Six paintings worth a total of more than £500,000 have been stolen from an anonymous London art dealer by thieves who broke into packages being sent back to Europe at the end of the Art Palm Beach Modern and Contemporary Art Fair in Florida.
Two are works by Raoul Dufy; others are by Jean Dubuffet, Jean Metzinger and Albert Marquet. A £50,000 reward is offered for information leading to their return.
From: "Bojan Indjic" bojani99@ptt.yu To: securma@xs4all.nl
Subject: Destruction of history
Date sent: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 19:15:06 +0100
I'm sorry for using this e-mail adress but I don't know which one should I use to write you.
I would like you to publish this article: Due to sistematic destruction of monuments of serbian heritage in Kosovo in the last three years, the Kosovo became the biggest grave of monuments in Europe. The destruction of monuments is on the ethnical base and is being made with the aim to destoy proves of serbian presence in Kosovo. It is being done by albanian extremists. After the entering of NATO trups in Kosovo in june, 10th 1999. 3 monuments of first class, 18 monuments of second and 31 monument of third class were destroyed. During that period 55 orthodox sites were also destroyed. 17 of 49 medieval monuments of first and second class were destroyed, and 19 are damaged. According to experts these rare monuments of european culture are also in high danger: monastery Pecka patrijarsija, monastery Bogorodica Hvostanska, the medieval town of Novo Brdo, monastery Gracanica, monastery Decani, monastery of St. Arhangel... The Unesco mission in Kosovo decided to repair only one serbian monastery of many that were destroyed, and serbian goverment in Belgrade doesn't have the possibility to help because those monuments are mostly located in towns with only albanian inhabitants. extracted from "Vecernje Novosti", january 26th 2003., Belgrade.
Refer recovered artifacts to Museum Dept (Malaysia)
GEDONG - The people have been urged to refer to the Sarawak Museum Department if they discover any antique or old item within their settlements. Minister of Social Development and Urbanisation Dato Sri Dr. James Jemut Masing said they should consult museum staff if they were unsure of any artifact that they found. "You never know that what you come across may hold priceless historical value," he said. According to him, the people should not keep such artefacts to themselves as household decorative items which would be deemed illegal under the Sarawak Heritage Ordinance 1993. Masing commended the wise decision by Tuai Rumah Kampung Benat Hilir, Binggai Tawan and the villagers to hand over the artifacts found in the village to the authorities. The artifacts were found by Binggai Tawan and the villagers in early 2000 and up to now, there are 9,270 ancient artifacts of ceramic, bronze, pottery and gold found in the area. He said the Museum Department would continue to evaluate the artefacts and was considering making some form of payment to the villagers for their effort based on the value of the artifact. "For now, let the Museum Department assess the quality and value of the artifacts before making any payment to the villagers."
http://www.jaring.my/
New Efforts to Recover Nazi Plunder
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Much of the art world is on the lookout as never before for lost Nazi plunder, but experts have become increasingly pessimistic that much more of it will ever be recovered and restored to its rightful owners.
This is the paradox confronting those who are trying to retrieve the prizes of history's biggest collective art theft, the German seizure of perhaps 600,000 important works from 1933 to 1945. As many as 100,000 pieces are still estimated to be missing, and some have undoubtedly been destroyed. Much of the hope of recovery rests with a growing welter of Web sites that have been put up by American museums after looted art was found in some of them. In addition, the American Association of Museums, which says 15 cases of possibly stolen art are now being studied around the country, expects to activate its Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal, a central Web site, this year. Delayed for more than a year by financing problems, it is to be a shortcut to other sites listing thousands of works that have gaps in their provenance, or ownership history, during the Nazi period. Europe has its own Web sites. But for all the efforts, experts say few if any lost works have been located through Internet postings, leading some prominent art recovery scholars to say that museums are doing too little too late. "Museums hold themselves out as knowing everything," said Marc J. Masurovsky, an art search specialist who served on the 1998-2000 Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States. "But now suddenly, they know nothing." He said museums should impose the rigorous self-policing they pledged at a 1998 Washington conference that set the stage for the current intensified searches. Harold Holzer, vice president for communications at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said, "We think the surest way to reach the most people is to post full provenance information on the Web." He said the Met's site was constantly updated. (The link is Provenance Research Project under metmuseum.org/collections.)
