Want to Ruin the Market for Looted Syrian Antiquities? Here's One Way

This new CBS report joins other undercover reporting that includes cellphone photos sent by traffickers to the reporter showing artifacts for sale.  Which suggests an interesting idea I haven't heard mentioned yet for how to fight the illicit trade in such artifacts: gather such images, just as the CBS team did, and then post them on the internet, identifying them as illicit and effectively rendering the artifacts unsaleable -- at least unsaleable to what Matthew Bogdanos in the report names as "the four destination points of New York, London, Paris and Tokyo" (Bogdanos for reasons I don't understand leaves out the Gulf States, certainly a more likely destination for ISIS-looted artifacts than Tokyo).

There are some downsides to consider. Undercover work costs money -- though for this nowhere near the amount it costs to mount international investigations of smuggling networks (to say nothing of what we are spending to remotely monitor the ongoing looting of sites), since only one node is being accessed.  This would not be risk-free work -- no undercover work is ever risk free. Buyers would have to rotate and be replaced to avoid detection and harm. And if it were to be undertaken, those posing as foreign buyers would almost certainly need to work with the Turkish or Lebanese  police, which might prove difficult. But unlike seizures of artifacts coming into the US or UK or France, which constitute a loss of profit for the dealers that they can and do simply pass on to buyers as a cost of doing business, the immediate losers in the case of looted artifacts posted to the internet would be the smugglers, who have no way to pass on the cost. The passing on of images via cellphone photos would become a thing of the past pretty quickly. (Many smugglers have already turned to video-streaming or snapchat-like image sharing to try to leave no record on the phones or computers of complicit buyers, but undercover buyers could easily capture those images.) [UPDATE 10/17: the CBS news producer speaking at the Met says the fellow who sent her the cellphone photos is still sending her photos, so he obviously wasn't much deterred -- though it would be interesting to see what happened if CBS were to now post those photos!]


This would be a great program for UNESCO in coordination with INTERPOL, the FBI, the Blue Shield, and the carabinieri to undertake. [For reasons I hope are evident, it would not be something to be done by academics as part of a research project.] It might be sponsored by the Getty and dealers who ought to prefer this kind of exposure to the gotcha they've experienced from the use of the Medici archive to embarrass them. Maybe, instead of yet another meeting bewailing the loss of heritage, it would make sense to spend that money on some undercover work.

ADDENDUM: An interesting new article by Sam Hardy studying direct-to-buyer reports notes that

 After the publication of photographs of the royal graves at Copan in Honduras (Stuart, 1997), the site was looted (Agurcia Fasquelle, 1998) in a way that indicated collectors had effectively used National Geographic as a sales catalogue. Likewise, a hieroglyphic text and carving of a bound captive were extracted from one 1,300-year-old stela, and a single sceptre was extracted from another such stela, at Dos Pilas (Luke, 2005). Without perpetrators’ use of publicly accessible documents to identify the targets, the fact that these thefts were commissioned would have remained unknown.

So at least in some cases, the existence of publicly accessible images did not deter buyers. But these were objects in situ not yet looted, and so not brought to the attention of law enforcement as pieces for which to be on the lookout.

UNSCR 2199 (2015): How Useful is it?

Given the continued references to UNSCR 2199 as a strong international response to the cultural heritage bit of the disaster now unfolding in Syria and Iraq, it is worth noting that the resolution contains only three action items regarding heritage, and that the resolution's only concrete action is the following:

17. Reaffirms its decision in paragraph 7 of resolution 1483 (2003) and decides that all Member States shall take appropriate steps to prevent the trade in Iraqi and Syrian cultural property and other items of archaeological, historical, cultural, rare scientific, and religious importance illegally removed from Iraq since 6 August 1990 and from Syria since 15 March 2011, including by prohibiting cross-border trade in such items, thereby allowing for their eventual safe return to the Iraqi and Syrian people and calls upon the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, Interpol, and other international organizations, as appropriate, to assist in the implementation of this paragraph.

In other words, nothing specific beyond what has already been affirmed. What the "appropriate steps" are is left to the imagination. Contrast the very specific steps described in the fifteen action items dealing with the oil trade, and the weakness of this resolution with regard to the trade in archaeological material becomes even clearer. 

I wrote a book about the failures of policy that led to the looting of the Iraq Museum and of Iraq's archaeological sites following the invasion of Iraq. The advent of ISIL poses a much more difficult problem, to be sure, than the American invasion did. And UNESCO, Interpol and other international organizations are doing their best to respond to the call with the very limited means at their disposal. But the lack of more robust policy measures in UNSCR 2199 is a failure that needs to be studied and learned from.

