By Liam McDougall Arts Correspondent
A NATIONAL database of stolen art and artefacts is to be set up by the government in a bid to crack down on Britain's illicit antiquities trade . Ministers are working to im plement a system to monitor and track stolen goods 'as a priority' because of fears that the UK will be flooded with treasures looted after the Iraq war . It is understood that officials at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport are discussing the creation of two databases, one for stolen art in general and another specifically to store information about missing Iraqi cultural property. The databases would be able to provide up-to-date information on artefacts stolen from anywhere in the world to police and dealers. A spokeswoman for the culture department said: 'We are heavily involved in developing a database for stolen art generally, but the situation in Iraq has brought a great need for an emergency database for Iraqi antiquities.' She added that private firms may be approached to help run the database.
Moves to create a stolen art database come three years after it was first proposed by the ministerial advisory panel on the illicit trade in cultural objects. At the time the idea was shelved because of a lack of funding, but the widespread looting of Iraq's museums has given the plan fresh impetus. 'What has happened in Iraq has driven the issue up the agenda and we are looking at it as a priority. We are currently finalising an outline business case,' said the spokeswoman. While there is no agreed timescale for its implementation, ministers are thought to be keen to have a working database up and running in 'a matter of weeks'. More than 170,000 priceless artefacts, including a 4000-year-old copper bust of Sargon the Great, the Akkadian king, examples of humankind's first writings and other treasures from the Uruk, Sumerian and Babylonian civilisations, are thought to be missing. During the past week the first suspected stolen Iraqi artefacts -- including 15 oil paintings, a cache of gold-plated weapons, swords, knives and undeclared bonds -- have been seized in Paris and at airports in the US and London. There are fears countries such as Germany and Switzerland will be targeted by the illicit art dealers and already two dozen FBI agents are working with Interpol in an attempt to recover the missing treasure.
But it is the British art market, the world's second largest, which has traditionally been seen as a trading centre for art and antiquities, including works from the Middle East. Currently, British police are searching for 50,000 stolen artworks and recover some £20 million worth of stolen pieces every year. On Tuesday, Unesco -- the UN cultural agency -- and antiquities experts will meet at the British Museum to discuss ways to help Iraq recover its looted art. The meeting, which will be attended by culture secretary Tessa Jowell, is expected to discuss proposals for the database of stolen art. James Ede, chairman of the Antiquities Dealers' Association, who sat on the illicit trade advisory panel in 2000, said : 'The catastrophe in Iraq has given added urgency to this issue. I think a publicly available database is essential. What has happened in Iraq is such a catastrophe of enormous proportions that it is right to have a separate database for that and another for art generally. 'If the government is serious about fighting art crime it's not enough to harangue the trade or pass laws saying it's illegal. You simply have got to give the trade the tools, and a database is the best way forward.' Anthony Browne, chairman of the British Art Market Federation, said: 'The difficulty comes, particularly with the passage of time, when things start to come into the legitimate marketplace with false provenances. That's where bona fide people can be caught out and that's why the database is so important. 'At the moment legitimate dealers and the art trade just don't have the tools to check if something has been stolen. There are databases but they are not as well resourced as something that the government is behind. As a dealer you can't get access to other databases held by Interpol or police forces. You just can't check what is legitimate and what is not.'
In a separate attempt to alert art dealers to stolen artefacts, The Art Newspaper posted pictures of 300 prominent exhibits from the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad on its website.
http://www.sundayherald.com/
A biblical bazaar
Treasures, trinkets, and fakes mingle in Israel's controversial antiquities market
By Jeffery L. Sheler
Call it a coincidence or providence, or dismiss it as the ruse of a clever hoaxster. Within a recent three-month span, two ancient artifacts of breathtaking biblical importance turned up in Israel: a first-century limestone box said to have held the remains of James, the brother of Jesus, and a tablet bearing what could be a 2,800-year- old royal inscription from the walls of the First Temple. If authentic--a big "if"--the objects would constitute the first tangible evidence corroborating the existence of Jesus of Nazareth and of an ancient Israelite temple erected by King Solomon in the 10th century B.C.
But the authenticity of both is murky, to say the least. Both artifacts emerged from Israel's lucrative antiquities market rather than in archaeological digs. Archaeologists, biblical scholars, and other experts are sharply divided over whether they are genuine or fakes, and tests may take months. In the meantime, the objects have kindled debate over the trade in biblical antiquities, conducted by private collectors and in hundreds of shops in Israel and the West Bank selling everything from statues of Canaanite fertility goddesses to oil lamps from Jesus's time. Some critics are asking whether Israeli efforts to restrict the possession and sale of ancient artifacts actually encourage forgeries, as well as the plunder of priceless historical treasures--a problem that the looting of Iraqi museums has brought to worldwide attention.
Reports last fall of the discovery of the James burial box, or ossuary, in the possession of an Israeli antiquities collector made international headlines and set the archaeological world abuzz because of an Aramaic inscription etched into its side: "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." French and Israeli scientists who initially examined the box said they found no evidence of forgery and that it dates to about A.D. 63, a year after James is said to have been martyred.
Some others who have studied photographs of the inscription accept the antiquity of the ossuary itself but contend that the part mentioning Jesus appears to have been added and could be the work of an ancient or modern forger. A new book and television documentary put a favorable spin on the evidence for the inscription's authenticity. "Is it 100 percent certain?" asks Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review and coauthor of the book, The Brother of Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco). "No. But I like to say that if you're looking for certainty, go into mathematics."
The box's owner, Tel Aviv engineer Oded Golan, says it is one of three ossuaries he bought from antiquity dealers in Jerusalem in the mid-1970s, and is among some 3,000 artifacts he has collected. It was only after he showed it to an expert in ancient inscriptions last year, Golan says, that he became aware of its biblical significance. "How was I to know the son of God had a brother?" he asks.
It was Golan, too, who turned over the so-called temple inscription to Israeli authorities earlier this year, saying he was acting as a middleman for another collector who wished to remain anonymous. The 15-line inscription in a tablet of dark sandstone tells of repairs to the temple under Judah's King Jehoash. Some scholars suggest the inscription was built into the walls of the renovated temple. Others find it deeply suspect (story, Page 46).
While Israeli scientists continue to analyze the two contested artifacts, some prominent archaeologists already are suggesting that both should be dismissed out of hand because of their murky provenance. "If we have questions about certain antiquities found in a dig," says Hebrew University archaeologist Eilat Mazar, "then we have that many more doubts about items like these." Because the lucrative market provides a strong incentive for forgers and looters, she says, scholars should simply ignore antiquities not excavated from archaeological digs.
Shanks, whose magazine first broke the story of the James ossuary, says he abhors looters and concedes that the market is glutted with forgeries. But, he adds, "this does not mean that we should ignore everything that comes from the antiquities market." He notes that most of the Dead Sea Scrolls, widely considered to be the most significant archaeological discovery of the 20th century, "were looted and purchased from middlemen. Yet no one today suggests that the scrolls are modern forgeries."
Past perfect. But clever fakes have deceived experts. Perhaps the most notorious incident occurred more than a century ago after the discovery of a ninth- century B.C. Moabite tablet that loosely parallels events in the Bible's 2 Kings. Within a few years, the antiquities market became flooded with fake Moabite inscriptions. The most prolific forger was a collector and dealer named Moshe Shapira, a Polish-born Jew who came to Palestine in 1855 and eventually converted to Christianity. Shapira sold some 1,700 "Moabite" inscriptions to the Berlin Museum, all manufactured by his team of workers. When his deceptions were exposed, Shapira committed suicide in 1884. Archaeologists and curators have become more adept at ferreting out phonies. But an occasional ringer still slips through. In the 1980s, an acclaimed epigrapher, Nahman Avigad of the Hebrew University, published a series of articles analyzing a set of seals he believed were from the First Temple period. The artifacts later were found to be fakes.