Museum directors, including Philippe de Montebello of the Met, while pledging to redress wrongs, say that the debate has become fogged by distortions and inaccuracies and that their institutions are, at worst, occasional innocent victims of murky dealings going back more than half a century. Beyond the museums are private dealers and collections from which there is little hope of identifying and retrieving lost art. "Obviously, what this is all about is the art world having to pay the price for lack of interest in provenance that they have shown for generations," said Willi Korte, a leading international investigator of stolen art. "It's a good idea to put it on the Internet and make it available, but I don't think there's a great deal of follow-up by museums." Although the plunder was wide- ranging, its exact extent is unknowable. A London-based group, the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, which has its own central computer registry, says it has recovered 420 looted works since 1999 and is investigating some 7,000 others. After the war, American investigators tallied the total number of art objects, books, Judaica, silver pieces and other valuables recovered from the Nazis in Europe. It came to some 10.7 million items, worth more than $37 billion today. In France, the center of the prewar European art world, the Nazis seized one-third of all art in private hands, much of it owned by Jews. Of the total (about 100,000 works, mostly paintings), about 70,000 pieces were restored to their owners after the war, said Hector Feliciano, a leading international art investigator and author of "The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art." The other 30,000, including many Modernist masterpieces, remain missing. The history of restitutions does not give much cause for optimism. For 50 years, little happened. In the face of Nazi genocide, property crimes drew scant interest. The cold war also thwarted international cooperation. The climate finally shifted in the 1990's with the fall of Communism, the publication of important books on wartime looting and the discovery of some stolen works in American museums. Momentum for a serious accounting built after the Manhattan District Attorney's office seized Egon Schiele's "Portrait of Wally" (1912) in 1998. Claimed by the heirs of a Jewish gallery owner in Vienna, it was then on loan from Austria to the Museum of Modern Art.
By the late 90's, many museums were focusing on the issue, and a handful of significant returns had been made by institutions like the Art Institute of Chicago, the Seattle Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art, where the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations said it had earlier discovered a stolen still life by the 17th-century Flemish master Frans Snyders. Last year, Poland, which has recorded 516,000 objects lost during the war, recovered four from the United States, including a 16th-century Persian tapestry which the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had bought at a London auction in 1970. The Nazis had stolen it from the Czartoryski family, which lost thousands of treasures, including one of the most valuable still missing, Raphael's "Portrait of a Young Man." For several years, the Web sites of 18 leading museums, including the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, have given detailed descriptions of hundreds of paintings and other works requiring further study. These works, created before 1946 and acquired after 1932, show suspicious gaps in their provenance. Some museums are doing extensive proactive research. At the Harvard University Art Museums, Sarah Kianovsky, an assistant curator, has been vetting about 150,000 pieces, and has identified 6,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures whose provenance cannot be fully traced. "It's like peeling onions," she said. "You go through a bag, peeling off all the first layers. Then you start again, peeling off the second layers." Many experts, though, caution that the results may be meager. Too many owners have died or disappeared, and too many works were stolen too many years ago for easy investigation.
