More from Wikileaks on Looted Antiquities Recovered in Operations Against Insurgents

Below are a few more instances I've been able to cull from WarLogs describing antiquities being found together with weapons. To put these incidents in some perspective, it should be noted that there are 1020 documents in the WarLogs that mention smuggling (and many of these are duplicate reports, so the actual number of anti-smuggling operations is probably closer to 500); that is out of a total of almost 392,000 total reports posted to WarLogs.  

The total number of reports in which antiquities are reported found together with weapons, then, is very low, in the neighborhood of 1-2% (only 6 or so out of something like 500 smuggling incidents).  It is possible that antiquities might have been found but not reported because they were not considered important enough to mention, but there is no way to know this. 

It is also worth noting that the WarLogs do not contain all reports made during the war; missing are reports of smuggling of any kind before 1/1/2004. The major looting shown by Elizabeth Stone to have occurred in 2003 would therefore not register at all on WarLogs if those antiquities were being smuggled out before 2004. 

The incidents that we do have, while few in number, are enough to make clear that while most smugglers did not smuggle antiquities along with RPGs, rockets, body armor, and mortars, some did. 

 

In An Nasiriyah (south part) started a search op. In order to contrast the illegal detention of weapons and %%% carried out by MSU/Military Police joint with local police. The followings (in good conditions) have

2004-10-28 23:40:00

Expand acronyms:  Take care; definitions may be wrong.

In An Nasiriyah (south part) started a search op. In order to contrast the illegal detention of weapons and %%% carried out by MSU/Military Police joint with local police. The followings (in good conditions) have been impounded by local police: 3 2x automatic rifle; 3 4x %%%; 3 4x air rifles; 3 3x %%% 1x ak %%% rifles; 3 1x %%% rifle; 3 2x pattern rifles; 3 1x stern rifle; 3 1x gun; 3 5x hand grenades; 320x electric detonators; 3 10x gun magazine; 3 33x ak %%% magazines; 3 2x %%% rocket for rpg; 3Various calibre %%%. An IZ has also been arrested by local police for illegal detention of weapons and %%%. The INFO-OPS, which started yesterday, carried out by Task force MSU joint with provincial archaeological local guard in , , %%% and %%% (located north west of ( %%%)) ended this morning. The op. Aim was to oppose and repress the illegal trade of archaeological stolen finds in %%% province. As result of the op. several vases, statues and tools dated %%% bc. All finds were given to archaeological authority of %%%.

THREAT WARNING: POSS Attack ON (: %%% DEC %%%)

2005-12-28 00:22:00

Expand acronyms:  Take care; definitions may be wrong.

%%%. AS OF LATE %%%, AN UNIDENTIFIED GROUP REPORTEDLY WAS PLANNING AN ATTACKUSING EIGHT %%% ROCKETS ON THE %%% NEAR AN NASIRIYAH FOR . (%%% COMMENT: THE EXACT TIMING AND ATTACK PLAN DETAILS WERE NOT KNOWN.) THE EIGHT %%% ROCKETSWERE PURCHASED BY (()) (()) %%% STORED ON '%%% FARM. '%%% FARM WAS LOCATED IN %%% VILLAGE, NEAR THE . %%% ALLEGEDLY WAS AFFILIATED WITH %%%/ANTIQUITIES IN AN NASIRIYAH. (()) (%%%), A FORMER MILITARY OFFICER TRAINED IN ARTILLERY, %%% WOULD HANDLE LAUNCHING THE ROCKETS FROM %%% VILLAGE.



%%%. THE ALLEGED PLAN FURTHER SPECIFIED THAT WITHIN TWO TO THREE HOURS AFTER ATTACKING THE %%%, THE OFFICE OF THE MARTYR %%% (OMS) OFFICE IN AN NASIRIYAH WOULD BE ATTACKED BY THE SAME GROUP. THE GROUP REPORTEDLY HOPED TO MAKE ITAPPEAR THE %%% AT %%% HAD RETALIATED AGAINST THE OMS IN AN EFFORT TO GAIN %%%'A SYMPATHY FOR '%%% GROUP.