Professional forgers, says Mazar of Hebrew University, do "thorough academic research and use the latest laboratory techniques" to confound experts. "We're talking about people who will hold on to a forgery for 15 years before they put it on the market. It's going to give them millions of dollars in the future so they can afford to invest time and effort."
More troubling than forgery, experts say, is the illicit trade in genuine antiquities plundered from thousands of unguarded archaeological sites throughout Israel and the West Bank. Cases of illegal digging and tomb-robbing, normally in the hundreds each year, have multiplied since the start of the intifada in 2000. High unemployment and a breakdown of law in the Palestinian territories have emboldened looters, who have little trouble finding buyers for pilfered goods.
Attempts by the Israeli government to crack down on the illegal traffic have proved controversial, and, some contend, of questionable effect. Under a 1978 law, all archaeological finds after that date are considered property of the government. Yet antiquity dealers are still permitted to sell artifacts discovered before 1978. (Golan says both the James ossuary and the Jehoash tablet were purchased before then, although Israeli authorities have doubts.) Critics of the policy say it has done little to stem the pillaging of archaeological sites and may have actually heightened demand for smuggled artifacts. "The best of the antiquities simply end up overseas," says Golan. Israel's historical treasures would be better protected, he says, if private citizens were permitted to keep recently discovered artifacts "as long as they were shown to scientists and documented."
Restricting the antiquities trade is all the more difficult because of the fascination these artifacts exert. Whether the James box and the Jehoash tablet are authentic or clever forgeries, says historian Neil Asher Silberman, director of the Ename Center for Public Archaeology in Belgium, the two objects "have been irreversibly transformed into relics" imbued with religious significance that rests "not in what they are but in what they symbolize." That kind of impulse is unlikely to subside any time soon.
With Leora Eren Frucht
http://www.usnews.com/
Collector returns missing butterfly to museum
Yomiuri Shimbun
A specimen of a rare butterfly stolen from a Bonn museum in 1981 that was acquired by a Japanese businessman rec ently was returned to the museum 22 years after its disappearance, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned.
The stolen Przewalski Apollo specimen was returned to Museum Koenig due to the efforts of a Japanese anthropologist who persuaded the businessman to relinquish the specimen he had purchased without knowing it was stolen. Police in the former West Germany had launched an international investigation into the butterfly's disappearance. The insect, a type of Apollo butterfly with a distinctive red-and- blue pattern on its wings, which have a span of five centimeters, was one of three of the species captured by Russian explorer Nikolai Przewalski in Qinghai, China, in 1884. One of the three specimens was donated to the Bonn museum, while the other two are housed in a museum in St. Petersburg. Although a number of butterfly enthusiasts tried to catch similar butterflies at the same location, the confused political situation in China at that time hampered such efforts. While the butterfly was found in the area in the 1980s, the specimen of the three butterflies caught by Przewalski has become a collectors item as a type specimen designated as a new species of butterfly. Shortly after the theft, a Japanese dealer reportedly purchased the specimen in the Philippines from a German researcher who had frequently visited the museum. The dealer then sold it for more than 2 million yen to the Tokyo businessman, a well-known collector.
According to sources, news of the sale spread, eventually leading the then West German police to open an investigation into the case. A German newspaper described the theft as the equivalent of the disappearance of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum in Paris. However, the police dropped the case later as the businessman was determined to be a bona fide collector who had bought the stolen item without knowing it had been stolen. However, Keiichi Omoto, 69, an anthropologist and an emeritus professor at Tokyo University known for his research into butterflies, was extremely concerned about the situation. Omoto was a frequent visitor to the museum and took a photo of the stolen specimen while he was studying in Munich in the 1960s. The specimen in the photo appeared identical to the one the businessman possessed as its shape matched, including damaged parts.
After being asked by the German museum to negotiate with the businessman for the return of the specimen, Omoto began making persistent efforts to persuade him to relinquish the item last May. As a result of Omoto's tenacious persuasion, the businessman finally agreed to hand it over to the museum for free. Omoto delivered the specimen to the museum on April 2 and received a letter of acceptance for the businessman. He gave the letter to the businessman on Sunday.
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/
Better protection for artefacts
By Dianne King
Amendments to the Antiquities Act 1975 would provide better protection for heritage objects by regulating sales within New Zealand and restricting overseas sales, Associate Arts, Culture and Heritage Minister Judith Tizard said in Alexandra yesterday.
Ms Tizard was opening the 49th New Zealand Archaeological Association conference yesterday. Revisions of the Act were due before Parliament this year, she said. While the export of cultural heritage objects from New Zealand was governed by the Act, the provisions were not intended to restrict the legiti- mate free trade in cultural objects, she told the 70 people at the conference. The amendments would improve protection of Maori cultural heritage objects and prevent removal of artefacts where it would be detrimental to historical records, scientific study, or contrary to the public interest. Association president Garry Law, of Auckland, said the changes were heading in the right direction. "It has taken a long time to get this far. The Act is inflexible at the moment and the changes will refine what is covered by regulation," Mr Law said. Department of Conservation historic ranger James Robinson, from Whangarei, was on Tuesday's field trip of historic sites at Bendigo, his first visit to the "deep South". "I had never been to a site quite like this . . . problems you have here in site management are very different from the humid north, but sometimes you find solutions to problems that are applicable all over the country," he said. This morning's field trip takes in a long-established cherry orchard and includes Bannockburn. More papers will be presented tomorrow before the annual meeting which concludes the conference.
http://www.odt.co.nz/
Karzai calls for return of looted artefacts
Kabul, April 26 Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called for an end to illegal excavations and the return of looted historical artefacts which were smuggled abroad, the official Bakhter news agency said Saturday.
"Anywhere you see people digging illegally, go and tell the local security," he said in a speech carried by the news agency. "These people are selling our heritage and our history." Karzai said Afghanistan had a rich pre-Islamic and Islamic culture and that the country was a cradle of civilisation. However, in 23 years of war much of the country's heritage had been destroyed or looted and smuggled abroad, he said. While destroyed villages and cities could be rebuilt, Chakary minaret and the Bamiyan Buddhas - destroyed by the Taliban - could never be restored to their former glory, making it even more important to hold on to what was left. Karzai said Afghanistan was hoping for help from the United Nations cultural organisation, UNESCO, in recovering stolen art and looted artefacts. Illegal excavation of archaeological sites and looting of finds is a major problem for Afghanistan which is trying to hold on to what remains of its physical heritage after 23 years of war.
Earlier this month the United Arab Emirates returned to Afghanistan 17 ancient Afghan artifacts seized from a foreigner trying to smuggle them via the Gulf to Europe.
http://news.sify.com/
Ukrainian monks seize part of 1,000-year old monastery in latest dispute over Soviet-seized property
By ANNA MELNICHUK The Associated Press 4/26/03 1:51 AM
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Ukraine's Orthodox monks are resorting to sit- ins to regain church property seized by the Soviet government and still occupied by secular organizations.
For the past week, about a dozen monks have occupied the State Archaeological Institute's archives, housed in the gold-crested, onion-domed Monastery of the Caves, demanding the government return the building to the church. The holed-up monks refuse to allow entry to outsiders.
It was the second-such occupation in a month.