"A lot of people in the last half of the 90's thought we can lick this without any idea of how intractable the problem was," said Constance Lowenthal, former director of the International Foundation for Art Research, who now tracks Holocaust claims for private clients and institutions. Much depends on your perspective, she said. Is a painting with provenance gaps guilty until proven innocent? Or innocent until proven guilty? Mr. Feliciano, the author who in the 90's found more than 2,000 looted paintings in French museums and institutions, said the art world had changed for the better in the last few years. Too often, though, he added, "Museums and art dealers still have to be sued or threatened with lawsuits in order for them to start doing the right thing." Mr. Korte, the investigator, said many museums simply listed works with gaps in provenance, rather than using their expertise to compare a piece's history with the thefts of the era. This means that possible claimants, often elderly and without financial resources, must trace the missing artworks themselves, a process one critic likened to giving them balls of yarn to untangle. Some museum officials also fear that the looted-art cases will lead to thornier foreign claims for the return of cultural property acquired long before the Holocaust under the looser standards of earlier eras. "This is the big bad wolf that's panting at the door," Dr. Lowenthal said. "They're afraid it'll blow their house down." Yet it is possible, she said, to draw legal and moral distinctions between Holocaust claims and those involving national patrimony. Edward H. Able Jr., president of the museum association, which has also published a guidebook on provenance, said widespread recovery was unlikely. "It will help us to reassure ourselves," he said, "but I don't know that it will uncover a lot." He declined to give details of the 15 inquiries now under way. Mr. de Montebello of the Met told the presidential commission that the handful of looted paintings that have turned up in American museums could not be equated with the quantities that have emerged in Europe. He said that he and his colleagues were committed to helping resolve the issue, but that American museums hold fewer than 20,000 European paintings, many acquired before the Nazis came to power.
Still, some searches have been successful. "Every little bit helps, but we don't have a lot of time," said Monica Dugot, a lawyer and deputy director of the Holocaust Claims Processing Office of the New York State Banking Department, which is investigating more than 120 art claims involving no fewer than 16,000 objects. Because of its experience investigating the handling of dormant Holocaust victims' accounts by Swiss banks with New York branches, the office has been unusually successful in tracking art claims, Holocaust researchers say. Nine claims have been publicly resolved, and others are pending. One claimant, Ruth Haller, the daughter of Ismar Littman, a German Jewish lawyer and art collector from Breslau who committed suicide in 1934, is seeking thousands of missing artworks. The Holocaust Claims Processing Office tracked two of them, paintings by Lovis Corinth and Karl Hofer, through various sales in Germany, Norway and London and returned them to Ms. Haller. But the pressure is intense, Ms. Dugot said: about every two weeks, another elderly claimant dies.
http://www.nytimes.com/
Suspected art thief out of jail, on the lam
By BRIGID O'MALLEY, bmomalley@naplesnews.com
One of the suspected art thieves who made off with nearly $7 million worth of paintings was released from jail four hours after he was first placed behind bars. Now Fernando Alfaro, 46, of Miami, is on the lam — and with a warrant with $1.1 million bond on his head — he's eluded capture for more than two weeks. Alfaro and an accomplice are suspected of stealing Paysage á Vétheuil by Claude Monet, worth $4 million, and La Place de Trinite by Pierre Auguste Renoir, worth $2.7 million, from the Gordon Drive beachfront mansion of Lee Anderson. Police say the pair tried to unload the paintings for $1 million. The works of art were stolen sometime Dec. 28 when family members left the house for dinner, left a door unlocked and didn't turn on the security system. Police believe the family interrupted the break-in and the thieves made a hasty getaway. The paintings, which had been kept in Miami-area efficiency apartments, were recovered undamaged after a complex undercover operation that involved local, state and federal law officers. On Thursday, Miami- Dade corrections officials said there was no paperwork that told them to hold Alfaro in jail for the art theft. Booked into the jail by Miami-Dade police at 12:25 a.m. on Feb. 12 on charges of dealing in stolen property and grand theft, Alfaro made bond at 4:30 a.m. the same day, reports show.
"It wasn't a mistake," said spokeswoman Janelle Hall. "There was no paperwork, no indication there was a warrant or anything that said we should hold him." His alleged burglary accomplice, Rigoberto Gonzalez, 32, of Miami, is still being held in Miami-Dade County on both the Miami-related charges of dealing in stolen property and grand theft and on a $1.1 million warrant from Collier County in connection with the Impressionist art thefts. Authorities say they have no schedule of when Gonzalez could be sent to Naples to face charges. The third person arrested at the time, Carlos Somuano, 36, of Miami, also bonded out on Feb. 12. He is not considered one of the art theft suspects, but came in later when Alfaro, considered the ringleader of the three-person crew, wanted to sell the paintings, authorities said. Naples Police Chief Steve Moore said he thinks there was a way Miami authorities could have held onto Alfaro even without the paperwork. "They say they didn't see it," Moore said. Moore said Miami-Dade police believe Alfaro is still somewhere in the Miami area. "They still seem to think he's local," Moore said. "We hope they find him." The warrant on Alfaro would allow any law enforcement officer who crosses his path to arrest him and he'd be extradited to Collier County. The burglary, which started with the theft of a few expensive watches, turned into a seven-figure art heist as an afterthought, authorities say. Moore said he doesn't believe the two suspected thieves, Alfaro and Gonzalez, were on the prowl for the Monet and Renoir, but rather grabbed the Impressionist paintings from the wall during their getaway. Investigators are still trying to determine whether they were tipped off to the easy access to the paintings.
