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Larry Rothfeld is reporting (Who Are the Looters? An Example from El Hibeh ) that on the El Hibeh facebook page from which I am blocked there was a report that the man Abu Kotia who US Egyptologist Carol Redmount accuses of being behind the recent looting of the site and threatening the Inspectors is out of the game:
Whether or not the looting at El Hibeh will stop because one thug with a gun shot another thug with a gun remains to be seen, its more than likely that the conflict was over control of this lucrative "small business" rather than a white-hat villager taking the role of sheriff and trying to stop the criminals like in a bad western.
Larry Rothfeld is reporting (Who Are the Looters? An Example from El Hibeh ) that on the El Hibeh facebook page from which I am blocked there was a report that the man Abu Kotia who US Egyptologist Carol Redmount accuses of being behind the recent looting of the site and threatening the Inspectors is out of the game:
about two weeks ago, Abu Kotia was shot (by whom I'm not sure) and wound up in the local hospital, where he died. I'm still trying to get further details. I very much hope that this means the looting at Hibeh has or will stop, but who knows at this point. If and when I get more details I will post them.Larry points out this says a lot about who the diggers supplying the antiquities market are ("hint: not just otherwise nice people driven to dig by poverty who could easily be convinced to go legal if only they were given a stake in sustainable tourism"). While he thinks there needs to be more "policing" (antiquities tax to pay for it) and "investigative journalism and public pressure" to get the criminals out of society (yeah, yeah), the obvious key point here is that criminals can only make money by selling old bits of rotten wood, carved rocks and pots because there are a whole group of people perfectly willing to buty them from criminals. They do it because there are a whole bunch of people all over the world that will quite happily buy stuff, no-questions-asked, which has been bought from those who have no qualms about buying from criminals. That is the key to the problem. Breaking the chain at the interface with the market costs no source countries any money, no taxes, nobody gets shot. Collectors just have to start buying responsibly. No more blood antiquities, no more encouraging criminals, no more dodgy stuff, no more self-deception. And if they find it hard to take that first step themselves, the authorities in the market countries need to take a step to jog them into action. Jail a few smugglers and those selling illegally obtained items.
Whether or not the looting at El Hibeh will stop because one thug with a gun shot another thug with a gun remains to be seen, its more than likely that the conflict was over control of this lucrative "small business" rather than a white-hat villager taking the role of sheriff and trying to stop the criminals like in a bad western.
1 comment:
I'm all for jailing smugglers and those selling illegally obtained items, and I agree that would deter some collectors. But it is naive to think that this is going to have much impact on looting, because:
a) not all collectors in the country doing the jailing will be deterred, and it only takes a few willing to pay hundreds of thousands for a single piece to keep looters looting (this is also why the just-say-no approach, even if successful for most collectors in, say, the US, would not obviate the need to protect sites from looters -- antiquities are not like drugs in that respect, the black market is driven by a small number of high-end sales, not by volume buying by lots of small users);
b) this jailing would have to occur in lots of countries, not just one, since high-end collectors live in many places, and there is very little chance of the law in many of these places touching them (i.e., princes in Abu Dhabi).
We need to be tamping down on both demand and supply ends -- and the best way to help tamp down on supply is to tax demand and use the tax proceeds to pay for more and better site protection and supply-chain disruption.
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