Cuno: partage is the solution to antiquities at risk

As one might have expected, James Cuno uses the disasters unfolding now in Iraq to beat the drum once again for restoring the old system of partage. He is right, of course, to say that we should be thankful that even though ISIS destroyed the Assyrian statues in the Mosul Museum and at Nineveh some statues remain safe in museums inaccessible to ISIS' sledgehammers. And surely he is also correct to argue that the most prudent policy for protecting cultural heritage from disasters is to distribute them around the world rather than concentrating them in one place.

The problem with partage as a solution is (at least) three-fold:
a) it ignores other ways in which antiquities might be -- and indeed are being -- dispersed, ways that would not be permanent (i.e., temporary transfers to safer countries as precautionary measures, as Iran is now offering to do, or long-term exchanges), and that would be much more palatable to countries that wish to retain ownership of cultural property they deem part of their cultural patrimony.

b) it does nothing to protect the razing of archaeological sites and the smashing of non-portable antiquities.

c) it does nothing to stop the looting of portable antiquities from museums or the market-driven digging-up of archaeological sites by looters. 

b) and c) would be less troubling if we were not now in the middle of a terrible crisis in which major sites are reportedly being looted and bulldozed. Failing to address those issues and fixating instead on a change in policy that even if enacted now would have zero impact on either b) or c) is insensitive.

It is fine to call for partage as one among several possible long-term solutions based on the principle of dispersion-for-safety's-sake. But what Cuno should also be doing is offering or at least calling for solutions to the immediate problems of stopping the razing of sites and the looting of both sites and museums, and putting some of the Getty's considerable resources into getting the job done.
 

Gen. Dempsey willing to "consider" acting to stop ISIS attacks on archaeological sites

 Gen. Dempsey opens the door a crack to possible action.

Protecting archaeological sites will always come low on the priority list, unless either the military is told it must act (hello, Obama, hello?) or there is a good military reason. In most instances there won't be a good military reason. In the case of ISIS riding gangs of zealots out far into the deserts on bulldozers and excavators that we are shooting at elsewhere, however, there is clearly a military benefit to be gained. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. So it is hard to see why Gen. Dempsey is only willing to consider the idea of going after them, instead of doing so.

But generals will do what they are told. So one can only conclude that Obama and Kerry (who gave a fine speech at the Metropolitan Museum on the topic, empty words it seems) haven't put the pressure on. Which is disgraceful.

A caveat about reports of site razings

We still have no imagery of the bulldozing of Nimrud, or Hatra, or Dur Sharrukin, as reported by Iraqi heritage officials, and hence no confirmation of how extensive the damage is (or even whether that damage has actually occurred). Reputable media outlets from CNN to the New York Times to NPR have spread the stories, and the documented iconoclasm at the Mosul Museum and Nineveh certainly lends them credibility. But without optical proof, we can't be certain.  

Should these sites turn out to be more or less intact after all, the error will no doubt be seized upon by the same looting deniers who declared no harm had been done at the Iraq Museum in 2003 because first reports mistakenly said the museum had been completely looted and it later turned out that "only" 15,000 artifacts were stolen, and who later pointed to the absence of looting on 8 sites as proof that there was no looting to speak of at the thousands of other sites in Iraq.

We should know the truth soon enough, once the site monitoring groups at Penn and the AAAS get done looking at the latest satellite imagery. But the very fact that we don't know what the facts are, and that we have to wait days to get them, is more important than whatever the facts turn out to be. For it is a sign that the US military is not taking seriously the need to prevent ISIS from getting to major sites. Doing so would have meant setting up a realtime monitoring regime covering not just the sites but the roads leading to the sites, so that bulldozers and trucks heading out to a site would be spotted, targeted and destroyed on the way to, not from, the sites. No such realtime monitoring system exists, it seems. That's a big problem. The Penn Cultural Heritage Center and AAAS projects are crucial for tracking the long-term effect of clandestine digging and must continue to be supported, but they were not designed for the quick turnaround needed to deal with this particular challenge. That's the military's job.

So if it does turn out that Hatra and Dur Sharrukin are not yet victims of bulldozing or dynamiting, we should thank God for our good luck, consider this a second wake-up call after the televised ISIS iconoclasm at Nineveh, and redouble our effort to force the military to step up with an operational plan -- realtime monitoring plus operational capacity to neutralize the bulldozers before and not after they get to the site -- before what happened at Nineveh is repeated.