The two, who, investigators said, make their living stealing mostly cash and jewelry, drove the stolen art across the state where they tried to figure out what to do with it. Within a few days, they'd run into a buyer and his associates, all undercover police officers. And in a fluid series of meetings at malls, cafes, restaurants and parking lots, they'd eventually make the buy.
Police say this is what led to the arrests:
An informant tipped off police that he knew the whereabouts of the paintings. Investigators then got proof that the people who had the paintings also had the watches stolen from the Anderson home at the time of the break-in. Alfaro and Gonzalez wanted to sell the watches. Undercover officers, part of the Miami-Dade Police Cargo Theft Task Force, made arrangements to purchase the watch valued at $9,000 for $2,000. But an officer's impersonation of a street-smart "Broward County bookie" with flashy clothes, jewelry and an expensive car won the men over. They wanted to sell the paintings they'd stolen for $1 million and they approached the undercover officer. They wanted a guarantee the paintings wouldn't be resold or placed on display, because they were stolen. He said he'd need an associate — really an undercover officer passing as an insurance investigator — to ensure the paintings were real. The preppy-dressed investigator, in the role of a millionaire from Romania, showed up in a chauffeur-driven car to keep the deal appearing real. Once the details were worked out, the undercover officers showed about $250,000 in cash as insurance that the $1 million was there. Then at a different location, the painting exchange was made and the three were arrested.
http://www.naplesnews.com/
Museum's plea after robbery
THIEVES have robbed a Scottish museum of historic artefacts, some of which date back to the turn of the last century.
Bosses at the Scottish Maritime Museum in Irvine were devastated to find that exhibits, including antique toys and a First World War tea set, had been stolen from a period shipyard worker's flat in Montgomerie Street.
Museum worker Terry Tovill urged the public to help trace the items. Irvine police have appealed for the items - many of them historial artefacts - to be returned.
http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/
Panama Police Hunt Gold Museum Thieves, Arrest Two
— PANAMA CITY (Reuters) - Police arrested two security guards in connection with the theft of Panama's most important collection of pre-Columbian gold artifacts from the museum where they worked, police said on Thursday. Police alleged employees at Panama's National Institute of Culture ransacked the country's principal anthropological museum during the weekend of Feb. 15-16, walking away with 292 priceless gold relics. Two security guards from the Reina Torres de Arrauz Museum in Panama City where the gold collection was displayed were arrested, police said. The homes of several culture institute officials were also searched, police said, declining to give further details.
The theft was discovered on Monday, Feb. 17.
The stolen relics date between A.D. 500 and 1,000 and were crafted by indigenous tribes who inhabited central and eastern Panama before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, culture institute officials said. "Their monetary value is unknown, but their historical value is incalculable and the artifacts are irreplaceable," Pablo Barrios, head of the culture institute said in a statement. Police involved in the investigation told Reuters the robbery could only have been an "inside job" carried out by staff at the culture ministry employed to run the museum. "The exhibition was locked in a large vault that could only be opened by keys and a combination code lock. The criminals knew how to avoid the closed-circuit television. Outsiders couldn't just break in," said one police source, requesting anonymity. The culture ministry declined to comment on Thursday, while police said they also plan to question the museum's supervisor, Acela Rodriguez.