On Friday, a thin bearded face appeared in the open window of the dilapidated building at the monastery, but the monk refused to speak to a reporter. "They won't give up until they receive what's theirs," said a young novice who refused to give his name. He was bringing the group food, climbing in and out of a second-floor window reached by a ladder. Ukrainian media quoted Metropolitan Volodymyr, leader of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to which the monastery belongs, as saying the institute had "desecrated" the premises. Volodymyr denied the monks were breaking the law, saying they were simply reclaiming their property. The nearly 1,000-year-old Caves Monastery -- a UNESCO world heritage site -- spreads over two large hills in central Kiev overlooking the mighty Dnieper River. Miles of underground tunnels containing crypts and ecclesiastical objects attract thousands of visitors each year. Originally, the dilapidated building the monks occupy was a church and inn for pilgrims. In the 1920s, Soviet authorities declared the monastery a state reserve and drove out all the monks.
A special commission returned part of the monastery in 1988 on the 1,000th anniversary of the baptism of Kievan Rus -- the first Slavic state. The church gained more of it after the 1991 Soviet collapse. Last year, President Leonid Kuchma ordered all religious property confiscated by the Soviet Union returned, but the order has not been implemented. In August, top officials promised to return the monastery to the church within three months. The monks seized the space after hearing rumors the government planned to lease it to new tenants, said Yuriy Bilan, a historian at a museum on the monastery grounds. Valentina Kulakova, deputy director of the Kiev-Pechersk Historic Archaeological Reserve, which runs the archive in the disputed building, said the monks had a valid claim but questioned their methods. "We understand perfectly that we must return religious buildings to the monastery, but it should be done in a civilized way, backed by orders from the authorities," she said. The Caves sit-in is not the first time this year that Orthodox believers have taken the law into their own hands. Last month, about 60 monks and laypeople from the nearby Holy Candlemas Monastery forced their way into a building housing two Western democracy foundations that have rented space in the monastery from the government for the past 10 years.
The group arrived in the early morning, pinned a guard to the wall and looked around for keys to open the offices, but found none, said Markian Bilynskyi, who heads one of the foundations, the Pylyp Orlyka Institute. The crowd blocked the offices and refused to let police in. Four days later, police finally persuaded the protesters to leave, and then sealed the offices pending a court decision, Bilynskyi said. He insisted that although property should be returned, leases must be respected. However, the government hesitates to enforce the law against the monks. "They're reluctant to do anything because it involves the church," Bilynskyi said.
http://www.cleveland.com/
The Art Newspaper.com
http://www.theartnewspaper.com
This week's top stories:
A COALITION OF THE WILLING
It is a truly shocking irony that the collections in the Iraqi National Museum have been looted and smashed at the same time as a painstaking survey of the cultures once covered so magnificently by that museum has been coming together at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. http://81.112.115.148/allemandi/TAN/news/article.asp?idart=10998
ALL TOGETHER NOW FOR THE MOBILE FLOOD BARRIERS TO PROTECT VENICE
Just when it seemed that the long-running “affaire Vasarely” had reached its final stages, a new twist has been added to the saga. In Paris last month a senior figure at the university of the French island of La Réunion was brought back to Paris in handcuffs and imprisoned, suspected of money laundering. http://81.112.115.148/allemandi/TAN/news/article.asp?idart=10994
MASSIVE SUCCESS FOR BRETON SALE
The hugely successful sale of the collection of the Surrealist André Breton ended here last week with a final generous flourish. The artist’s daughter Aube decided not to accept payment for a number of lots the State had pre-empted. http://81.112.115.148/allemandi/TAN/news/article.asp?idart=10992
“WE WANT TO DISMANTLE THE PREJUDICE AGAINST ARABS”
As regime change is being imposed on Iraq, down the other end of the Persian Gulf, in the United Arab Emirates, a very Western phenomenon, an art biennale, is introducing the local Arab citizens to the international Avant-garde. http://81.112.115.148/allemandi/TAN/news/article.asp?idart=10991
Anna Somers Cocks, Editor contact@theartnewspaper.com
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IRAQ:
Iraqis and their antiquities
The looting, ransacking and burning of Baghdad's great repositories of historical antiquities came as a shock to many -- including, apparently, U.S. troops in the field -- even though scholars all over the world had warned that a war could cause catastrophic cultural damage in Iraq. But now the damage is done, and all that's left to do is pick up the shattered pieces, attempt to recover some of what was stolen, secure the rest -- and try to figure out exactly what happened and why.
That, of course, entails finger-pointing. Yet the accurate assigning of blame turns out to be more complicated than it looks. Most people, including many American scholars, hold the United States responsible, and they are obviously right in two respects. None of the destruction would have happened if the U.S. and Britain had not invaded Iraq to begin with and if Baghdad's fall had not triggered a sudden power vacuum in the city. Looting might also have been avoided, or at least mitigated, if troops had been instructed to make it a priority to safeguard Iraq's National Museum and National Library as soon as it was clear that the government in Baghdad had collapsed.
So it is easy to understand the anger that has prompted several American experts to resign from official positions in protest at the failure to guard Iraq's historical treasures as diligently as the U.S. guarded oil refineries and ministry facilities. Mr. Martin Sullivan, head of U.S. President George W. Bush's Cultural Advisory Committee, for example, stepped down two weeks ago, saying the looting had not been prevented "due to our nation's inaction." Their frustration was surely compounded by the cavalier response of some top U.S. officials to news of the looting. "Stuff happens," shrugged Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "These are the phases," said retired Rear Adm. Steve Baker. "First there's jubilation, followed by looting, followed by revenge attacks, followed by what we are about to see next -- some amazing black markets." The tone, if not the substance, of those remarks is certainly offensive. Yet U.S. culpability is hardly the whole story. There are two other striking facts about the destruction in Iraq. First, it did not take place as a result of combat or airstrikes. On the contrary, coalition forces took tremendous care not to target cultural sites -- for example, they did not attack Iraqi soldiers who took refuge in Najaf's venerable Ali Mosque in early April.
Second, the worst destruction was perpetrated not by the victorious invaders, but by Iraqis themselves -- an astonishing turn of events when you think about it. It's easy to imagine the confusion of a young U.S. Marine in Baghdad watching Iraqi citizens cannibalize their own historic treasures. It would be as if, amid the chaos of Sept. 11, New Yorkers had ransacked the Museum of Modern Art to get back at Osama bin Laden. Who can fathom the psychology of what happened in Baghdad? Who could have anticipated it in precisely the self-destructive, frenzied form that it took? In truth, those experts who warned of the dangers that a war would pose to Iraq's antiquities did not foresee it playing out this way, either. Yes, they worried about damage in the field -- and about looting, too, because it had happened after the Persian Gulf War. But that earlier bout was more gradual, more diffuse and more familiar: It continued throughout the decade, despite the Draconian penalties imposed for trafficking, and it mostly affected poorly guarded archaeological sites, not Iraq's major cultural institutions. Many Asian nations have experienced the same slow, corrosive drip of thievery for decades. Baghdad was different -- to a degree that perhaps even helps confirm Mr. Bush's case for invasion. Reportedly, the vandalism that swept the city this month was of two kinds: one a fast, focused, professional effort that might have been orchestrated by fugitive Baath Party officials and the other a mad rush by ordinary men, women and children to grab whatever they could carry and to smash or burn what they couldn't. The former set of looters are understandable, if loathsome. But the latter are comprehensible only as an extreme example of a profoundly alienated people: not just poor, not just hungry, but so severed from their cultural roots that when their country's great museum and library stood briefly unguarded they swarmed in greedily, unable to see themselves for what they were: Iraqis destroying irreplaceable Iraqi treasures. Statues and bronzes, stone tablets and books? Those were the trappings of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, not theirs.