RAID BY /%%% IA IN BAGHDAD(ZONE ): %%% DET, %%% INJ/DAMAGE

2005-06-03 11:14:00

Expand acronyms:  Take care; definitions may be wrong.

AT 1714D, /%%% IA CONDUCTED A RAID TO KILL OR DETAIN AIF %%%. RESULTS OF RAID: 5X DETAINEES, STOLEN %%% DEVICES, MONEY MAKING MACHINES, AND 31X ARTIFACTSRECOVERED. ARTIFACTS WERE STOLEN FROM THE BAGHDAD MUSEUM. NO Coalition ForcesINJ/DAM

(FRIENDLY ACTION) DETAIN Report - : %%% UE DET

2009-07-08 19:00:00

Expand acronyms:  Take care; definitions may be wrong.

***%%% NATION REPORT***
****CONFIRMED BY Coalition Forces*****
*****LATE REPORT*****
*EXCEPTIONAL INFORMATION*

MND-%%% EVENT (%%%)

UNIT: /%%% ABN

WHO: - %%%

WHAT: CACHE

WHEN: %%%

WHERE:

: %%%

CLOSEST ISF/SoI Check Point(%%%):
Check Point NUMBER:
UNIT:
GRID LOCATION:
DISTANCE AND DIRECTION:

TIMELINE:
: -%%% CONDUCTED A UNILATERAL %%% DRIVEN RAID TO CAPTURE -%%%. SUSPECT WAS DETAINED WITH 6X GUARDIAN DEVICES IN HIS HOME AND 2X ARTIFACTS. INFORMATION WASGATHERED THROUGH THE FLEXIBLE MAINTENANCE WORKER PROGRAM IN %%%. HHC/-%%% AND -- %%% REFINED THE INFORMATION FROM THE %%% AND PASSED TO HIGHER HQ FOR ABrigade LEVEL OPERATION. %%% RECEIVED PERMISSION TO ENTER %%% CITY FROM MAJOR GENERAL , %%% ISF PARTNERSHIP AND COORDINATION. THE SYSTEMS WERE IN Coalition ForcesHANDS BY %%%.


CACHE ROLL-UP:
%%% X ENEMY DETAINED
2X GUARDIAN SYSTEMS
2X ARTIFACTS
1X PISTOL
1X BODY ARMOR VEST

GUARDIAN TRANSMITTER SERIAL NUMBERS:

%%% BAND:
%%% BAND:
%%% BAND:
%%% BAND:
%%% BAND:
%%% BAND: %%%


Explosive Ordnance Disposal [bomb defuser] ASSESSMENT: %%%/A


S2 ASSESSMENT:
%%% AN Facility protection service GUARD AT BIAP WHO HAS PRIOR REPORTING OF BEING CORRUPT AND A MEMBER OF %%%. WE BELIEVE %%% GUARDIAN SYSTEMS FROM ANOTHER INDIVIDUAL WHO WAS GOING TO USE %%% THE DEVICES TO SOMEONE IN %%%. FURTHER TQ AND INTERROGATION OF %%% THE OTHER MEMBERS INVOLVED WITH THE THEFT OF THIS SENSITIVE EQUIPMENT.

SUMMARY:
%%% X CACHE
%%% X ARREST
%%% X INJ
%%% X DMG


//CLOSED// %%%

(FRIENDLY ACTION) RAID Report %%% AD DIN OPS/ : %%% UE DET

2008-07-03 15:00:00

Expand acronyms:  Take care; definitions may be wrong.

THE ISF RAIDED THE RESIDENTIAL COMPLEX IN %%% AREA, '%%% HOUSE WAS RAIDED AND THEY FOUND SOME ANTIQUES, THEY ALSO CAPTURED THE FOLLOWING :




%%%
AND THE ALSO SEIZED ONE MILLION ID AND .%%%

(FRIENDLY ACTION) CACHE FOUND/CLEARED Report KARBALA OPS/ : %%% INJ/DAM

2008-11-02 04:45:00

Expand acronyms:  Take care; definitions may be wrong.

