the National Museum in Baghdad.

From Iraq, antiquities are smuggled to Kuwait, Israel and Turkey, all regional transit hubs, said Col. Firas Hussein Abed, an Iraqi army commander who oversaw an investigation into a smuggling ring in April.

A raid by his officers led to the arrest of four people and the recovery of 25 items, which experts are examining to ascertain whether they came from Islamic State-controlled sites.

Around Mosul, there are reports of widespread digging for ancient objects to sell.

Amr al-Julaimi, a lecturer in Mosul University’s antiquities department until it was closed by the Islamic State, said residents have informed him that the group is excavating areas around the tomb of Jonah, the prophet famed in Islam and Christianity for being swallowed by a whale. The tomb was destroyed last July by the group, which deemed it idolatrous.

“The longer until Mosul is liberated, the more the danger that our human legacy will be wiped out,” he said.

One indicator of how rapidly the illegal trade may be growing is the number of declared imports into the United States of antiquities said to be excavated long enough ago to be legal to trade.

The value of antiques and ancient artifacts from Iraq imported into the United States jumped fourfold between 2010 and 2014, reaching more than $3.5 million, according to U.S. International Trade Commission figures. Imports from Syria and Egypt have also skyrocketed.

“It’s highly suspicious,” said Danti, the Boston University professor. “These spikes in supposed legal imports perfectly correlate with the breakdown in law and order in these countries. I’d be shocked if all of it was legal.”

In Iraq, Rasheed advocates a blanket ban on the trade in antiquities from the country. In the same compound as his office is the National Museum, recently reopened to the public for the first time since 2003 in what officials described as an act of defiance against Islamic State destruction.

“The Iraqi people need to be able to witness their history, their diversity,” Rasheed said. “What’s happening is a tragedy.”

Mustafa Salim contributed to this report.

PDF of the article here

Islamic State isn’t just destroying ancient artifacts — it’s selling them
By Loveday Morris June 8, 2015

People observe ancient artifacts at the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad on March 15, 2015, after its reopening in the wake of the recent destruction of archaeological sites by Islamic State. (Karim Kadim/AP)

BAGHDAD — Islamic State militants have provoked a global outcry by attacking ancient monuments with jackhammers and bulldozers. But they also have been quietly selling off smaller antiquities from Iraq and Syria, earning millions of dollars in an increasingly organized pillaging of national treasures, according to officials and experts.

The Islamic State has defended its destruction of cultural artifacts by saying they are idolatrous and represent pre-Islamic cultures. Behind the scenes, though, the group’s looting has become so systematic that the Islamic State has incorporated the practice into the structure of its self-
declared caliphate, granting ­licenses for digging at historic sites through a department of “precious resources.”

The growing trade reflects how Islamic State fighters have entrenched themselves since seizing the Iraqi city of Mosul a year ago Wednesday, in a dramatic expansion of the territory they control in this country and neighboring Syria.

The extremist group’s recent capture of Syria’s majestic 2,000-year-old ruins at Palmyra threw a spotlight on the risk that the Islamic State poses to the region’s rich cultural heritage. It is, however, just one of 4,500 sites under the group’s control, according to the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force.

“They steal everything that they can sell, and what they can’t sell, they destroy,” said Qais Hussein Rasheed, Iraq’s deputy minister for antiquities and heritage.

FILE- In this file photo taken on Monday, Sept. 15, 2014 photo shows, a calcareous stone statue displayed at the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad. The videos of Islamic State militants destroying the ancient artifacts in Iraq’s museums and blowing up temples and palaces are chilling enough, but one of Iraq’s top antiquities officials said it is all a cover for an even more sinister activity _ the wholesale looting and selling of the country’s cultural heritage. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban, File)

“We have noticed that the smuggling of antiquities has greatly increased since last June,” he added, referring to the month in which Islamic State militants took control of Mosul and large parts of northern Iraq.

At that time, militants also seized the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh. In a video released earlier this year, the Islamic State showed its fighters drilling off the faces of the mighty stone-winged bulls on the gates of the city. The militants also filmed themselves destroying statues at Mosul’s museum. But many of those items were actually replicas of antiquities kept in Baghdad, Iraqi officials said. Anything genuine and small enough to move was likely sold off or stockpiled by the militants, they said.

Iraq has suffered from years of despoilment of its historic sites, as thieves have taken advantage of instability in the country. The sacking of the poorly guarded National Museum in Baghdad after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 was decried around the world.

