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Looted Iraqi Relics Slow To Surface
These looted artifacts were displayed in May 2003 at Iraq's National Museum, two months after they had disappeared.
(By Murad Sezer -- Associated Press)
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Britain's draconian 2003 Iraq Sanctions Order has put the burden of proof on a dealer to show that an artifact is not stolen. The United States has lifted general trade sanctions on Iraq imposed after the Gulf War but left them in place for cultural property.
Neil Brodie, director of the Antiquities Research Center at Cambridge University's McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, credits the new British law with the collapse of the London market. "I thought it would go right to New York," he said in a telephone interview, "but it hasn't happened."
That is because "people here at the high end understand that this is illegal," said New York lawyer William Pearlstein, who frequently represents antiquities dealers, collectors and auction houses. "We have a very heavily policed antiquities market, and the message has gotten through."
Still, there appears to be no disagreement that looting continues. Until recently, what little evidence there was came from risky field trips by journalists, military reports from the Iraqi hinterland and the occasional helicopter flyover.
Stony Brook University archaeologist Elizabeth Stone, however, has been leading an effort to compare "before and after" satellite photographs of well-known sites in southern Iraq, and has found holes "denser than Swiss cheese."
The artifacts recovered from these sites are a grab bag that includes some cylinder seals, pottery, clay tablets, stone carvings and other small items. But a lot of it is probably valuable. Where is it going?
Stone suggested that somewhere "there are warehouses bulging at the seams," waiting for vigilance to relax and laws to expire. Pearlstein thinks the artifacts are traveling to "virtually unregulated" markets in the Persian Gulf states.
DePaul University's Patty Gerstenblith, an expert on cultural property law, believes the sanctions may have forced thieves to make a cost-benefit calculation. "It will be too dangerous for collectors to buy the well-known items," she said, and not worth the risk for smugglers to sell the cheap stuff.