It is to be hoped that, whatever kind of Iraq emerges from the chaos of this interregnum, it will be one that all Iraqis will want to honor and protect. The Japan Times: April 27, 2003
Barbarians at the gates
Alexander Chancellor Saturday April 26, 2003 The Guardian
We won't know for a while yet how many Iraqi civilians were killed or injured in the second Gulf war. But although there have been terrible tragedies affecting many innocent people, the final casualty figures will probably be very low in relation to the number of bombs and missiles the coalition has rained on Iraqi cities. The Americans seem, on the whole, to have taken seriously their commitment to keeping civilian casualties to a minimum, helped by the uncanny accuracy of their guided weapons. And they have taken other praiseworthy precautions against wanton war damage, such as securing Iraq's oil wells and disarming its Scud missiles before they could be fired at Israel. So why on earth have they permitted the destruction of an ancient culture on a scale without parallel in modern times and unequalled in Iraq since the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258? In a three-day rampage at the Iraqi National Museum, looters took up to 170,000 statues, clay tablets, pieces of pottery and jewellery, dating back more than 5,000 years to the first stirrings of civilisation. And the victorious Americans did nothing to stop them. How can this have been possible?
Military spokesmen have answered this with relaxed talk about it being a matter of priorities in time of war. But Donald Rumsfeld was not relaxed when asked the same question last week: he seemed genuinely angry at any suggestion of US negligence. "We didn't allow it to happen," he said. "It happened."
But it is not only in the Arab world that this cultural catastrophe has aroused deep indignation and suspicion towards the US government. Three members of President Bush's advisory committee on cultural property tendered their resignations because of this "wanton and preventable destruction". And some US archaeologists even suggested that the failure to protect the collection could amount to a war crime under the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property. The US administration's line has been to suggest that the disaster was not foreseeable. "I don't think anyone anticipated that the riches of Iraq would be looted by the Iraqi people," said one complacent general. But, in fact, it had every reason to think that something of the kind might happen - during uprisings in Iraq after the first Gulf war, 13 museums were ransacked. And the US government was well aware of the great value of both the National Museum and the National Library (which went up in flames in an arson attack), since it had put both buildings on a "no strike list" of sites to be spared during the "Shock and Awe" bombing of Baghdad. The inevitable conclusion to which one is drawn is that Rumsfeld and his friends in the Pentagon simply didn't care enough about Iraq's cultural and artistic heritage to make any effort to protect it. And they cannot even say they are sorry or take any blame for its destruction, because they cannot admit to any flaws in their battle plan."To try to pass off the fact of that unfortunate activity to a deficit in the war plan strikes me as a stretch," Rumsfeld said when asked if the looting reflected a military mistake. But there seems no doubt that, if it had wanted to, the military could have spared the men to stand guard over Baghdad's great cultural institutions. Professor McGuire Gibson, an American expert on Mesopotamian archaeology, pointed out that American soldiers had been made available to chip away an insulting mural of Bush in Baghdad's al-Rashid hotel. None, however, could be spared to protect the treasures in the National Museum while they were being looted up the road at the same time.
Here is one area in which the Americans have proved themselves less sensitive than even Saddam Hussein, who showed a keen interest in his country's archaeological legacy. Since he was also a brutal dictator, he went so far as to make the smuggling of antiquities punishable by death. The US government, on the other hand, is suspected by the Arabs of being in league with art smugglers, since it is being claimed that some of the most valuable items in the museum were stolen to order. Such rumours may not be true, but they are an inevitable consequence of this huge American cock-up, which will turn out to have been the greatest public relations disaster of the war and a major defeat in the battle for Arab hearts and minds.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Legal plan to save Iraq treasures
A Liberal Democrat MP is urging the government to close loopholes that could allow stolen Iraqi cultural treasures to be sold in the UK. Richard Allan, the MP for Sheffield Hallam, says the current laws could allow Iraqi antiquities to be sold openly in the UK without fear of prosecution.
The warning comes after looters ransacked many of Iraq's priceless treasures from museums and archaeological sites following the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. "At the moment if somebody tries to sell an artefact that has been stolen and you can prove who it was stolen from they can be prosecuted for handling stolen goods," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Friday. "But if it can't be tracked back to the original owner then they can't be prosecuted. That's the loophole we're trying to plug," he said. The loophole means uncatalogued treasures from archaeological sites could be sold in the UK without fear of prosecution. It is not thought that treasures stolen from museums will be openly traded because they will be catalogued and easily identifiable.
'Tainted objects'
But Mr Allan's proposed law changes would take into account local heritage laws to make sure Iraq's national treasures could not be sold, or "you would be committing an offence". He said police would not have to prove the items had been stolen. "All you'd have to prove is something had been taken contrary to the local heritage protection laws," he said. The antiquities would be described as "tainted cultural objects". London is thought to be a likely hub for those trying to sell looted or stolen antiquities. Mr Allan says the bill mirrors Prime Minister Tony Blair's pledge to return Iraq's national treasures to the Iraqi people, but says the government needs to confirm committee time to help make the bill law. Meanwhile, US president George W Bush said on Thursday he regretted the looting of Baghdad's internationally-renowned museum. "I couldn't agree more with people who say we're sorry that happened," he told the US's NBC television in the first interview since launching the war against Iraq.
"We are, by the way, helping find treasure, restore treasure and we'll provide all the expertise and help they need to get that museum up and running again," Mr Bush said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
And Now: 'Operation Iraqi Looting'
By FRANK RICH
Let it never be said that our government doesn't give a damn about culture. It was on April 10, the same day the sacking of the National Museum in Baghdad began, that a subtitled George W. Bush went on TV to tell the Iraqi people that they are "the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity." And so what if America stood idly by while much of the heritage of that civilization — its artifacts, its artistic treasures, its literary riches and written records — was being destroyed as he spoke? It's not as if we weren't bringing in some culture of our own to fill that unfortunate vacuum. It was on April 10 as well, by happy coincidence, that the United States announced the imminent arrival of nightly newscasts from Dan Rather, Jim Lehrer and Brit Hume on newly liberated Iraqi TV. Better still, the White House let it be known, again on that same day, that it was seeking $62 million from Congress for a 24-hour Middle East Television Network that would pipe in dubbed versions of prime-time network programming.
Goodbye, dreary old antiquity! Hello, "Friends"!
There is much we don't know about what happened this month at the Baghdad museum, at its National Library and archives, at the Mosul museum and the rest of that country's gutted cultural institutions. Is it merely the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years, as Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, put it? Or should we listen to Eleanor Robson, of All Souls College, Oxford, who said, "You'd have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale"? Nor do we know who did it. Was this a final act of national rape by Saddam loyalists? Was it what Philippe de Montebello, of the Metropolitan Museum, calls the "pure Hollywood" scenario — a clever scheme commissioned in advance by shadowy international art thieves? Was it simple opportunism by an unhinged mob? Or some combination thereof?
Whatever the answers to those questions, none of them can mitigate the pieces of the damning jigsaw puzzle that have emerged with absolute certainty. The Pentagon was repeatedly warned of the possibility of this catastrophe in advance of the war, and some of its officials were on the case. But at the highest levels at the White House, the Pentagon and central command — where the real clout is — no one cared. Just how little they cared was given away by our leaders' own self-incriminating statements after disaster struck. Rather than immediately admit to error or concede the gravity of what had happened on their watch, they all tried to trivialize the significance of the looting. Once that gambit failed, they tried to shirk any responsibility for it.