Sorry, not my table: US military dodges responsibility to do something about site destruction in Iraq

This from the US News and World Report:

“Our forces in Iraq are there to advise and assist Iraqis,” a defense official tells U.S. News on the condition of anonymity. “We have no commanders there who are responsible for sectors on the ground.”

A spokesman for the Combined Joint Task Force, or CJTF, overseeing the operation confirmed the limitations on how it can help stem the Islamic State group’s destructive acts.

“The CJTF is taking these reports very seriously. Daesh actions such as this underscore the necessity to defeat Daesh. The CJTF and our partners on the ground are committed to ending the atrocities committed by Daesh,” the spokesman says, responding to questions by email from a U.S. military base in Kuwait.

“Stopping smuggling, money laundering and other criminal activities committed by Daesh are also part of the broader coalition effort, but it is not under the auspices of CJTF.”

 Always nice to hear that reports are being taken seriously. That makes everyone feel so much better. But the question is whether the US has commanders who order airstrikes against targets on the ground, including bulldozers, backhoes, and other excavating equipment being used to raze sites. The answer is, obviously, yes. Here's a report from yesterday:

In Iraq, two air strikes near Al Huwijah destroyed six excavators and hit a tactical unit. Near Fallujah, four strikes hit two tactical units, a fighting position and destroyed three vehicles. Other strikes near Haditha, Kirkuk and Mosul also struck tactical units, fighting positions, excavators, vehicles and other targets.

 "Excavators" are being hit. Just not the excavators headed for archaeological sites. 

That the same article in which the CJTF demurs also includes another rousing statement from Secretary of State Kerry affirming our deep regard for cultural heritage only adds insult to injury. The Obama administration needs to crack some heads, or they will be as culpable of negligence as the military.

What one military manual says about site protection

From ATP 3-39.30, "Security and Mobility Support", Oct. 2014:

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Protect Key Personnel and Facilities 1-47. When required, military forces may extend protection and support to key civilian personnel to ensure their continued contribution to the overall operation. In the interest of transparency, military forces specifically request and carefully negotiate this protection. Similarly, the long-term success of any intervention often relies on the ability of external actors to protect and maintain critical infrastructure until the HN can resume that responsibility. Protection of key facilities may be either an immediate or long-term requirement. The list of essential tasks may include an initial response and transformation, described as follows:

 l An initial response in which military forces—

            n Protect government-sponsored civilian reconstruction and stabilization personnel. n Protect contractor and civilian reconstruction and stabilization personnel and resources. n Provide emergency logistic support, as required. n Protect and secure places of religious worship and cultural sites. n Protect and secure critical infrastructure, natural resources, civil registries, and property ownership documents. n Protect and secure strategically important institutions (such as government buildings; medical treatment facilities and public health infrastructure; the central bank, national treasury, and integral commercial banks; museums; and religious sites). n Protect and secure military depots, equipment, ammunition dumps, and means of communications. n Identify, secure, protect, and coordinate disposition for stockpiles of munitions and CBRN materiel and precursors, facilities, and adversaries with technical expertise. l A transformation in which military forces build HN capacity to protect— n Civilian reconstruction and stabilization personnel. n Public infrastructure and institutions. n Military infrastructure.

 This doesn't specifically call for airstrikes, and it is troubling that the document is tasking site protection to the Army military police, whose capacity to take active measures may be limited. But someone in the military chain of command should have been on top of the threat that ISIS posed to archaeological sites. That no action was taken indicates negligence.

A trip down (bad) memory lane: recommendations from 2006 for military action to protect archaeological sites

Back in 2006, in response to the disastrous looting of Iraq's national museum and the consequent untrammeled looting of sites around the country over a period of years during and following the American occupation, I pulled together experts from the military, the Pentagon, the heritage conservation community, and the museum world to see if we could figure out what had gone wrong and develop some recommendations for steps that could be taken to do better in the future. We gathered our findings and recommendations in a published volume, Antiquities Under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection after the Iraq War. A number of the recommendations were in fact adopted.