The Islamic State’s plundering began in a haphazard fashion when the extremists first gained a foothold in Syria. But the trade has become more organized as the group has conquered territory.

The Islamic State grants licenses for the excavation of ancient sites through its “Diwan al-Rikaz” — a governing body for overseeing resources in the “caliphate.” The body has a department for oil and gas, as well as antiquities, documentation from the group shows.

“Islamic State has incorporated the activity of excavation into its bureaucracy,” said Aymenn al-Tamimi, a researcher on jihadist groups at the Britain-based Middle East Forum who has compiled an archive of Islamic State administrative documents.

How much the Islamic State earns from the trade is difficult to estimate. Iraqi officials say it is the group’s second most important commercial activity after oil sales, earning the militants tens of millions of dollars.

With the extremist group struggling to maintain its oil revenue in the wake of U.S. airstrikes that damaged infrastructure, experts and officials worry that the Islamic State — also known as ISIS or ISIL — might focus even more on illegal excavations.

“It’s a dependable source of revenue, which makes it very attractive, and it’s surprisingly untapped,” said Michael Danti, a professor of archaeology at Boston University. “Over time, we’ve seen ISIL and organizations like it increase their ability to draw revenue from these crimes.”

Danti, who advises the State Department on the trade in plundered antiquities from Iraq and Syria, said some looted items have made their way to U.S. and other Western markets — especially antiquities in the lower- and medium-price ranges, such as stone seals with cuneiform inscriptions.

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Digital Monuments Men wage online war against Islamic  State looting
Skills once used to track terrorists are now being used to track stolen antiquities and smugglers through the digital bazaars of the Middle East

By Ben Farmer 10:21PM BST 06 Jun 2015

An Isil flag fluttering atop the circular wall bounding the orchestra at the Roman theatre of the ancient city of Palmyra. Photo: AFP

A few years ago the small team scouring the digital bazaars of the Middle East were using their skills to hunt terrorists and disrupt insurgent networks.

Now all in the civilian world and driven by their horror at the archaeological destruction and looting which has followed the spread of Islamic State fighters, they have decided to use those same skills to track down priceless treasures and the unscrupulous racketeers who threaten them. “The idea came from the shocking images from the Middle East and the way cultural history is just being destroyed by Islamic State,” said one of the team with a background in the British special forces. “It just flies in the face of everything that’s decent. Anyone can see that destroying the world’s cultural heritage in the name of religion or faith is just wrong.” The small anonymous team go by the bland name of the Committee for Shared Culture, which gives little hint as to the nature of their task, or breadth of their skills.

Islamic State militants take sledgehammers to an ancient artifact in the Ninevah Museum in Mosul in February (AP)

Their mission to save the imperilled archaeological heritage of the Middle East has also led them to be nicknamed the ‘digital Monuments Men’, after the team of academics portrayed in the 2014 George Clooney film, who tried to save art treasures from the Nazis. “We have got very good over the last ten years at finding people,” the source said. “Everyone leaves a digital trace, on social media, or the web. Now, it’s the same for items. Using the same techniques people have been using to map and find terrorists, we can now find items and map networks of smugglers.” Governments are overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge, so the team decided to start on their own. The team of a dozen or so former intelligence workers, academics and linguists are funded by a wealthy private individual with an interest in antiquities, but are also looking for further funding, he said. They choose to remain anonymous for security reasons. “It came out of a number of conversations with similar-minded individuals and we decided it was something we could do without waiting for somebody else to act. “Using some of the techniques we have been using for the past few years, plus the skills of our colleagues who are Arabists, linguists and so on, we thought it was something we could do without waiting for somebody else to act.”

The spread of extremists such as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as Isil or Isis, has seen not just the wanton destruction of globally important sites such as Nimrud, but also an explosion in looting.

The smuggling of antiquities out of the region to black markets in Turkey, Beirut and beyond is now believed to be one of the militants’ main sources of income.

France Desmarais, director of programmes and partnerships at the International Council of Museums, said: “The scale and the rhythm of the looting in Iraq are unprecedented. It’s a huge free for all.”
There is opportunistic looting by common thieves, looting encouraged and taxed by warlords and specialised “looting to order” to satisfy unprincipled collectors.

She said: “Looting will always flourish when you have instability in a country and this is a worst-case scenario.”

Museums have been captured and stripped, while satellite imagery shows hundreds of holes have been sunk to plunder archaeological sites.

What is stolen is spirited away, often though Turkey and Lebanon, before heading to collectors, many believed to be in the UK and US.