Lauder's Mix of Restitution and Collecting
By CELESTINE BOHLEN
Ronald S. Lauder, heir to the cosmetics fortune, former American ambassador to Austria, once a mayoral candidate, prodigious art collector and major benefactor of Jewish causes, knows a lot about art stolen by the Nazis, much of it from Jews. Starting in the mid- 1990's he became a vocal champion of restitution of the artworks to their rightful heirs, an issue that was then erupting across Europe and the United States after 50 years of silence. As chairman of the Commission for Art Recovery of the World Jewish Congress, Mr. Lauder has been a patron of scattered efforts to help Jews reclaim what had been theirs. In testimony before Congress, he called these stolen artworks "the last prisoners of war." But in an interview he also conceded that he had artworks in his collection whose provenance was at best ambiguous and at worst unknowable. And some critics say he has been too slow to check the provenance of his art, even given the historical difficulties of doing it, or to make the information he does have available to outsiders. Mr. Lauder has a particular for two turn-of-the century Austrian artists, Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, many of whose works belonged to Jewish collectors before World War II. Many were stolen and lost during the Nazi years, and many of their owners were killed in the Holocaust. Could it be that some of the missing drawings, works on paper that both artists turned out by the hundreds, are hanging on the walls of the Neue Galerie, the sparkling new addition to Museum Mile that Mr. Lauder opened on Fifth Avenue 14 months ago?
The answer, Mr. Lauder and experts say, may be unknowable.
"As for me, I am going to doubly, triply and quadruply check everything," Mr. Lauder said in the interview in his corporate office, filled with art, overlooking Central Park. "But that doesn't mean it couldn't happen" — that someone would present a claim to a work seized by the Nazis from a relative. Mr. Lauder, who bought his first Schiele drawings as a teenager with his bar mitzvah money, says that few people paid attention to provenance when he entered the market in the late 1960's under the tutelage of Serge Sabarsky, whose collection also hangs in the Neue Galerie. "I was like everyone else," Mr. Lauder said. "It didn't occur to me. It was not a question that people were looking at." Mr. Lauder and his curators have since done provenance research on the works in the museum's collection, which belongs to the Lauder family, the Sabarsky Foundation and the museum itself. Given his public stance on the restitution of stolen art, Mr. Lauder said, "I have a responsibility to be more aggressive than most." Still, the Neue Galerie has yet to post the results of its provenance research on its Web site in accordance with a commitment by the American Association of Museums two years ago to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets. The agreement, covering art acquired after 1932 and produced before 1946, was intended to allow people anywhere a chance to look at American museum collections without having to travel here. "We are only 12 to 14 months old, and it is taking us more time to get going and do the research necessary," Mr. Lauder said, adding that he would prefer that the museum post all provenance data at once rather than piecemeal. Specific requests for provenance information on the collection were answered by the gallery, but often the research is sketchy and does not go back before World War II. In some cases the results are limited to the name of a New York art dealer, with no hint of prior ownership. But the Neue Galerie's lapse is regarded as typical of Mr. Lauder, who has several times during his long career become ensnared in contradictions of his own making.
Because of his prominent position in the New York art world — he is chairman of the Museum of Modern Art, as well as a founder of the Neue Galerie and one of the city's best known collectors — experts in the field of art stolen by the Nazis are reluctant to comment publicly on his record. But several, speaking anonymously, noted that his different, sometimes overlapping roles have sometimes clashed awkwardly. One said he was inconsistent as a private collector and as head of the modern. The issue of Holocaust-era art, which emerged first in Europe, became news in Manhattan in 1998 when District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau moved to seize two Schiele paintings that had been on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, on loan from the Leopold Foundation in Vienna. The works, "Portrait of Wally" and "Dead City III," were claimed by the relatives of their original owners, Viennese Jews whose collections and property were seized by the Nazis. "Dead City III" was eventually sent back to Vienna, although some experts continue to challenge its provenance, which is similar to the provenance of Schiele drawings in some American museums, including a drawing entitled "Prostitute" at the Modern and another drawing, "I Love Antithesis," at the Neue Galerie. All three pictures come from the collection of Fritz Grunbaum, a Viennese cabaret artist who was killed by the Nazis after they seized his art. His collection of Schiele drawings and watercolors was auctioned in Switzerland in 1956, and after the New York seizure of "Wally," the validity of the auction has been questioned, with no clarity about whether the works were ever in the possession of a lawful heir. Tina Walzer, an Austrian art historian, said of the Grunbaum case: "There's never been restitution. What we know for sure is the Grunbaums were expropriated and that some of these objects reappear in Switzerland in 1956." Museums like Mr. Lauder's with art from this collection "should at least make public that this once belonged to the Grunbaum collection," Ms. Walzer said, adding: "Why not make plaques that say where they came from? I think that would be a fair solution." As the Modern's chairman, Mr. Lauder implicitly backed the museum's legal position on the seized paintings, which supported the Leopold Foundation's arguments that American courts do not have the right to intervene in the affairs of another country. But four years later, Mr. Lauder, as chairman of the Commission for Art Recovery, protested indignantly when the State Department, using the same argument, stopped a California court case in which an American heir was suing Austria for the return of six Klimt paintings taken from her uncle by the Nazis.