THE SECURITY FROM THE ESTABLISHMENTS PROTECTION AND THE ANTIQUITIES PROTECTION FOUND AND CLEARED:
- 16X 60MM MORTAR ROUNDS
- 15X CONTAINERS OF %%%.5MM ROUNDS FOR MACHINE GUN
- 1X 122MM %%% ROUND
- 3X %%% PROPELLING CHARGES
- 1X 120MM MORTAR ROUND

Italy gets 2.5 million visitors per year to Pompei but can't afford to prevent gladiatorial house from collapsing

To be fair, Pompei is a gigantic site, but still this is the latest sad result of a long-festering problem of mismanagement.

Wikileaks Provides Evidence Linking Illicit Iraqi Antiquities to Weapons Sales

More proof, on top of what Matthew Bogdanos has reported, that looted antiquities were part of the revenue stream for the same folks that were/are supplying weapons to insurgents in Iraq:

(FRIENDLY ACTION) RAID RPT : ___ INJ/DAM

2007-12-07 00:00:00

Expand acronyms: Take care; definitions may be wrong.

A FORCE FROM THE NATIONAL SECURITY ALONG WITH A FORCE FROM THE CRIMINAL ___ ONE OF THE HOUSES AFTER RECEIVING SOME TIPS THAT THEIR IS SOME ILLEGAL ___ ( SELLING WEAPONS AND ANTIQUES) THE HOUSE LOCATED AT ___ KUT - BAGHDAD ___ ROAD THEY ALSO FOUND A , ___ ,FOUR MORTAR , AND TWO GRENADES FOR ATTACKS.THEY ALSO CAPTURED ___ SUSPECTS.

Global Heritage Fund -- new report, blog, forum

The Global Heritage Fund is rolling out a report, a new blog, and a forum this week, all of which should be of interest to readers of this blog (disclosure: I was on the editorial committee for the report):


Report: Sunday, GHF released Saving Our Vanishing Heritage: Safeguarding Endangered Cultural Heritage Sites in the Developing World, which details the state of conservation for the planet’s most significant and endangered cultural sites over the past decade. This includes the 12 “on the verge” and an estimate about the potential $100 billion per year opportunity if global heritage sites are preserved.
http://www.globalheritagefund.org/vanishing


Forum: GHF is hosting experts and funders from around the world to discuss this very topic at Stanford on Oct 19. Nicholas Kristof is the keynote. http://www.globalheritagefund.org/forum.html
HuffPost: GHF Executive Director has this post on HuffingtonPost: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-morgan/as-global-heritage-sites-_b_764570.html
New GHF blogs: Updates and news on endangered sites around the world, and the work attempting to save them. http://www.globalheritagefund.org/onthewire

Le Monde report on Iraq National Museum

A new article in Le Monde retraces mostly already covered ground, but does shed a little additional light on the Iraq National Museum's pathetically underfunded and understaffed initiative to recover its stolen antiquities:

Au premier étage, nous montons voir Abbas K. Abbas, patron du département de recherche des antiquités disparues. Le sympathique quinquagénaire moustachu ne cache pas son désarroi. Il est chargé de scanner la presse mondiale et le maximum de catalogues des salles d'enchères pour essayer de repérer les ventes d'objets volés dans son pays. Pour effectuer ce travail de titan, il a trois employés (un seul lit l'anglais), deux ordinateurs antédiluviens et "pas de budget" pour se rendre sur le lieu d'une vente suspecte.

The Iraqi government should be funding this (as they should be funding the antiquities police), of course, and it is just one more sign of the government's negligence, incompetence, or perhaps corruption with regard to its own cultural patrimony. But in the case of the museum, the largest source of funding in the past few years was not the Iraqi government but the Bush administration's last-minute $17 million. Presumably those delivering the money were also helping the museum officials figure out how to use it best. One can only wonder why it is that so little of that funding was allocated to Abbas' department that he cannot afford even up-to-date computers, much less to fly to London or New York to examine artifacts that may be showing up at Christie's or Sotheby's. 

New al Jazeera Report from Iraq National Museum

http://www.headlinertube.com/?p=6292

Who Stole the Iraqi Torah, and How Did It Get Out of Iraq in the Middle of an Invasion?

