Looting in Iraq Revisited

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The looting of some 15,000 objects from the Baghdad museum during the 2003 invasion, and destruction and looting of objects in other collections has been debated continually, as has the chronology and degree of the looting of at least 12000 archaeological sites (according to satellite photos an area of up to 15.75 square kilometres) all across the country. Dr Elizabeth Stone of Stony Brook University, New York who has been looking at these issues is quoted in an (undated) article featured on the Iraq Museum webpage (the original seems to be inaccessible at the time of writing).

She fears a resurgence in the illicit trade. "What the wealthy [of the Gulf region are now doing] is emulating the spending patterns of the west". "Collecting antiquities is often seen as a hallmark of being a member of high society" says Dr Stone, but ethical issues are often disregarded in the process. There had been signs that the global trade in stolen Iraqi artefacts had been on the decline as dealers in major markets like London and New York felt the squeeze of stern legislation and public opinion. This had led to a degree of self-policing by traders and auction houses such as Christie's and Sotheby's. As a result, it is claimed that the open traffic in these markets was reduced to "a trickle". Nevertheless as has been shown on this blog and by others such as Neil Brodie, this is by no means the same as saying that the no-questions-asked dealing in unprovenanced and potentially to some extent freshly "surfaced" Mesopotamian artefacts did not continue. Simply nobody questioned the glib excuse: "from a old collection made in the 1980s".

Despite the claims of the dealers and collectors that there is "no connection between the trade in antiquities and looting", Stone suggests that her work indicates that the difficulties of getting rid of freshly "surfaced" items openly on the UK and US markets had an effect on the supply side of the market. Satellite imagery reveals the explosion of looting that took place with the imposition in the 1990s of UN sanctions, and then the 2003 invasion, covering about 15 percent of all accessible archaeological sites in Iraq. The evidence of the chronology however shows that with the imposition of emergency regulation making open trade in the products of such items illegal, the frequency of looting dropped. Dr Stone now estimates that the most egregious cases of looting were restricted to the period before December 2003.

It was 14th June 2003 that the "Iraq (UN Sanctions) Order (SI 1519)" came into force in the UK in implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution No 1483 (dated 22 May 2003). In Article 8(3) it states:

Any person who deals in any item of illegally removed Iraqi cultural property shall be guilty of an offence under this Order, unless he proves that he did not know and had no reason to suppose that the item in question was illegally removed Iraqi cultural property.

Similar to the 2003 Act, the Iraq Order defines ‘illegally removed’ as illegal under the law of a part of the UK or any other country. The Iraq Order is retrospective, applying to cultural property illegally removed from Iraq since 6 August 1990. The USA was a little less quick off the mark, with the the Emergency Protection for Iraqi Cultural Antiquities Act of November 2004 (after a failed attempt earlier blocked by somebody no doubt).
Stone's work therefore quite clearly shows that the tightening of controls on the western markets was having an effect since the digging of artefacts was only profitable if they could be marketed. A fact that all those opposing MOUs concluded under the CPIA might bear in mind.

The question remains where the vast number of artefacts that must have been dug out in this period of frenetic digging and looting actually went. Presumably many of them are still hidden in Iraq or neighbouring countries.

This theory is supported by recent discoveries. In October, Lebanese customs officials seized 57 Iraqi objects being smuggled across the border from Syria. Customs officers in Dubai say that in November they found more than 120 stolen pieces being brought into the emirate by boat. In Iraq itself the army broke a smuggling ring in the south in April, arresting seven thieves and recovering 235 Babylonian and Sumerian items, according to the US military. While these successes testify to the vigilance of the authorities, they suggest a worrying trend. "Most of the demand still seems to come from the west, but increasingly you hear of collectors in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE," says a European archaeologist based in Bahrain.