"What you are seeing is a reaction to oppression," said Ari Fleischer on April 11, arguing that looting, however deplorable, is a way station to "liberty and freedom." If only the Johnson administration had thought of this moral syllogism, it could have rationalized the urban riots that swept America after the assassination of Martin Luther King. "Stuff happens!" said Donald Rumsfeld, who likened the looting to the aftermath of soccer games and joked to the press that the scale of the crime was a trompe l'oeil effect foisted by a TV loop showing "over and over and over . . . the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase." As Jane Waldbaum, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, summed up the defense secretary's response to the tragedy, he "basically shrugged and said, `Boys will be boys.' "
When the outrage over the story refused to go away after the looting subsided, a cover-up began. "I don't think that anyone anticipated that the riches of Iraq would be looted by the Iraqi people," said the Centcom spokesman, Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, on April 15, days after the museum had been sacked, the library burned. But even the public record makes this assertion laughable. In the 1991 war, nine of Iraq's 13 regional museums were looted, flooding the antiquities market with the booty for years. Why wouldn't we anticipate that the same would happen again?
In fact, we did. The Pentagon held a late January meeting with American experts on Iraq's cultural bounty, opening a conversation that continued in the weeks before the war. "I had thought they were aware of the importance of the museum," said McGuire Gibson, of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, who was among the Pentagon meeting participants I interviewed last week. Last Sunday The Washington Times uncovered the smoking gun proving that Professor Gibson was right and that General Brooks's claim of ignorance was (at best) misinformed: a March 26 Pentagon memo to the coalition command listing, in order of importance, 16 sites that were crucial to protect in Baghdad. No. 2 on the list was the Baghdad museum.
Our troops cannot be blamed for what happened 10 days after that memo was sent. The failure to deploy any of them to guard the museum and its sister institutions happened somewhere within the command, and we may never learn where. It was "a matter of priorities," said Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Obviously the highest priority is human life, including that of our own forces. But this wasn't an either/or proposition. If we had enough troops to secure the oil ministry, we surely had the very few needed to ward off looters at the museum. "America would have scored a coup in Europe, the Middle East and the Muslim world if it protected the museum," says Vartan Gregorian, the president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Instead we sent the message that Iraqi's "great civilization," as the president called it, wasn't worth a single tank for protection.
But we also sent the message that we don't appreciate the worth of our own culture so terribly much either. For all the news reports of "billions of dollars" of losses, for all the golden objects shown on TV, the most devastating crime may have been the pillaging of cuneiform clay tablets and other glitter-free objects that tell us of the birth of writing, cities and legal codes in what was the former Mesopotamia. This land was the cradle of our civilization, too, long before there was Islam. Most of the early chapters of Genesis are believed to have been set in what only recently has been known as Iraq.
If this history was forgotten or ignored by our ostentatiously Bible- minded administration, so was much more recent American history. In 1943, American armed forces fielded a monuments, fine arts and archives section to try to protect cultural treasures as we prosecuted the war in Europe. Lynn H. Nicholas, who wrote the definitive account of that story in "The Rape of Europa," told me that she had been invited to give lectures "to reserve units doing serious study on the securing of cultural artifacts" in recent years. "They were being prepared for the eventuality of something like this," she says. "Why weren't they deployed?" According to Mr. Rumsfeld, it would be "a stretch" to say our failure to take such measures was "a defect in the war plan." Rather, he said, the looting is just a reminder that freedom is "untidy" — or, in this case, literally just another word for nothing left to lose.
Now that the pillaging of the Baghdad museum has become more of a symbol of Baghdad's fall than the toppling of a less exalted artistic asset, the Saddam statue, all the president's men are trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Colin Powell was once again suited up to counter crude Pentagon rhetoric. Karl Rove has been on the phone with Mr. de Montebello. F.B.I. agents are on the case. But even if all such efforts, from Unesco's to that of the mobilized museum world, disable the black market for the major loot, nothing is going to restore the priceless library that is now ash or reconstitute the countless relics that have modest individual monetary value but collectively would have helped scholars reconstruct mankind's deepest past. "These items will appear for sale for $50 or $100 in antique stores all over the Middle East, Europe and North America or on eBay," said Oxford's Professor Robson. "The unsuspecting or the unscrupulous will buy them as novelty Christmas presents or coffee- table pieces."
It's hard to put a loss this big in perspective. I asked Mahrukh Tarapor, the associate director for exhibitions at the Met, to try. Ms. Tarapor has spent the past six years seeking Mesopotamian holdings from museums throughout the world for "Art of the First Cities," an all too timely exhibition that by coincidence is opening on May 8. "It's almost a new emotion," she said, noting that she has felt it only once before, when the Taliban destroyed the Great Buddhas of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan two years ago. "One is almost conditioned to accept even human death as part of life. The destruction of art — of our heritage — goes very deep in our unconscious. To a museum person, the worst thing you can experience is damage to an object on your watch. For the magnitude of what happened in Iraq, you have no words. You lose faith in your fellow man."
The tragedy for America is not just the loss itself but the naked revelation of our worst instincts at the very dawn of our grandiose project to bring democratic values to the Middle East. By protecting Iraq's oil but not its cultural motherlode, we echo the values of no one more than Saddam, who in 1995 cut off funds to the Baghdad museum, pleading the impact of sanctions, yet nonetheless found plenty of money to pour into his own palaces and their opulent hordes of kitsch. We may have been unable to protect tablets containing missing pieces of the Gilgamesh epic. But somehow we did manage to secure the lavish homes of Saddam's hierarchy, where the cultural gems ranged from videos of old James Bond movies to the collected novels of Danielle Steel.
http://www.nytimes.com/
Iraq's 'most wanted' stolen relics
Search for priceless antiquities goes high-tech
By MIKE TONER The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Archaeologists and scholars around the world are racing to turn up the heat on stolen Iraqi artifacts -- adapting the concept of Wild West wanted posters to the Internet age and international art markets.
Within days, antiquities experts hope to have pictures and detailed descriptions of thousands of Baghdad's missing treasures posted on a single Web site -- an electronic "hot sheet" that will grow even larger in the days ahead. Between 50,000 and 200,000 items, worth millions on international art markets, were taken from Iraqi museums in the wake of the war. "We want to make these stolen objects too hot to handle by making it possible for everyone to see what is missing," says Gil Stein, director of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, which is acting as the clearinghouse for the project. Some internationally known pieces -- like the white marble head of a woman from Uruk (3,000 B.C.), the gold helmet of King Meskalamdug, the famed Lyre of Ur, with its gold bull's head motif, and limestone reliefs from the Assyrian palaces near Mosul -- are so well-known that offering them for sale would be like trying to fence the Mona Lisa. Objects stolen from the Baghdad Museum are marked in indelible ink with seven- or eight-digit accession numbers, but if the numbers are scraped off, most of the less well-known artifacts could easily disappear into the shadowy "gray market" of illicit antiquities. "If some cop in Paris stops someone and finds suspicious stuff in a trunk, we want to give him a place where he can find out what it is," says Stein. "It will only work as an international collaborative effort if we have all the information in a single searchable place."
As civil order is restored in Iraq, it is clear that "missing" artifacts fall into a number of categories. Some were grabbed by casual looters. Some were taken from vaults by organized thieves. Some were destroyed when the museum was ransacked. Over the course of the last week, a number of Iraqi citizens have returned paintings and other pieces to the museum. By listing everything that's still missing, archaeologists hope to enlist global interest -- and millions of eyes -- in recovering the remaining loot. Developing a "most wanted" list for 10,000 years of cultural heritage is no easy task. The only detailed catalog of the collection, Treasures of the Iraq Museum, was published by Iraqi scholar Faraj Basmachi in Baghdad 25 years ago. Since news of the looting swept the world two weeks ago, however, more than 36 institutions, including universities and museums on three continents, have joined forces to offer their own archival records of Iraqi artifacts. At the Oriental Institute in Chicago, these bits and pieces of Iraq's ancient culture are being reassembled in the cyberspace "hot sheet." In addition to aiding the recovery effort, archaeologists hope the database eventually will help the Baghdad museum rebuild the records destroyed earlier this month. "A lot of scholars are contributing information and photographs," says Ellen Herscher, chairman of the cultural property committee of the Archaeological Institute of America. "Every bit of information increases the chance that once these things show up on the market, they will be identified."