I thought I'd look back at the list of recommendations to see if any of them anticipated the need to deal with the problem we are seeing today at Nimrud and it appears Hatra. The answer (pp. 284-5) is yes:

During any transitional period, in the likely event that the antiquities ministry is unable to operate effectively without backup provided by a central authority, the military should take one or more of the following steps, after consultation with the antiquities ministry:
i. Preclude road access to selected sites by sowing the road with tire-puncturing tacks.
ii. If feasible, make a show of force at strategically selected sites, confiscating, disabling, or destroying a few of the vehicles used by potential looters as a deterrent to future potential looters.
vi. Create monitoring systems to identify sites under assault or threat of assault by looters.

It's too late for Nimrud, and probably for Hatra as well. One can only hope that now that Iraq's government is publicly begging for this kind of military action, our feckless leaders will lift their fingers enough to see that such tiny but crucial actions be undertaken.

First Nimrud, now Hatra: Why no military response?

The bulldozing of Nimrud should not have caught the international community by surprise, yet it occurred without, so far as we know, any moves to thwart it by taking countermeasures against the bulldozers and truckloads of ISIS zealots that drove out to the site. Perhaps bombing the vehicles or even just the roads might have been unfeasible given the location of Nimrud (the aerial photo below shows quite a few roads and cultivated fields around the site).

But as Abdulameer Hamdani has confirmed for me, Hatra is isolated in the desert with no population around it, and only one road in and out to the site (as the image below from http://www.centroscavitorino.it/en/progetti/iraq/hatra.html confirms):

Which raises the question: If Hatra is indeed now being razed, why did the coalition not bomb the road or the bulldozers and truckloads of ISIS fanatics to prevent this from happening (and not incidentally to kill some of these murderous thugs)?

According to Hamdani, Assur is likely to be the next site in ISIS' crosshairs. Will the coalition stand idly by again?

UPDATE (MARCH 9, 2015)
I'm not the only one who thinks air strikes are needed:
Iraq Calls for Air Power to Protect Antiquities

Now You Can Buy Your Very Own Bronze Age Bust from Syria, Direct to You!

The Wall Street Journal is bringing public attention to bear on the ongoing decimation of Syrian archaeological sites by market-driven antiquities looters putatively overseen and enabled by ISIS. 

The most recent article is notable for several reasons:

First, the messaging from heritage protection advocates has advanced beyond the sensationalist proffering of dubiously astonishing guesstimates that give recalcitrant dealers and collectors an excuse for avoiding the main issue, which is the amount of looting going on and its impact on archaeological sites. 

Second, it documents what many have suspected, that the high end at least of the illicit market is direct-to-buyer (though we have no way to know whether the buyer is a collector or a dealer):

...Islamic State is using its vast network and social-media savvy to bypass conventional middlemen and reach buyers directly. The looters store the booty in a secret location then circulate the photos directly to buyers in hard copy or via text message or the WhatsApp messaging service, law-enforcement officials say. 

The Wall Street Journal reviewed cellphone photos of a Bronze Age votive bust, possibly 5,000 years old, looted from Islamic State-controlled territory, being touted for sale to private clients and potentially sold for around $30,000.

 Third, as the asking price of $30,000 indicates, the high end is high enough to constitute a huge incentive for looters in a country where 80% of the population makes less than $286 per year.  Even with a mark-up of 100:1 from the site to the dealer, finding this one piece would be worth a year's work for most Syrians. 

Third, extremely dangerous undercover work to infiltrate the smuggling networks by posing as dealers is being done: 

senior members of the group have begun posing as antiques dealers to snare information on looted items. The disguised archaeologists contact looters and photograph artifacts, before emailing pictures to academics in Europe who pass information onto law enforcement agencies. Hundreds of looted artifacts have been photographed, including a 1,500-year-old mosaic of a bearded biblical figure in a green-and-blue striped tunic ripped from a wall of an Idlib church.

Fourth, the international community appears to be getting its crime-fighting act together, evidenced not only by the sharing of these photos with law enforcement, and by the scrutiny by "European and U.S. spy agencies" of photos sent via text messages and WhatsApp but by what is apparently a stepping-up of efforts by bordering countries to clamp down:

Security forces in Lebanon and Jordan have stepped up raids on smuggling rings. In Turkey, special police antismuggling units conducted dozens of raids in Turkey’s southern cities since last summer.

 Unfortunately, the independent activities of the daring group of archaeologists apparently isn't getting the support needed. And one also has to wonder how much material is bleeding out of Syria via Iraq into Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, not discussed in this article but theologically sympathetic to ISIS and therefore not unlikely to have dealers able to be approved by ISIS.  