Deborah Lehr, chair of the US-based Antiquities Coalition, a non-profit group devoted to fighting the destruction of heritage sites, said: “What Isis is doing is encouraging people in their territory to go out and loot and they take a tax on those items. They then guarantee safe passage out through Turkey.”

The trade has been estimated to be worth billions.

She says the amount of legally declared antiquities being transported from Iraq has risen tenfold in the past two year. Just because they are legally declared does not mean they are legal though, she says.

“It’s not like cocaine, where if customs finds it, it’s always illegal. If you find an ancient urn, customs doesn’t know if it’s legal or not legal without looking at the history and you can fake provenances.”

The boom in online auction houses has made the shadowy trade easier, she said.
“It’s a flourishing trade online.”

It is here that the digital monuments men focus. The need for buyers to be specific about what is on offer makes it easier for individual pieces to be found. The digital footprint that comes from using social media also throws up connections. The team have found at least one antiquities seller with Twitter links to Isil militants inside Iraq.

Potential smugglers and routes that are found can be passed onto the police or international authorities.

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UN unable to stop IS relic-smuggling from Iraq and Syria
#IslamicState
Vast number of artefacts smuggled out of Iraq and Syria is ‘something we will never halt’

Last month, IS fighters defeated Syrian government forces and overran the historic city of Palmyra

James Reinl
Thursday 4 June 2015 18:48 UTC

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Save Statues, Save Lives
BY MATTHEW BOGDANOS, TESS DAVIS, ATHEEL AL-NUJAIFI – JUNE 2, 2015

Photo credit: JOSEPH EID/AFP/Getty Images

At the height of the Roman Empire, the wealthy metropolis of Palmyra was a gateway to the riches of Persia, India, and China. An ancient city even in the first century, Palmyra had grown over the previous 2,000 years from a remote caravan station to a center of culture and trade containing some of the world’s greatest artistic treasures. Its sculptures, temples, theaters, and tombs in the desert sands on the road to Damascus remain a source of pride for Syria, where Jews, Christians, and Muslims have together protected them for more than a millennium. Now it’s all under threat.

After a weeklong offensive against the modern town of Tadmur, the Islamic State stormed Palmyra on May 21, raising its black flag over the ruins. Having survived the ravages of time and invaders for millennia, this iconic site may not survive this latest surge of ideological fanaticism. In an interview and a video report, the group has claimed it will allow Palmyra’s ancient architecture to remain — even if the city’s statues face destruction. But the group’s recent history demonstrates a troubling pattern.

In July 2014, the Islamic State obliterated the Judeo-Christian tomb of Jonah in Mosul in northern Iraq and with it the Sunni mosque of the Prophet Yunus. Exploiting destruction as propaganda, the group posted a video this February of its black-clad thugs taking jackhammers to ancient Nineveh — once the world’s largest city — and the colossal winged bulls that had guarded it since the 7th century B.C. The extremists then destroyed several priceless statues in the nearby Mosul Museum before turning their senseless wrath to the fabled cities of Hatra, Khorsabad, and Nimrud. In the Islamic State’s latest archaeological snuff film, a slick production complete with soundtrack and slow-motion special effects, the jihadis showcased their attempts to destroy Nimrud; the Old Testament palace of Ashurnasirpal was shown disappearing in Hollywood-style explosions.

Nothing compares to the horror of the Islamic State butchering aid workers, captured soldiers, journalists, and religious minorities, even children. The group has reportedly already started lining Palmyra’s streets with the corpses of those who oppose them. The focus is, as it must be, on the human tragedy. But mourning these attacks against heritage does not change that focus.

As devastating as this destruction is, history warns us that worse is coming. Once you erase a people’s historical identity, the next step is to erase the people themselves. The Holocaust followed the razing of old Warsaw; Cambodia’s Killing Fields followed the destruction of churches, mosques, and pagodas. Stopping the Islamic State’s devastation of the region’s identity and ending the humanitarian crisis must go hand in hand.

For the Islamic State, death and destruction are inextricably interwoven: According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the Islamic State recently executed 20 men in the famed Roman amphitheater of Palmyra, in a propaganda stunt redolent of the depravity of Joseph Goebbels. Because terrorists don’t respect borders any more than they respect human life or heritage, this pattern should concern those far beyond the self-declared caliphate. It must be stopped.

But the biggest threat to cultural heritage is not iconoclasm. It is plunder-for-profit. For every masterpiece that the Islamic State destroys on screen, thousands of others line its coffers through the global black market.