Use of the Internet as a clearinghouse for stolen art is not a new tactic. The Art Loss Register, a London- and New York-based partnership of insurers and auction houses, maintains a database of more than 100,000 stolen works. Since 1991, the register has been instrumental in recovering more than 1,000 items worth an estimated $100 million.
Unusual unanimity
The effort to curb the flow of Iraqi antiquities, however, has been strikingly swift and spontaneous, with all the major players in place within two weeks of the initial looting. In an unusual show of unanimity, art dealers and museums, two groups frequently at odds with archaeologists, have called for a voluntary ban on the acquisition of Iraqi material until the situation is clarified. Interpol, the international police organization, is already using images from the University of Chicago's electronic archive to help authorities in 181 member countries identify suspicious artifacts. "Interpol is calling on organizations and institutions involved in conservation and trade of antiquities to categorically decline any offers of cultural property originating from Iraq," says Karl-Heinz Kind, the police agency's specialist in art theft. International law enforcement agencies will meet at Interpol's headquarters in Lyon, France, on May 5 to coordinate strategies for recapturing Iraq's missing heritage.
FBI expert on the case
Lynne Chaffinch, manager of the FBI's art theft program, arrived in Kuwait on Friday to take charge of a team of FBI agents who will coordinate bureau efforts in the hunt for stolen antiquities. Chaffinch says most of the stolen antiquities are likely to surface in wealthy countries, such as the United States, Britain, Germany, Japan, France and Switzerland. U.S. dealers and collectors buy 60 percent of the world's art, legal and illegal The FBI maintains its own police-only database of stolen art and antiquities, but until it can add Iraqi antiquities to the file, it too is relying on the electronic images and information being assembled by the University of Chicago. As the central repository for Iraqi cultures, the museum held half of all artifacts excavated in the country since the 1920s. The Oriental Institute calls the Baghdad Museum "an unrivaled treasure, not only for Iraq, but for all of mankind," with material that dates from the earliest stone tools ever made to Islamic pottery. It wasn't the only repository of Mesopotamian culture, however. Because many of the major digs in Iraq before 1991 were conducted jointly with Western institutions, large numbers of the artifacts, and records of the work, were held outside of the country. Until now, most of the records existed only on paper and only in widely scattered institutions in the United States and Europe. "Digitizing all of these records and publishing them on the Internet is an enormous task," Stein says. "We've had student volunteers in here all week scanning photographs at a furious pace."
Similar efforts are under way at dozens of institutions with collections of Iraqi material.
The University of Pennsylvania Museum, for instance, is providing data and images from archaeology it has done in Iraq since the late 1800s, including its famous excavations with the British Museum at the ancient city of Ur, the Biblical home of Abraham. Richard Zettler, the museum's curator for Near East studies, says all museums with Iraq collections and expertise should contribute to the effort. "We ask museums and universities, particularly those that have sponsored excavations in Mesopotamia, to cooperate with Iraq's Directorate of Antiquities and Heritage, to rebuild its accession and registration records and to lend their expertise in repairing artifacts and reopening exhibitions," he says.
http://www.ajc.com/
Looting of Baghdad treasures shines light on a 'dirty business'
Sunday, April 27, 2003 By Dennis B. Roddy, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The Byzantine frescos of Lysi, painted in Cyprus, kidnapped to Germany and now staring down from the ceiling of a museum chapel in Texas, testify by their travels that the world views much of its cultural legacy through a catalog of stolen property.
For nine centuries, the frescos hung unmolested on a small chapel in Cyprus before being cut from the ceiling by Turkish looters during the 1974 war. Ten years later, a Houston foundation, working with the Cypriot Orthodox Church, saved them and installed them in the museum chapel, where they are an example of the moral ambiguity of the antiquities trade. As the hunt for looted Iraqi antiquities continues, the debate over how best, or even whether, to share the art and artifacts of nations has divided scientists and collectors, archaeologists and museums, in an acrimonious debate over ethics, property law and cultural politics. "It's a dirty business, the antiquities trade," said Jane Waldbaum, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, a scientific group that largely opposes the antiquities traffic. "They will say they only buy from reputable dealers. But where do they buy things from?"
Countered William Pearlstein, a Manhattan lawyer who represents museums and collectors: "What the archaeologists have trouble understanding is that we have a regulated market. In their view, even the most careful collector is still aiding and abetting tomb robbers." The intensifying bitterness of those divisions prevented the two sides from uniting in the days before the Iraq war, a time when each mounted separate and ultimately unsuccessful efforts to prevent the destruction of Iraq's treasures.
Ulterior motives?
While members of the American Council on Cultural Policy, a 2-year- old organization of dealers, collectors and museum curators, met with both the Department of State and the Pentagon to map out plans to prevent the destruction of Iraq's antiquities, the archaeological institute found itself on the outside. The two groups were unable to put together a joint statement. "We wanted a statement that was more comprehensive and didn't just address the bombing," said Patty Gerstenblith, a DePaul University law professor who helped spearhead the institute's efforts. The archaeologists were "asleep at the switch," complained Ashton Hawkins, former counsel for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a founder of the cultural policy council. In the end, the council's do-not-bomb list prevented destruction from the air, but neither Hawkins' group nor Gerstenblith's, was able to persuade commanders on the ground to station troops around the Iraqi museums or libraries that were stripped of treasures dating to 3000 B.C.
The State Department and Pentagon meetings with the cultural policy council gave rise to sometimes bizarre speculation about the government's motives. Newspapers in Scotland and England published stories broadly suggesting the collectors were somehow hoping the Bush administration would loosen export controls in the wake of the Iraq invasion and suggested the looting could have been an outcome of that. Gerstenblith, a critic of the cultural policy council, said she saw no ulterior motives in the council's meetings with Pentagon and State. "Their agenda is totally clean at these meetings," Gerstenblith said. "A lot of people sort of overstated what happened." It was one of the few moments in which one side had kind words for the other.
Largely irrecoverable
To understand the views that divide the groups, the Church of Ayios Themonianos is an object lesson. After looters cut the fresco from the ceiling of the 12th-century chapel, they hid the pieces in a Munich warehouse and put it on the black market for sale, piece-by- piece. "The stuff was put up for ransom," said James Demetrion, director of the de Menil collection, a Houston art museum that bought the fresco, conceded ownership to the Cypriot Orthodox Church, and installed it in a specially made chapel in Texas.
To do a good deed, the foundation rewarded thieves.
"I don't think one would want to encourage ripping off places and holding things for ransom," Demetrion said. "This was a very unusual circumstance." The de Menil foundation and the Cypriot church must now, come 2012, renegotiate whether the frescos remain in Texas or go home to Cyprus. The unsettling truth, say experts on both sides of the dispute over collecting, is that much of the world's cultural storehouse has been expropriated by either force of arms or business deals in which some questions were never asked. "What do you think the Louvre is?" said Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Museum in Baltimore. "The ethical, moral imperative we feel now would have been absolutely foreign to Lord Elgin, absolutely foreign to Henry Clay Frick." One hundred years ago, when Elgin was shipping priceless Greek marbles to London and Frick was gathering up masterpieces from Europe, the trade in the cultural legacies of other nations was free- wheeling. When up for sale, artworks and antiques often came without an explanation for their source. When sold, they were largely irrecoverable. That effort to recover the antiquities, whether still in the ground or secreted in the attic of a smuggler awaiting his moment to slip it onto the black market, is at the root of the debate between archaeologists and collectors.