The Association of Art Museum Directors' Opposition to MOUs: Is it Justifiable, and What's the Alternative?

Rick Saint-Hilaire has an interesting post noting that the AAMD appears to have changed its policy stance towards Memos of Understanding, shifting from muted acquiescence or support to outright opposition. Several colleagues have already commented on facebook at how troubling this shift is. But it's also troubling that the law establishing the MoU system is not what many of us whose primary concern is stopping the market-driven looting of archaeological sites want it to be, i.e., not just a way to close down US imports regardless of any other factors. It requires countries asking for this restriction to do certain things, and supposedly lets us off the hook -- or, if one prefers, enables us to put pressure on those countries to live up to their end of the deal -- if they do not do those things, whether the reason they do not is corruption, indifference, or revolution. 

Reading the AAMD's brief on El Salvador as an example, one has to admit that they make a strong case, based on the evidence they provide, that the Salvadoran government is not doing a very good job. Because governmental presentations to CPAC are not made public, there is no way to know how or even if the Salvadoran government has refuted the charges the AAMD makes. The best we have is a  brief from the Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Protection which does not address the evidence offered by the AAMD, and as evidence of El Salvador's  offers a single example of a joint operation initiated, it seems, by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We have no way to know  how much El Salvador is spending on site protection, customs inspections, etc. etc., whether that amount has increased either in absolute terms or relative to the country's overall budget, or what the fruits of this expenditure have been.

The AAMD's more general policy position seems now to be that MOUs are not working and should be scrapped. In favor of what? The AAMD suggests that countries should open their markets and tax the exports to pay for more better policing (and, just coincidentally of course, to bring more better antiquities to museums). 

This is an intriguing suggestion, despite the fact that it is both politically unrealistic (they really think El Salvador's Ministry of Culture is going to go back to their government and persuade them that they have to both let national patrimony be bought up by foreigners and institute new taxes, because the museums and collectors in the US have reopened the US end of the market and caused a spike in looting as a result?), and bureaucratically unfeasible -- since, as the AAMD notes, corruption is a major problem, it's hard to see how the tax will be collected and revenues find their way to site protectors. What makes it interesting is that the AAMD recognizes that the general idea of taxing the market for antiquities to pay for site protection is a good one.  

The next step would be for the AAMD to propose, whether as a quid pro quo for abandoning particular MOUs or simply as a more effective way to bring looting under control enough to make MOUs unnecessary, that the US impose taxes on the import and sale of antiquities here. The funds raised could then be funneled -- perhaps via the newly proposed White House coordinator -- into targeted programs aimed at improving site protection and other anti-looting and anti-site-destruction efforts. 

Numbers that matter: the AAAS Report on Site Looting in Syria, and where we go from here

The tempest in a teapot about how much the looted artifacts are worth or whether they are the third or fourth largest source of revenue for ISIS should not distract us from the main point, made irrefutably by this gold-standard analysis of the hardest of hard data: market-driven looting of archaeological sites is rampant in Syria.

What's needed most now, the next step, is not more argument about how much, but more clarity about where and how looted materials move from site to various destinations, through what exchanges, with what participants.  That information in turn will help inform market design research by economists, by providing answers to such questions as:  Where, if anywhere, are the most fragile links in the supply-chains? Where can leverage be most effectively brought to bear (for instance, by the US on emirates that are providing freeports for transiting illicit antiquities and enabling their own wealthy citizens to amass collections of illicit antiquities)? How can the various tools of governmental and intergovernmental action be used not to make these markets more efficient but to disrupt, cool, or smother them?

This is the direction, at least, that we're trying to pursue more generally in the project now getting underway at Chicago, http://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/faculty/past_for_sale/.

Pick a Number, Any Number

A new post on Chasing Aphrodite continues the scolding of the press and of those who are passing on unsubstantiated claims about just how much money ISIS is making from the sale of looted antiquities.

I'm all for data-informed policymaking; I'm an academic, after all. But with regard to the "second largest source of revenue to ISIS" meme, it is worth remembering a few things:

1. In the long term we are all dead, said Keynes, and in the short term getting attention paid to archaeological looting has had very positive stimulative effects in the area of heritage protection at least (witness the White House Coordinator law just proposed).