If a reporter can go undercover and reveal a smuggling network, why aren't the police and UNESCO doing so?

Much of interest in this story. If the Lagash relief is in fact genuine, and was dug around 2006 in southern Iraq, its appearance for sale on the Turkish border in 2015 reminds us that massive looting occurred between 2003 and 2008 during the US occupation. It also reminds us that dealers are willing to stockpile looted artifacts, especially valuable but "hot" ones, for very long periods until a buyer can be found. And it shows that the networks connecting smugglers with buyers are not independent chains but involve trading between middlemen -- a reasonable structure given the nature of the demand (one doesn't want to miss the chance to take advantage of the intermittent appearance of a possible high-end buyer).

But the key take-home point is not made so much as illustrated by the reporter's having to go undercover in order to get the story, but being able to do so without much difficulty or worry. That shows that it is not hard to get to those dealing, but that the way to get to them is via locally-originated but sometimes multi-nationally pursued sting operations -- not, in other words, via high-profile but rare seizures by customs agents, nor the kind of arms-length work INTERPOL and UNESCO normally do. Antiquities smuggling networks are fluid, evolving, and adjustable, and this requires fluid and adjustable counter-operations.

UNESCO does appear to be taking steps in the right direction, including establishing the "crack team" mentioned but not detailed in the article. Presumably it comes out of these meetings held last November and includes the carabinieri, who actually do the kind of work needed. But there have been no major take-downs of international networks since then, despite the ease with which the reporter was able to discover so much. Is the crack team involved in operations, or merely trainings?

Two Cheers for Interdiction and Restitution!

A good post from Tess Davis following up on the Huffington Post piece she did with Mark Vlasic. I'd only add that while it is indeed laudable that the FBI et. al. are having some success nabbing individuals who are smuggling already looted artifacts, this doesn't really address the fundamental problem of how to prevent looting going forward, since the demand is global and effective interdiction difficult. Interdiction and restitution on a country-by-country basis, assisted by the always-understaffed INTERPOL, are necessary but not sufficient. And while it would be thrilling if the world could be persuaded to stand together and institute -- not to mention enforce -- a global ban on trade in antiquities, that is not going to happen. The real answer has to lie in providing more and better resources to those who are trying to guard and protect their own archaeological sites.

There is, in fact, some reason to worry about the otherwise happy-making emphasis on high-profile seizures and restitution.  Catching a few dealers here and giving stuff back might well be a policy substitute rather than a complement to developing policies that would actually protect the sites themselves.  And there's good reason to believe that our government might prefer seizure and restitution to site protection support. That's because, as Davis and Vlasic note, restitution, with its high-profile newsworthiness, is a handy tool for mending diplomatic fences, much sexier than, say, giving some remote sensing devices to the Cambodian antiquities police. Just as in Iraq, where Babylon was restored while thousands of sites were left unprotected, so more generally, splashy seizures may just mystify and obscure negligence about the real and more intractable issue, which is how to keep the looters from reducing sites to rubble in the first place.

ICE on a roll

This story is interesting on several counts, including the news that the smuggler was apparently moving artifacts not just from the Dominican Republic but also from Mexico. Equally interesting and heartening is the news that ICE is working well with INTERPOL and other countries to interdict illicit imports. (On the other hand, checking a shipment marked as containing artifacts is not exactly rocket science, and leads one to wonder why the importer did not try to hide the artifacts somehow.)

Cairo Museum Looting: A Wake-Up Call to Heritage Protection Organizations

Bad, but it could have been much, much worse. Photos here and here and here (thanks to Chuck Jones).


What is disconcerting is that it could have happened at all, given the fate of the Iraq Museum. One would have expected that Zahi Hawass would have anticipated some such eventuality and that the museum would have had the wherewithal to lock itself down. That does not appear to have been the case. 


This should be a wake up call. Right now, the national and international agencies and NGOs who make it their business to save our vanishing heritage -- the Smithsonian, the State Department's Bureau of Economic and Cultural Affairs, UNESCO's World Heritage Centre, INTERPOL, ICCROM, ICOM, AAMD, AAM, AIA, Blue Shield, World Monument Fund, Global Heritage Fund, World Heritage Foundation, the Getty, etc. etc. -- should be on the phone to museum officials in all countries where there is the chance of unrest, asking them if they have in place a plan to secure their buildings and holdings, and offering immediate assistance to create and/or beef up these plans.