Disdain of collectors
Vikan is one of three members who resigned from President Bush's advisory council on cultural property to protest U.S. failure to stop the looting of Baghdad's museums and libraries. Collectors have argued that the acquisition of antiquities for museums spreads cultures and ideas freely. Archaeologists worry that even legal collecting, regulated in the United States since 1983 through a series of agreements with various nations, simply encourages the kind of looting that ravaged Baghdad this month. Archaeologists largely object to the antiquities trade because, in their view, it disturbs important sites, makes it hard to understand the context of a culture, and, as demand heats up, encourages outright looting and robbery that destroy important artifacts and make it impossible to understand the culture in which looted objects were created. "When you see things outside their historical context, you can't do much except date them and appreciate their beauty," said Samuel Paley, a professor of classics at State University of New York's Buffalo campus. "I would say, our law, as it relates to culture, really has a great deal of left-leaning. In other countries, there is no such disdain of institutional as well as private collectors by academia," said Torkom Demirjian, whose Manhattan shop, Ariadne, deals in Mesopotamian antiquities.
Anger between the two sides can run deep.
"How about hatred? We respect them, they hate us," said William Pearlstein, a lawyer who represents collectors and museums. "What would happen if we stopped talking to them? What would happen if we stopped giving them information about the objects in their cases? That would be my personal gut reaction," Paley said. "That springs from this wonderful arrogance that academics have," Vikan said. "There's a lot of anger. The piety is really just quite amazing to me sometimes."
Rift in the art world
Those two poles on the cultural globe emerged through centuries of changes in law, ethics and the standards of science. They happened at the same time a demand for antiquities grew, fueled by the interests of wealthy and usually educated collectors. One example is Jay Kislak, a Florida banking millionaire whose enthusiasm for pre- Columbian artifacts from Central America resulted in one of the premier collections in the world. "We are mostly in books and manuscripts and maps and documents," Kislak said. "We are deeply involved in documents related to the early history of America." His foundation offers research grants to scholars, usually to study materials in his collection. His gallery is open Monday through Friday, and Kislak, a major donor to Republican causes, is slated to take a spot on the same presidential advisory committee Vikan quit in protest. But a less-touted example of a collector and dealer is Frederick Schultz. Schultz was a New York specialist in Egyptian and Middle Eastern antiquities who, as president of the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art, testified frequently before the President's Cultural Property Advisory Committee, arguing against further restrictions on the trade in antiquities and art during the Clinton administration. What committee members did not know at the time was that Schultz, according to later testimony at his trial, was receiving artifacts looted from archaeological sites outside Cairo, then sent to London by a British smuggler named Jonathan Tokeley-Parry. Tokeley-Parry, testifying for the federal government, said he and Schultz created a false "provenance" -- a history of ownership -- for the items. On some occasions, he said, they dipped forged labels for the items into tea and then baked them to make them look old.
Schultz's prosecution helped to define the rift in the art world when archaeologists and collectors took opposing positions on the point of law under which Schultz was prosecuted.
Making the right noises
The Archaeological Institute of America filed a friend of the court brief urging U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff to rule that the National Stolen Property Act applied in Schultz's case. Under that act, the items Schultz received could be classified as stolen because they were taken out of Egypt in violation of a 1983 U.S. law that declared all newly discovered artifacts national property. Schultz's own trade group, through lawyers who included Pearlstein, urged the court to grant Schultz a new trial, saying Rakoff should not have applied a 1979 ruling that allowed the stolen property act to be used in such cases where all that had been shown was that Schultz had handled objects that had been illegally exported from Egypt. The appeal is pending and Schultz, reached at his New York home, declined comment. The fake provenances created for the objects Schultz received could be a road map for investigators charged with keeping Iraqi war booty off the market. To pass any items off as legitimate, they would need to have been taken out of Mesopotamia before the 1983 law under which the United States recognized Iraq's claim to all artifacts on its soil as national property.
"You may see a lot of 'old collections' -- collections that predate the Iraq law," Waldbaum said. Demirjian doesn't expect anything to come to the United States. "Nobody will ever touch any of these pieces with a 10-foot pole," he said. Demirjian has been burned by stolen antiquities, purchased openly at public auction. "At one point, we owned a very beautiful mosaic with an image of Gorgon," he said. "Several months later, we received an inquiry from U.S. Customs that a Greek museum had been broken into, and this mosaic was stolen, among many other pieces." A potential new conflict between scientist and collector is now shaping up in the archaeological institute's proposal to create a database of all items now owned by museums and collectors -- a "baseline" by which governments can be tipped off when looted Iraqi antiquities appear on the market. Many collectors are disinclined to publicly declare what they own, sometimes from fear of being robbed. "It becomes very difficult to tell which objects have legitimate backgrounds and which don't," the institute's Gerstenblith said. "Right now, a lot of people are saying, 'Oh, we wouldn't touch this stuff,' " Waldbaum said. "They're making all the right noises."
Dennis Roddy can be reached at droddy@post-gazette.com or 412-263- 1965.
http://www.post-gazette.com/
Treasure trove of suspects in museum artifacts' theft
By Paul Watson, Los Angeles Times April 27, 2003
MOSUL, Iraq — The mystery of who looted Iraq's archeological treasures is rich with suspects and clues, such as the belly dancer who many believe became Saddam Hussein's mistress or the skeleton of a man who was thrown down a well almost 3,000 years ago. Taken together, Iraqi archeologists say, the evidence convinces them that the very people entrusted with protecting some of history's most significant relics are responsible for some of the worst plundering of ancient artifacts. Thieves left a long trail, with many twists and turns, which runs back at least to 1991, when Saddam's defeat in the Persian Gulf War reduced Iraq's antiquities to booty for his cronies to steal, the archeologists charge. "The gang started in the early 1990s, with the support of Saddam Hussein himself," said Junayd Fakhri, an archeologist who claims the 1990 discovery of a royal Assyrian treasure buried in a palace well, perhaps in 8th century B.C. Priceless relics of gold and ivory were uncovered with about 400 skeletons, one shackled in irons at the wrists and ankles, Fakhri said. He thinks it was an Assyrian king executed and buried with his retinue at Nimrud, 20 miles southeast of the northern city of Mosul.
It was an extraordinary find, and a controversial theory, one that international experts would normally study in great detail, examining the bones and the jewelry and vigorously debating their meaning. But Fakhri and several other Iraqi experts say Saddam's culture and information minister during the 1980s and early '90s, Latif Nusayyif Jasim, ordered about 160 pounds of Nimrud's golden treasures, including a queen's crown and jewelry, shipped to Baghdad. The treasure was stored in a vault at the national bank, which was looted along with the national museum in the early hours after Saddam's fall. "They can say the museum was looted and nobody knows the truth," Fakhri said. "The truth is they sold all the pieces." Similar but sketchy accounts of what Nimrud's Iraqi guards now call "The Killing Well" and its skeletons have seeped out of Iraq, and experts abroad don't yet know what to make of them, said John Russell, professor of art history and archeology at the Massachusetts College of Art. It will take the digging of an archeological detective to piece together the truth, Russell said in a telephone interview. Russell warned about the looting of Iraq's antiquities in 1995, when he noticed that a piece of Assyrian art for sale was from the Nineveh palace, near Mosul. As a member of a University of California, Berkeley team that visited Nineveh in 1989 and 1990, Russell took 900 photographs of the palace, built around 700 B.C. The pictures showed the object on sale had been broken off.