2.  More generally, the notion that credibility will be sapped by the flogging of dubious factoids is not supported by any evidence I know of in public policy studies, and indeed there's plenty of evidence that even outright lies have very long tails and only sap credibility when they lead to what are retrospectively recognized to have been disastrous policy decisions.

3.  There are, of course, two, not just one policy decision in play: one having to do with heritage protection efforts, the other, much bigger one having to do with how to deal with the challenge posed by ISIS. Here we need to make a distinction that I don't see Felch making between information that drives and information that helps sell policymaking. The policy decision to escalate, while perhaps disastrous (time will tell), may have been justified ex post facto by the meme about antiquities looting, but it surely wasn't caused by it.  What got that decision made was not the lopping off of the heads of statues but the lopping off of human heads.

4. What we need more than strictly accurate numbers is a general sense of the scale, drivers, and vectors of looting and the market that can help guide policymaking to intervene in the most effective ways possible.

Scathing critique of UNESCO's ineffectual response to Syrian crisis

Michel al-Maqdissi, former director of the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums' Archaeological Excavations department, points out the ways in which UNESCO has failed to go beyond the traditional list of UNESCO measures to do more than what it traditionally does (i.e., training customs officials, putting monuments that are already damaged on the "threatened" list) -- and does, Maqdissi notes, too little too late. The article is interesting throughout, but for me the following points stood out:

-- Qatna-Mishirfeh, a famous site, has not been looted. Maqdissi says this is because it is too famous and people would know, but he also notes that "in contrast to other sites, Qatna-Mishirfeh is still being guarded."

--the majority of looters are professionals working in gangs that learned their trade in Iraq. 

-- it does not make economic sense for armed groups to go into the antiquities trade, since it is not a quick business and rebels need money fast. (This is true, but if the gangs are being taxed, as reports have suggested, then rebels can milk the trade, assuming the gangs are adequately capitalized to be able to retain inventory as we know they have done with the massive amounts looted in Iraq from 2004-2006.)

-- UNESCO has been training the staff of the General Directorate of Antiquities and Museums but not the activist groups engaged directly in trying to protect sites and museums.

-- Nor is UNESCO thinking about ways to get Syria's site guards paid:

Traditionally, the guards are paid by the Syrian government and by foreign archaeological missions, which usually brought the money into the country themselves. 

For more than three years now, foreigners have stayed away. I have tried to help by picking up the money personally at foreign institutions and sending it from Lebanon to trustworthy Syrians, who gave it to the Directorate of Antiquities so that the guards' wages can be paid for another year. But that only helped a small number of the guards. According to my estimates, 30 to 40 per cent of them no longer receive any money. The sites of the ancient trading city of Mari-Tell Hariri, for example, are currently being guarded by overburdened villagers.

It would be interesting to take a look at UNESCO's budget to see how much has been spent on its international meetings and on conservation training, and to ask how many sites would have been saved from looters had the funds instead gone to pay site guards' salaries. But that's an academic question, since as Maqdissi says, UNESCO's bureaucracy is very entrenched -- including, notably, the experts whose expertise is not in guarding but in conserving -- , making it almost impossible to redirect resources.

And one can see why paying for site guards might open a can of worms for UNESCO. The World Heritage Fund's annual assistance budget for the entire world is only $4 million, and while Syria's situation is perhaps the most desperate, there are many, many countries lacking the money to pay for enough site guards. 

So where is the money to come from? One answer, laid out by Mounir Bouchenaki in his contribution to Antiquities Under Siege, might be actually funding the Intergovernmental Fund for the Protection of Cultural Property in Times of Conflict, established but (to my knowledge) never actually contributed to by any state party. 

Don't hold your breath on that happening any time soon. It would take leadership from the US, which sends John Kerry to talk loftily at the Metropolitan Museum about the need to do something to stop the looting of sites in Syria but whose policy moves have been limited to helping document the damage. 

There are, to be sure, other funding sources in the world aside from governments and foreign archaeological missions. One could imagine, for instance, the antiquities dealers associations, museum directors' associations, and a phalanx of ultra-wealthy enlightened collectors, all led perhaps by James Cuno, coming together to set up their own fund. Or, better still, lobbying the governments of major collecting nations to set up funds and generate the revenues to go into those funds via a tax on antiquities sales. 

Wouldn't that be great?