[CPProt.net] Iraq: Holders of looted artifacts are lying low, waiting for the right time to sell

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

Hidden treasures of Iraq

Holders of looted artifacts are lying low, waiting for the right time to
sell, writes Guy Gugliotta 

Thursday, November 10, 2005

 
Holders of looted artifacts are lying low, waiting for the right time to
sell, writes Guy Gugliotta 
More than 2 years after looters sacked Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad,
Iraqi authorities and police forces throughout the world are still searching
for thousands of stolen items, including a handful of the most famous
artifacts in history.

US military sources say forces in Iraq have no systematic way of
investigating the missing objects, and in the ongoing insurgency neither US
nor Iraqi forces can justify using scarce manpower to guard sites in the
countryside, where widespread looting has continued unchecked since the
March 2003 US invasion.

Law enforcement organizations worldwide are chasing the lost items, but
their representatives said there is no systematic coordination, and they are
relying on ad hoc partnerships to bring the thieves to account.

Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, the man in charge of recovering the museum
treasures, eventually counted about 14,000 lost items, of which about 5,500
have been recovered.

Not surprisingly, only a few high- quality looted pieces have reappeared
since the end of 2003. Yet paradoxically, although lower-end artifacts
occasionally are placed for auction on the Internet, there has been no
serious upsurge in public sales of Iraqi antiquities, either in the United
States or Europe.

Experts attribute the absence of a market to a combination of factors, none
of them verifiable. Tough laws in Britain and the United States may have
scared off known dealers, some say, or smugglers may simply have stashed
their prizes in warehouses until they think it is safe.

Others suggest that it takes a few years for stolen goods to migrate from
the Middle East to shops in London, Tokyo or New York. Still others suspect
the loot has gone to collectors in nearby states along the Persian Gulf,
where Mesopotamian artifacts enjoy a stature they never attained in the
West.

Most sources agree, however, that the most famous pieces are too hot ever to
be handled again in public. Without sophisticated police work, help from the
art world and patience, the only people who will ever see them are the
millionaires who buy them on the black market and lock them away.

"I teach about it all the time," said Columbia University art historian
Zainab Bahrani, recalling the missing Sumerian black statue of Eannatum,
prince of Lagash, one of the earliest royal sculptures to bear an
inscription. "I explain why it is important, but in the back of my mind I'm
thinking, `It's gone ... it's gone.' "

Bahrani is one of a relatively small number of specialists in academia, the
art world and law enforcement who continue to track the fortunes of Iraq's
stolen patrimony.

The danger was obvious. Iraq is the birthplace of civilization, where
ancient peoples left behind a cornucopia of cultural heritage. The patriarch
Abraham lived in what is today Iraq, and Imam Ali, the founder of Shiite
Islam, was martyred there.

Two months before the 2003 invasion, experts warned Pentagon officials about
the possibility of looting once the shooting stopped. It had happened in the
chaos after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and US forces could expect the same
this time, they said.

And so it proved. As US tanks entered Baghdad in April, mobs broke into the
National Museum and stole, burned or destroyed everything they could find.
It was not as bad as expected because staff members had spirited most of the
famous exhibits out of the museum to secret hiding places. But it was bad
enough.

No one has disputed Bogdanos' figures on museum losses, but he cautioned
that the numbers of both missing and recovered pieces will rise as the staff
continues to inventory pillaged storerooms.

Outside the capital, looting of known archaeological sites has proceeded
unimpeded, and there is no end in sight as long as overburdened US and Iraqi
security forces remain preoccupied with battling insurgents.

"When Saddam found looters, he killed them," said Bogdanos, a reservist who
works as a Manhattan prosecutor in civilian life and who has recounted his
experiences in a new book, Thieves of Baghdad. "We told the Iraqis right
away that we weren't going to fly helicopters over the sites and start
shooting people."

Bogdanos has compiled the accepted "top 40" list of the most famous pieces
stolen from the National Museum. Fifteen have been recovered, including the
Sumerian vase of Warka, the mask of Warka and an Assyrian wheeled firebox
made of bronze. 

The 25 missing items include the Sumerian statue, the gold-and-ivory carved
plaque of a lioness attacking a Nubian, and the almost life-size head of the
Goddess of Victory, from Hatra. 

"You're never going to see these in a gallery," Bahrani said. "No art dealer
would ever touch them, because they're just too well known. We're talking
about a black market. These pieces will never see the light of day."

The second category includes about 8,000 small items taken from the museum
in what Bogdanos calls "an inside job." Thieves with keys "cherry- picked"
storerooms for pendants, amulets, decorative pins and about 5,000
Mesopotamian "cylinder seals."

These carved finger-sized pieces of stone leave a distinctive design when
rolled over soft clay. Each has a museum number written on it in nearly
indelible India ink, and the whole collection, Bogdanos said, would fit in a
backpack.

These are the most saleable of all the stolen items - easy to hide and
transport, distinctive and authenticated as museum pieces. Most of the high-
profile items recovered outside Iraq are cylinder seals, including eight
that were voluntarily handed over to the FBI by a returning marine and three
taken by customs agents from journalist Joseph Braude at New York's John F
Kennedy International Airport. 

Bogdanos, lead investigator in the Braude case, was disappointed by the
sentence of six months of house arrest and two years of probation.

Since Bogdanos departed Iraq, US forces no longer have a systematic way to
search for artifacts, and the effort has devolved upon an assortment of
organizations, including the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage,
Interpol, the FBI, and cylinder seal experts at the University of Chicago's
Oriental Institute. 

But there is little evidence that anyone in the United States or Europe is
taking advantage. In fact, whatever market there was for Iraqi antiquities
appears to be drying up. "The items that are coming to auction are much
better provenanced [authenticated]," said William Weber of the London-based
Art Loss Register. "Dealers have to be very careful with this material."

Britain's draconian 2003 Iraq Sanctions Order has put the burden of proof on
a dealer to show that an artifact is not stolen. The United States has
lifted general trade sanctions on Iraq imposed after the Gulf War but left
them in place for cultural property.

Neil Brodie, director of the Antiquities Research Center at Cambridge
University's McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, credits the new
British law with the collapse of the London market. "I thought it would go
right to New York," he said, "but it hasn't happened."

That is because "people here at the high end understand that this is
illegal," said New York lawyer William Pearlstein, who frequently represents
antiquities dealers, collectors and auction houses. "We have a very heavily
policed antiquities market, and the message has gotten through."

Still, there appears to be no disagreement that looting continues. Until
recently, what little evidence there was came from risky field trips by
journalists, military reports from the Iraqi hinterland and the occasional
helicopter flyover.

Stony Brook University archaeologist Elizabeth Stone, however, has been
leading an effort to compare "before and after" satellite photographs of
well- known sites in southern Iraq, and has found holes "denser than Swiss
cheese."

The artifacts recovered from these sites are a grab bag that includes some
cylinder seals, pottery, clay tablets, stone carvings and other small items.
But a lot of it is probably valuable. Where is it going?

Stone suggested that somewhere "there are warehouses bulging at the seams,"
waiting for vigilance to relax and laws to expire. Pearlstein thinks the
artifacts are traveling to "virtually unregulated" markets in the Persian
Gulf states.

DePaul University's Patty Gerstenblith, an expert on cultural property law,
believes the sanctions may have forced thieves to make a cost-benefit
calculation. "It will be too dangerous for collectors to buy the well-known
items," she said, and not worth the risk for smugglers to sell the cheap
stuff. THE WASHINGTON POST