Stemming a Tide of Cultural Theft

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/arts/international/stemming-a-tide-of-cultural-theft.html

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BERLIN — They have always been among the spoils of war, alluring in their beauty, tantalizing in their value to dealers, museums and collectors. And after a decade of turmoil, and a longer stretch of willful destruction, the world’s antiquities are in such jeopardy that preservationists are sounding a screeching alarm.

At a gathering in Berlin last week, 250 experts discussed ways to help Syria, Iraq and Egypt, as well as Afghanistan and other threatened regions, protect cultural property.

But while the fighting in the region has been devastating to scores of heritage sites — decay, negligence and religious fervor also have taken a heavy toll — the destruction is also driven by the persistent demand for looted goods, European experts said.

Many participants called for tightening laws to make it more difficult for the very wealthy to acquire tangible bits of world history. Or, as the German commissioner for culture, Monika Grütters, put it, while proposing far-reaching new German curbs on the murky antiquities market, “the cultural heritage of all humanity” is something everyone should help preserve.

This month, Irina Bokova, the Bulgarian who heads Unesco, the United Nations’ organization in Paris for education, science and culture, appealed for new curbs on billions of dollars earned illegally in antiquities. She wants a ban on such trade with Syria and Iraq, and urged the creation of culture safety zones in Syria, starting with the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo.

Emily K. Rafferty, the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, joined members of the Louvre, the Berlin Pergamon Museum and the British Museum to call in Paris for a fight against illicit trafficking and destruction.

Carrying off art treasures has long been part of war and the assertion of cultural superiority. The perhaps most well-known dispute flared anew this month when the British Museum — which has long asserted that the Parthenon frieze taken from Greece in the early 19th century could not be returned to Athens or split up — lent one statue from it to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Russia itself has long refused to return to Germany art treasures seized by Soviet troops in World War II.

Germany, of course, has its own painful history of the Nazis confiscating art from mostly Jewish owners, and from museums. That, and the recent discovery of a trove of art amassed by a Nazi-era dealer and kept secret for decades by the dealer’s reclusive son, Cornelius Gurlitt, have helped spur a proposal for what experts say would be the most far-reaching laws regulating the booming market in cultural property.

Ms. Grütters outlined plans for a new law that would require documented provenance for any object entering or leaving Germany, long among the laxest of regulators of the art market. Among other measures, dealers would be required to show a valid export permit from the source of the piece’s origins when entering Germany.

Countries like Switzerland, and European Union members like France, Italy and Britain, have in recent years considerably tightened their rules, and are now re-examining them.

Vincent Geerling, chairman of the International Association of Dealers in ancient art, insisted that “we don’t need an extra German law.” Museums and serious collectors can police themselves, he suggested.

Yet the German proposal could be “a big step,” said Neil Brodie, an antiquities expert at the Scottish Center for Crime and Justice Research at the University of Glasgow. “In a way, the United States was the most advanced” in curbing illicit trade in cultural goods, through five-year, renewable agreements with about a dozen affected countries, he said. “But the Germans are now looking to go one step further,” he said. “You don’t just have to prove something is not guilty, but show that it is innocent.”

The first global attempt to regulate the antiquities trade was a Unesco convention of 1970, now signed by 127 nations. But implementation depends on national governments, and the 1970 date has fed what Egypt’s culture minister, Mamdouh Mohamed Eldamaty, called “antiquities laundering.” Like money launderers, he said, dealers scramble to prove objects left his country — or any other — before 1970, and can thus be legally traded.

Over all, many experts blame illicit cultural deals on the desire of wealthy people to have an ancient piece of culture to boast about.

“There is no business if there are no buyers,” said France Desmarais, a Canadian expert with the International Museum Conference in Paris, which has 33,000 members worldwide. “Don’t buy this stuff!” At a lecture, Mr. Brodie took cases from Italy in the 1990s, India and New York from 2010 and Cambodia in 2009 to illustrate his charge that perhaps 95 percent of dealings in the international antiquities market are tainted by crime.

One step needed to curtail such trade, he suggested, is to focus on experts who perhaps unwittingly lend their knowledge to serve what he called organized crime — defined by the United Nations as a structure of at least three people who band together to break the law.

“These experts are operating without any thought to being criminally involved,” he said. “I think this is a choke point. I think these people would be quite easy to deter.” He suggested that social media have helped in the case of Syria to sound immediate alarms, because people post evidence of looting on Facebook or Twitter almost as it occurs. But other experts suggested that the presence of foreigners can signal to cultural criminals where the treasures are.

Once European archaeologists leave a site in Afghanistan, for example, illicit dealers move in, alerted to the presence of potential treasure, said Christian Manhart, a veteran of Unesco, who has long experience with Afghanistan and is now based in Nepal, trying to stem a fresh flow of cultural theft.

Mr. Manhart, addressing the Berlin conference, at one point showed a slide of Afghans at an antiquity site under a banner written in Dari and English — “A nation stays alive when its culture stays alive.”

“We should all meditate on that,” he said.