Asked about the inconsistency, Mr. Lauder said he excluded himself from participating in the Modern's case "because of wearing two or three hats." "I have been consistent in my desire not to be involved," he said, adding that he still maintained that exceptions to sovereign immunity are needed for Nazi-era restitutions. People who have worked closely with Mr. Lauder and who admire his tenacity on restitution issues, agree that he has a "blind spot" when it comes to his own collection. Certainly, his love for acquisition has gotten him in trouble before. When he was ambassador to Austria in 1986 and 1987, he was accused in parliament and the press of trading on his official position to buy and export valuable paintings and furniture. Mr. Lauder bridled at the charges, which he said had been cooked up by Austria's right wing in response to his stance on Jewish issues. He denied that he had used his position, noting that the parliamentary inquiry was eventually closed. At the time, he told one Austrian newspaper that his purchases were mostly souvenirs, not museum pieces, although the list of exports printed in the Austrian press included pieces of furniture by Josef Hoffmann and others, whose works are now represented in the Neue Galerie. Mr. Lauder said none of the pieces he bought as ambassador was on exhibit. "I own 120 Hoffmann chairs, and only 3 are on display," he said. Three times in the last decade Mr. Lauder has been presented with claims to artworks: two medieval shields, which were returned to France and to Italy, and a Russian painting, also returned, that had been seized from a Russian museum by the Nazis.
The ICOM-Committee for Conservation (ICOM-CC) is an international body of conservator-restorers that is committed to the preservation of all forms of the world's cultural heritage including material, natural, and cultural heritage both tangible and intangible. ICOM-CC is highly concerned about the prospects of possible damage to our shared cultural heritage and loss of human life as a result of armed conflicts. All people, wherever they may live on the face of this earth, will not succeed and prosper without their cultural past. In our global village we must safeguard our past in order to guarantee our future. ICOM-CC therefore urge all political parties and international organisations appreciative of the world's multifaceted cultural past to take all means in their possession to spare our cultural heritage from damage or destruction. We would recommend reading "UNESCO's Document on Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict": http://www.unesco.org/culture/legalprotection/war/html_eng/index_en.shtml
Jorgen Wadum
Chair ICOM-CC
25-Feb-03
ICOM-CC is the largest of the international committees under the International Council of Museums (ICOM) with members' world-wide from every branch of the museum and conservation profession. ICOM is a non-governmental organisation maintaining formal relations with UNESCO and having a consultative status with the United Nations' Economic and Social Council. Iraq:
read Museum Security Network Mailinglist messages about War and Iraq:
By Alphonso Van Marsh CNN Saturday, March 1, 2003 Posted: 1818 GMT ( 2:18 AM HKT)
(CNN) -- As U.S. troops prepare for a potential war in Iraq, an international coalition of archaeologists, lawyers, researchers and art collectors believe some of the world's most important archaeological sites are at risk. Iraq -- a cradle of ancient civilization -- is the home of such fabled cities such as Ur, Babylon, Kabala and Nineveh. Many scholars believe that cuneiform writing, glass, accounting -- and even bureaucracy -- were invented there. Archaeologists are apprehensive that a U.S.-led bombing and land campaign might damage Iraq's tens of thousands of archaeological sites. "War and archaeology are not a good mix," said University of Chicago archaeologist Maguire Gibson, who has been leading archaeological digs in Iraq since 1964. Gibson heads the American Association for Research in Baghdad -- a consortium of about 30 U.S. museums and universities. "When you have a war, armies tend to occupy higher ground. When they take higher ground, they tend to dig in. And when they dig in, they are digging in to ancient sites," Gibson said. The American Council for Cultural Policy wants U.S, forces to be aware of precious sites. Its president, Ashton Hawkins, said his group was offering maps and expertise to the U.S. administration.