One worth watching. This investigation (who, exactly, in the US is going to do the investigation is an important question) may yield some interesting insights into what was going on behind the scenes before and during the invasion to facilitate the taking of the scroll by US troops (or other authorized personnel) during a period when, we are told by defenders of the military, there were not enough troops to secure the Iraq National Museum.

Crime-scene training helps protect artifacts, archaeological sites

Crime-scene training helps protect artifacts, archaeological sites

We often think of archaeological site looting as a problem plaguing other countries that are too poor to afford to protect their sites, or lacking in the kind of cultural awareness that makes us superior to the less civilized peoples of the world. As this article makes clear, though, sites in America are being looted and we spend almost nothing to protect them. Here's the money quote from the article:

Vance, who traveled across the country for the session, said his job is hindered by a lack of manpower; he and two other officers are responsible for watching over about 3 million acres.

U.S. Returns Iraqi Artifacts Without Thinking Much About Who Takes Them

Yet one more piece of evidence, if that were required, that the State Department dropped the ball completely by focusing its efforts on restoring the museum rather than on helping the Iraqis get their cultural policy infrastructure set up properly:

While Iraqi officials celebrated the repatriation of what they called invaluable relics — “the return of Iraq’s heritage to our house,” as the state minister of tourism and antiquities, Qahtan al-Jibouri, put it — the fate of those previously returned raised questions about the country’s readiness to preserve and protect its own treasures.

Appearing at a ceremony displaying the artifacts at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Iraq’s ambassador to the United States, Samir Sumaidaie, pointedly said a previous shipment of antiquities had been returned to Iraq last year aboard an American military aircraft authorized by Gen. David H. Petraeus, only to end up missing.

“They went to the prime minister’s office, and that was the last time they were seen,” said Mr. Sumaidaie, who has worked fervently with American law enforcement officials in recent years to track down loot that had found its way into the United States.

It was not immediately clear what happened, and Mr. Sumaidaie said he had tried and failed to find out. He did not directly accuse Mr. Maliki’s government of malfeasance, but he expressed frustration that the efforts to repatriate works of art and antiquities had resulted in such confusion and mystery.

Ali al-Mousawi, a government spokesman, demanded that the American government account for the artifacts since an American military aircraft delivered them. “We didn’t receive anything,” he said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Jibouri, one of Mr. Maliki’s advisers, said that if the relics were not somewhere in the prime minister’s custody, then they would probably be with the Ministry of Culture, which oversees the country’s museums. Its spokesman declined to comment.

Amira Edan, the director of the National Museum, said none of the objects had been returned to her collection, which is where, she said, they all belonged.

How do earrings from one of the most spectacular archaeological finds of the 20th c. end up on the auction block at Christie's?

The story in yesterday's papers about the return of artifacts to Iraq has more facets than the Hope Diamond. One is noted in Jane Arraf's Christian Science Monitor story:

The earrings were found after they offered for sale at auction at Christie’s in New York last December. The catalog listed them as having been acquired by the owner before 1969, the year before a UNESCO convention made it more difficult to trade in antiquities.

The earrings were recognized by Iraqi archaeologists as part of the treasures of Nimrud, excavated in 1989 when an Iraqi team discovered a royal tomb overlooked by previous British excavations. They were believed stolen from the Baghdad Museum before the collection was put into safekeeping in bank vaults before the 1991 war with the US over Mr. Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

Christie’s, which had put opening bids at $45,000 to $65,000 for the earrings, withdrew them after the Iraq Embassy launched a formal claim.

As Arraf notes, the Nimrud treasures are "considered one of the most spectacular finds of the 20th century, on a scale of the gold found in King Tut’s tomb." One would think such objects would be easily recognized by experts. And yet, somehow, they appear at auction at Christie's with a phony provenance. Either Christie's authenticators are incompetent, or Christie's is simply leaving the task of spotting illegitimate antiquities to the archaeologists. Either way, it is disgraceful.

