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"UNESCO has no blue helmets," its deputy heritage director
Mechtild Rossler told Reuters, using the common jargon for
United Nations' peacekeepers.
"We work with three people... So what do you want us to do?"
Islamic State's pillaging of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud,
video of museum statues and carvings destroyed in the Iraqi city
of Mosul, and now the seizure of the Syrian heritage site of
Palmyra have underscored the world's impotence at saving some of
its most precious archaeological treasures.
With major powers not willing to put troops on the ground,
Islamic State fighters have extended the reach of their
fundamentalist caliphate against depleted and demoralized
government forces in both Syria and Iraq.
The world's failure to stem daily killings, atrocities and
mounting humanitarian crises in the two countries understandably
gets most attention.
But its inability to safeguard heritage sites from an array of
threats is also storing up trouble, as much-needed future
livelihoods based on tourism are ruined and potentially
lucrative sources of funding for Islamist insurgents created.
The fear that the trade in looted artifacts can aggravate the
conflicts has earned them the nickname "blood antiquities" -
adapting the "blood diamond" tag coined for the gems that have
financed fighters in African wars from Angola to Sierra Leone.
"The situation in Syria and Iraq is unprecedented," said Rossler,
whose career has spanned the 1993 destruction of Bosnia's
Ottoman-era Mostar bridge by Croatian forces and the Taliban
dynamiting of Afghanistan's Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001.
Yet if the world has had ample experience of assaults on
cultural sites, the quest for a counter-strategy is uphill.
UNESCO, headed by polyglot Bulgarian ex-foreign minister Irina
Bokova, has led world calls for a halt to the destruction. But
its own resources are limited, not least because of the U.S.
decision in 2011 to cut off funding of the body after other
members backed a Palestinian bid for full membership.
No fewer than six international conventions have been drawn up
over the years to protect cultural heritage. Alarm bells have
been sounded in U.N. Security Council resolutions and in
declarations by heads of state, top museums and the art world.
But, despite some successes in recovering objects, the effort is
hamstrung by the patchwork approach of national authorities, a
failure to tackle smuggling networks head-on and a lack of even
basic information about the market they trade in.
"When a crisis like this erupts, we feel the need to act. But we
don't know what to do," said Jason Felch, co-author of the book
"Chasing Aphrodite" that reported on how looted antiquities can
end up in the hands of the world's museums.
CHECK THE FIGURES
Syria's famed archaeological sites have suffered extensive
damage during four years of conflict, with gems such as the old
souk in Aleppo devastated by the fighting. But as the civil war
has ground on, the threat of plunder has risen to the fore.
In late-2014, media around the world leapt on the assertion by a
U.S.-funded archaeologist that antiquities-trafficking had
become IS's second largest source of revenue after oil sales.
Some even estimated the take ran into billions of dollars.
At around the same time, satellite images published by the U.S.
government and others showed heritage sites such as Syria's 3rd
century BC Dura-Europos city increasingly pockmarked by crude
excavation pits over a period from mid-2012 to early 2014.
Some experts believe the worst of the looting took place when
the site was under the control of the Western- and Arab-backed
Free Syrian Army, suggesting the problem is rampant and
afflicting many sites regardless of which faction is in charge.
While those images are still widely accepted as evidence that
theft is taking place on a huge scale, doubts have since emerged
about the methodology and data basis of estimates of the amount
of proceeds that have flown to IS or other groups.
"We still need to figure out the market itself," Richard Stengel,
U.S. Department of State Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy
and Public Affairs, acknowledged at a conference held at Paris's
Louvre museum this month.
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UNESCO is similarly circumspect. Rossler puts the revenue yield to
IS in the "high millions" of dollars, but said her organization did
not have an official estimate.
Black markets in any goods are notoriously difficult to quantify and
ultimately the debate may yet prove moot: the very fact looting is
taking place on IS-controlled sites suggests the group is confident
it will one day derive revenue from them.
Yet the episode reveals the continued lack of institutional
knowledge about a trade thought to piggy-back smuggling networks for
other illicit goods such as narcotics, starting in neighbors such as
Turkey and Lebanon and ending in the West.
That is mirrored by the patchiness of national legislation.
UNESCO's 1970 flagship convention aimed at prohibiting the illicit
trade in cultural property has been ratified by some 130 of its 195
member states. But Rossler said only two countries, the United
States and Switzerland, directly implement it.
While February's U.N. Security Council Resolution on Syria outlaws
exports, there have been few national moves to ban all sales of
Syrian and Iraqi antiquities outright because of the harm that could
do to secondary markets for legitimate objects.
The British Museum said this week it was holding for safekeeping an
undisclosed artifact illegally removed from Syria, and there have
been sightings on e-commerce websites of limestone figures believed
to be from Palmyra.
But so far, few objects are known to have surfaced in art circles,
suggesting to some that traffickers are repeating a tactic used
after the Iraq war when looted objects were stored for a period of
time before being quietly placed on the market.
Author Felch said such a "cooling off period" can be used by illicit
traders to ease the entry of an object into the legitimate art
world, often via a private collector who will donate it to a museum
in return for a tax break worth much more than the purchase price.
STING OPERATION
Others argue the existence of super-rich collectors ready to pay
huge sums to privately display illicit treasures may owe more to
Hollywood than reality. They say the real effort must lie with
persuading bona fide art players to reject anything whose provenance
cannot be proven beyond doubt.
Alice Farren-Bradley at London-based Art Recovery Group, a private
company that runs a database of registered antiquities, said
everything from solid documentation to common sense is needed to
determine whether the origin of an object was suspect.
"It's that gut feeling when you are offered something ... for
example if it's got chisel-marks on it. I did archaeology and one
does not excavate with a chisel. You go in as lightly as possible,"
she said, noting that much looting is done quickly, clumsily and
after nightfall.
Farren-Bradley argued that schemes to establish the exact provenance
of objects can help by undermining the market value of any good seen
as suspect, therefore removing the financial incentive for it to be
looted in the first place.
UNESCO's Rossler agreed, saying the organization was working with
auctioneers Christie's and Sotheby's to persuade art professionals
never to buy anything without clear documentation.
Yet the setbacks encountered by the "Kimberley Process", a
certification scheme launched in 2000 to combat blood diamonds, show
it will not be easy. As recently as last November, a U.N. panel
concluded that illicit diamond sales were still funding a bloody
conflict in Central African Republic.
Felch argues a more direct route would be to provide proper funding
for law enforcement agents in potential end-markets such as the
United States and elsewhere to help undercover efforts to penetrate
smuggling networks and ensnare the ringleaders.
"Federal agents are being offered looted stuff out of Syria," he
said. "But they don't even have the resources to set up a sting
operation."
(Additional reporting by Jessica Chen in Paris and Michael Holden in
London; Editing by Crispian Balmer)
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