"We want to stimulate discussion. The cultural sites and monuments in Iraq are part of the world's heritage," said Hawkins, a former general counsel at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The American Association of Museum Art Directors, American Schools of Oriental Research and the Archaeological Institute of America have issued similar pleas to government leaders to protect Iraq's museums, monuments, cultural centers and archaeological sites. British activists say the effort isn't progressing as well in the United Kingdom. "Trying to get the message across is a very slow business. It's like trying to push a dinosaur out of the way," said Harriett Crawford, president of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. She said she is teaming up with British legislators to lobby British military authorities and the Foreign Office to commit to a plan to protect Iraq's patrimony. Crawford said the U.S. and its allies need to realize Iraq's heritage is a unifying factor in a country with no natural boundaries, made up of diverse groups with varying loyalties: Kurds, Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims and Christians. "It seems to me that in any attempt of reconstruction after an invasion, heritage has a major role to play," Crawford said.
Duke University Law School professor Scott Silliman believes U.S. forces will select targets with great care. The former Air Force colonel was the senior attorney for U.S. Tactical Air Command during the 1991 Gulf War. His legal team helped U.S. forces target Iraqi sites in Operation Desert Storm. "The targeting process is extremely complex. Commanders do not just bomb targets willy-nilly," Silliman said. "A good commander will tell you, or me, that you must give me all the information so I can make the best decision I can. He's certainly not rejecting any source, whether it's inside or outside the Department of Defense," he said. There is no independent assessment of damage to Iraq's cultural and archaeological treasures following the Persian Gulf War in 1991. But Gibson, Crawford and Silliman agree that some of the greatest damage to Iraq's antiquities came from post-Gulf War looting. In the absence of strong central rule, some of Iraq's museums and archaeological sites were cleaned out. Many of the looted items later appeared in international art sales. Whether under President Saddam Hussein's regime, a new regime, or foreign occupation, Houghton argues, more planning and funds will be needed to rebuild Iraq's cultural and archaeological programs. The American Council for Cultural Policy and other organizations say they aren't taking sides as to whether the U.S. should invade Iraq. During the Gulf War, a senior official with the Baghdad Museum -- which is near a railroad station, telecommunications office, the Iraqi Ministry of Information and other military targets -- reportedly slept in the museum, watching over antiquities too large to move to safety. The museum wasn't hit. But Maguire Gibson of the American Association for Research in Baghdad is worried about Iraqi colleagues: "It is not an easy thing to think that a country that you are very fond of, a people who you are very fond of, are going to be in very real danger."
http://edition.cnn.com/
Dali Sketch Stolen From Rikers Island
By Associated Press
March 2, 2003, 4:16 AM EST
NEW YORK -- A sketch drawn by Surrealist artist Salvador Dali for a former Correction Department commissioner was stolen from the lobby of the men's jail at Rikers Island, officials said. Workers discovered it was missing Saturday from a locked display case. The framed sketch, which depicts Jesus Christ on the cross, had been replaced by a copy of the drawing. "It's a great mystery at this point," Corrections Department spokesman Tom Antenen told The New York Times in Sunday's editions. A 1985 appraisal concluded that the work was worth at least $175,000, Antenen said, but an art expert told the Times in 2001 that it was worth at least three times that amount. Dali drew the sketch in 1965 as a favor to then-commissioner Anna Moscowitz Kross. It was displayed in the jail's dining room for 16 years before being moved to the lobby. Antenen said the copy would hang in the display case for the near future. He said the department would investigate.