The next year, a lawyer contacted Russell to ask whether 10 Assyrian sculptures that a client wanted to buy were legal. They had been looted too, nine of them from the middle of separate wall slabs, by thieves who apparently knew what would bring the best price. At least one of the pieces was retrieved after a private collector in England tried to ship it to Israel, Russell said. It was returned to the Baghdad museum, where it apparently survived the recent looting, he added. But the world market for stolen antiquities is still very large, and supported by havens such as Switzerland, where the law favors buyers of stolen property, Russell said. "If you buy it and don't show it for five years, and claim you didn't know it was stolen, it's yours," he added. There wasn't much of a market for ancient Assyrian art until the 1990s, Russell said, because there wasn't any supply, apart from the pieces still held in private collections dating back to the European colonizers' 19th century plunder of the Middle East. An English private school inherited one of those sculptures and put it up for auction in 1994. It sold for $12 million, the highest price ever paid for an antiquity, Russell said. Two days after Iraqi troops surrendered Mosul this month, looters scared off the guards at the Nimrud museum and entered by breaking a small hole in the mud brick wall, said Shehab Ahmad, a policeman at the site. He bowed on one knee, and raised his right hand open to the sky to demonstrate the alabaster bas relief sculpture of a woman, about 3 feet high, that the thieves stole. "It would be impossible to sell legally, but it would bring a pretty high price," Russell said.
One of the guardians of Iraq's ancient culture, which dates to the birth of civilization, was Mansiyah Khazer. Saddam met her during a tour of Hatra, 55 miles southwest of Mosul, capital of the first Arab kingdom, said Mamoun Ghanim, a veteran archeologist at Mosul's museum. Ghanim and others say Khazer, a singer and belly dancer, stole the visiting president's heart. Saddam took Khazer as a lover and, to make her life more comfortable, appointed her general director of the Hatra ruins and museum in 1994, Fakhri said. The year after she took charge of Hatra, the United Nations education and cultural organization, UNESCO, put out a global alert warning art dealers and governments that artifacts were being looted from the ancient walled city. Khazer's brother was the top bodyguard to Hussein Kamel Majid, the president's son-in-law. Majid was also a trusted member of Saddam's inner circle until he defected to Jordan in 1995 and revealed Iraq's biological weapons program. Majid, who was executed after returning to Iraq in 1996, had numerous business interests in Jordan. Fakhri and other Iraqi archeologists believe his bodyguard used some of those contacts to smuggle looted relics from Hatra. "No ordinary man can take these things," said Hikmat Bashir Alaswad, a scientific researcher in the archeology department of Mosul's museum. "There is some organized gang behind it. It can only be someone important in the (deposed) regime." Alaswad has been too afraid to make that charge for a long time. He has devoted most of his more than 25 years as an archeologist to understanding and protecting Hatra, and he almost sacrificed his life for it. In 1994, he noticed that part of a stone statue, a woman's head more than 2 feet tall, was missing from the wall. Thieves had hacked it off sometime in the night. Alaswad quickly wrote a report and submitted it to his superiors. Then the police came and arrested him.
"They kept me in jail for 22 days and they tortured me," he said. "They handcuffed my arms behind my back and attached them to a chain hanging from a hook in the ceiling. Then they stood me on a table and suddenly kicked it out from under me. "I was flying in the air for about 10 minutes. When I fell down, both of my arms were paralyzed." Alaswad said it took a year of hospital treatment, with electrical stimulation, before he could move his arms properly, and even now they hang at odd angles. Three months ago, the statue that he discovered missing from Hatra was spotted in a London antiques shop and returned to Iraq with the help of Interpol, Alaswad said. Iraqi police apologized for their mistake, he added. But no one mentioned what the London dealer paid for the artifact.
"I paid the price," Alaswad said.
Ghanim says he worked closely with Khazer, was often a guest at her house and heard from a mutual friend that she admitted that her brother stole a statue of the Roman god Bacchus from Hatra in late 1994. "Saddam threatened her personally and ordered her to make her brother return the piece," Ghanim said. "But it is now in Britain." Ghanim thinks that the statue was smuggled out of Iraq by diplomatic pouch when Khazer traveled to Cuba with Jasim, the culture minister, and a cousin of Majid.
http://www.bouldernews.com/
Chalabi's men hand 'rescued' artefacts back to museum
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and James Morrison 27 April 2003
Dozens of tablets and statuettes believed to have been among those looted from the Iraqi National Museum were returned yesterday after being "seized" by followers of Ahmed Chalabi, the man the Pentagon is grooming to lead the country.
Members of his Free Iraqi Forces claimed to have recovered the three boxes of antiquities in an armed stand-off with a gang of men who were driving through the southern city of Kut en route to the Iranian border. News of the encounter came as the international row surrounding US handling of the mass looting of Iraq's cultural buildings escalated. While the US ambassador to Bahrain conceded that his country should have done more to protect Iraq's heritage, the US reconstruction team in Baghdad was briefing that much of the damage was caused by journalists "trampling" on objects dropped by looters. But sources in Baghdad claimed that looting was still continuing this weekend. As attention focused on protecting the main museum, thieves were said to have carried out a series of opportunist raids on the city's modern art gallery. The "rescued" artefacts, which included statuettes, busts and tablets bearing what appeared to be ancient script, were unloaded in Baghdad yesterday after being transported in three medium-sized tin trunks from Kut. They were seized at a road block two days earlier from a group of armed men travelling in a car towards Iran. Zaab Sethna, spokesman in Baghdad for Mr Chalabi, the controversial head of the Iraqi National Congress, told journalists that the items were intercepted by a squad of his Free Iraqi Forces armed with Kalashnikov rifles. He said the looters offered them a $5,000 (£3,150) bribe to keep quiet, but they refused to do so.
There was no independent corroboration of the incident, and Mr Sethna did not specify what happened to the looters afterwards. Sources suggested they were allowed to proceed with up to two crates of artefacts still on them, in return for handing over the bulk of the treasures. The involvement of Mr Chalabi's fighters in this instance of salvage is being treated with scepticism by his Iraqi opponents. One source said: "This is very much part of a kind of campaign to try to win over the Iraqis. The US likes Chalabi, but he is not popular among his own people." A similar public relations offensive appears to be being waged by the American reconstruction team. Its publicists spent yesterday trying to convince reporters that the scale of the looting had been exaggerated and that many ancient objects remained safe, having been pre-emptively hidden by Baghdad museum staff. In an interview with the Bahrain Tribune, an English-language daily, the US ambassador there, Ronald Neumann, said of the response to the threat to Iraq's museum collections: "I think we made a mistake. We did not think the Iraqis would go knock down their own heritage. Maybe we should have expected it." Asked whether the US had been too concerned about safeguarding oil reserves at the expense of its heritage, he added: "Yes, we worried about oil. If we had not protected the oil, what would we use to rebuild Iraq?" Yesterday, Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, criticised America's handling of the looting crisis. He also said that Donny George, the head of research at the Baghdad museum, would be attending an emergency summit of international curators in London on Tuesday, where he will detail the estimated scale of the devastation.
Among the most significant items believed to be missing are the Vase of Uruk and the Harp of Ur, dating from the rule of Sumerian kings between 3,000BC and 2,500BC, as well as the bronze Statue of Basitki from the Akkadian kingdom. Responding to reports that the US military is continuing to abdicate responsibility for protecting Iraq's heritage, he said: "The safety of the public collections of Iraq is clearly the responsibility of the force on the ground. There can be no question of that." Mr MacGregor confirmed that a "first aid team" from the British Museum would be dispatched to Iraq as soon as possible, buoyed by hundreds of thousands of pounds in private donations raised in "the past 72 hours". The Department of Culture, Media and Sport is also preparing to send a team of Arabic-speaking officials with in-depth knowledge of the country's history.
http://news.independent.co.uk/