Cambodia gets US-held Stolen Statues Back

The "It Surfaced Down-Under" blog has a post about the recent news of some stolen Cambodian antiquities being repatriated from the US (Angkorian Statuary Repatriation: What's Behind the Headlines? ) the story attracted a lot of media attention, but almost all the articles were duplicates of each other, and they all missed the vital information:

The article makes some to-do about these pieces being recovered during a 2008 "raid" by US Immigrations and Customs (I.C.E.) agents, on the location they were being held at somewhere in Los Angeles, yet fails to report where this locations is, who possessed them, if they were recovered from private residences or institutions post-sale or were in some warehouse somewhere awaiting delivery. The article notes that, despite the M.O.U. (Memorandum of Understanding) signed between Cambodia and the US (and, I should note, the existence of an I.C.O.M. "Red List" for Cambodia since 2009), numerous artifacts large and small have ended up in private collections overseas. This is indeed true, and ongoing. What I question is whether there's more to this story than meets the eye.

To look at the way these "stolen cultural property repatriated from the US" stories inevitably written on the basis of ICE press releases, one cannot avoid getting the impression that the ICE does not really seem all that interested in actually catching smugglers, still less investigating the sources that supply them (to allow others to get back to the looters). The press stories give the impression that the ICE mostly interested in getting its hands on showy and easily identified things to "send back" to create photo opportunities and show US "co-operation" with other nations and America taking some form of moral leadership. Stopping the actual looting is entirely secondary to that, in fact helps to provide material for the backslapping stories.

The Cambodian statues is just one case where the back story is never provided. Where did they suddenly "surface"? That is not deemed important to the reporting of these stories, what is reported is they went back and the Cambodians are ever so grateful to the wonderful USA for handing them back. Again we have the object-centric approach, totally ignoring the destruction of a monument, or context to produce those "works of art" which everyone is so pleased about. What however is more important is how on earth did they get to the staes in the first place, what sort of deals lie behind that, and what unscrupulous US collectors or dealers were actually buying these items despite the existence of an MOU?