Frank Kermode: a remembrance

Frank Kermode was a gentle, kindly, slightly sad mentor-figure for me and other grad students at Columbia in the early 1980s. By then he was already turning against theory, at a moment when post-structuralism was beginning to flower into what became cultural studies. He was averse to intellectual hurlyburly. In a seminar attended, if memory serves me right, by (among lots of other really smart people) Max Rudin (now the publisher of Library of America) and future documentary-maker Ric Burns, Kermode appeared taken aback to hear the argument made by one of us that Heidegger's Origin of the Work of Art, assigned for the class, was deeply compromised by Nazism, as Meyer Schapiro had shown. But he was a true, pure man of letters. I remember walking through campus with him on the way to class. I told him I was writing an article on the great nineteenth-century French critic Sainte-Beuve, and Kermode said, with an air of ineffable pathos, he had memorized a line from one of Sainte-Beuve's diaries:"De jour en jour je suis devenu de plus en plus triste." A real smoothie, he also taught me a big lesson at what might have been my first panel presentation, something cooked up at Columbia. I had slaved over my five minute talk, of course. Kermode was to speak second, before me, and he had his paper folded in his hand. When it was his turn to speak he moved to the lectern, unfolded the paper, and spoke eloquently, about what I cannot recall. How am I going to follow that, I thought despairingly. As Kermode sat down, I glanced over at the pages he had been reading from. They were blank.

Donny George speaks out on the evacuation of the Kuwait Museum in 1991

Donny George released a statement, via Looting Matters, detailing what happened to the contents of the Kuwait Museum during the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. his account is a fuller version of what he described to me when I interviewed him for my book, The Rape of Mesopotamia, and is corroborated in the following sources, noted in the footnotes to that book: Jonathan M. Bloom and Lark Ellen Gould, “Patient Restoration: The Kuwait National Museum,” Saudi Aramco World, September/October 2000, http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200005/patient.restoration-the.kuwait.national.museum.htm. Kirsty Norman, “The Invasion of Kuwait, and the Subsequent Recovery of its National Museum: A Conservator’s View,” Museum Management and Curatorship 16, no. 2 (1997): 180-191; Selma Al-Radi, “War and Cultural Heritage: Lessons from Lebanon, Kuwait and Iraq” (lecture, Cultural Emergency Response, Prinsenhof Museum, Delft, The Netherlands, September 26, 2003), De Kracht Van Cultuur, October 2003, cached text of Web site retrieved by Google, July 25, 2007, http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:U9M2HK2MjlYJ:www.powerofculture.nl/nl/artikelen/war_and_cultural_heritage.html (accessed September 21, 2007); and, authoritatively, McGuire Gibson and Augusta McMahon, Lost Heritage: Antiquities Stolen from Iraq's Regional Museums, fasc. 1 (Chicago: American Association for Research in Baghdad, 1992). See also Gibson's 1991-92 Annual Report on the Nippur Expedition.

Why is it necessary to provide these references? Because media misreporting back in the 1990s, probably encouraged by supporters of Kuwait, mixed up the real and inexcusable looting of private Kuwaiti collections with the entirely legal and indeed required removal of the holdings of Kuwait's National Museum by heritage professionals from Iraq. This misreporting has a long tail.

One more reason why monitoring archaeological sites aerially is worth doing

News from Italy that a large Roman-era settlement has been discovered. Nothing special about that, except that according to the report this discovery was made by analyzing aerial photos taken during a helicopter reconnaissance flight conducted by the carabinieri and officials from the Italian Ministry of Culture's archaeological service as part of their regular monitoring of archaeological sites for possible looting.

Iraqi Official Says Thousands Of Artifacts Recovered

File this under "Get out there and tell them we're doing something": following the damning front-page New York Times story of a few weeks ago pointing out that his government has funded only 100 or so of the many thousands of antiquities police needed and that as a result site looting is surging, Iraq's Tourism and Antiquities Minister announces that more than 36,000 ancient artifacts have been recovered since 2003. Radio Free Europe's crack reporter apparently failed to ask how many of these were recovered in-country (the figure seems to refer only to artifacts returned by other countries), or whether the rate of seizures abroad has increased or decreased recently, or what the Iraqi response is to the Times story, or whether the government there has any plans to fund more antiquities police.