In February, the G7’s Financial Action Task Force, a Paris-based intergovernmental body, reported that the Islamic State may “have earned as much as tens of millions” of dollars from looted Syrian antiquities alone. That same month, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2199, recognizing that the Islamic State and groups associated with al Qaeda are using “the looting and smuggling of cultural heritage” to fund “recruitment efforts and strengthen their operational capability to organize and carry out terrorist attacks.” And just last week, the U.N. General Assembly passed Resolution 69/281, calling on all member states to help cut off terrorist financing from antiquities trafficking.

We welcome this recent condemnation, but it is long overdue. Col. Matthew Bogdanos, head of the investigation into the 2003 looting of the Iraq Museum and one of this article’s authors, has been sounding the alarm for a decade. In the New York Times, in his book Thieves of Baghdad, and before the United Nations, Interpol, and British Parliament, he has argued that antiquities trafficking is financing the bullets and bombs that are killing so many.

In June 2014, Tess Davis, another of this article’s authors, cautioned in theBritish Journal of Criminology — based on years of on-the-ground work in Cambodia — that looted antiquities were funding criminals and terrorists. And earlier this year, while governor of Nineveh, the third author of this article, Atheel al-Nujaifi, warned the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that the Islamic State was “stealing valuable relics which they intend to sell.” Like the Taliban in Afghanistan (who learned to finance terror with opium) and Charles Taylor in Sierra Leone (who paid for war crimes with diamonds), the Islamic State finances its campaign of death with antiquities.

Although publicly denouncing art as blasphemous, behind the cameras, the Islamic State’s large-scale antiquities trafficking operation suggests that it cares less about idolatry than it does about dollars. A cozy cabal of academics, dealers, collectors, and museums turns a blind eye to the illicit side of the trade that is funding terror. In surprisingly few steps, an antiquity can travel from an Islamic State-controlled looter through a smuggler who sells it to a dealer or gallery owner, who then launders it with false provenance documentation and sells it at auction or privately to an individual collector or museum.

No one has hard numbers — the traffic in artifacts for cash for arms is too shadowy a phenomenon, and many investigations remain classified because of the terrorist connection. But a single cylinder seal — an intricately carved piece of stone the size of a piece of chalk — can sell for $250,000 and cross borders undetected by drug-sniffing dogs or metal detectors. Controlling more than 4,500 archaeological sites in the region, the Islamic State requires that any independent looters fork over one-fifth of their proceeds under the Quran’s war-booty provision. It is an income stream sufficient to allow any chief financial officer to sleep soundly.

As a result, the desert night is filled with the roar of bulldozers ripping into ancient mounds of clay that were once thriving cities, such as Palmyra, whose incomparable works of art predate the split between Sunni and Shiite. Many even predate the three competing traditions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — that have brought so much bloodshed to the Middle East. Through a universal and transcendent language, these relics remind us of our common beginnings.

Two weeks ago, Egypt, the Middle East Institute, and the Antiquities Coalition convened an emergency summit in Cairo to address the Islamic State’s funding from antiquities trafficking. This historic event brought together the secretary general of the Arab League, ministers from 10 Middle Eastern and North African countries, the director general of UNESCO, and others, including Bogdanos and Davis. The result, announced in the Cairo Declaration, was a joint initiative to halt the supply of, and demand for, “blood antiquities.”

The participating countries — Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates — agreed to establish a task force supported by an international advisory committee. By coordinating their efforts as a region for the first time, these countries have an unprecedented opportunity to take quick action against an illicit trade that frequently thwarts efforts at investigation by crossing borders.

The Cairo Declaration is a sign that the region is finally ready to lead the fight to stop this threat to security and heritage. A bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday, which would restrict imports of archaeological material from Syria, is also a promising sign. But this is a global problem that requires a global solution. All countries — origin, transit, and destination points alike — must increase scrutiny at borders when coming across all antiquities, especially for those coming from war-torn regions.

The art world has responsibilities as well. In the last year alone, some of the world’s most well-known auction houses, museums, and collectors have been linked to masterpieces that were stolen during the Holocaust and Cambodia’s Killing Fields. Those who deal in antiquities — whether in a warehouse in Geneva, at an art gallery in Manhattan, or on the board of a museum — must require greater documentation of artifacts’ origins and histories to ensure they are not purchasing the products of crime and conflict. Otherwise they are no better than criminals and war profiteers and should be treated as such, subject to criminal prosecution and prison.

This responsibility will long outlast the Islamic State. That illicit art from World War II is just now being recovered demonstrates that this struggle will be measured in decades, not years. But the battle must begin today to stop the destruction before it is too late.

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