Palmyra in early May 2015 before the arrival
of Da’ish (ISIS). As of early October 2015 it
is not known precisely what has been spared. (Photo: fplamb)
"it’s a clarion call for each of us to join the
growing public support for confronting ‘looting to order’ and ‘cultural
racketeering’ in Syria
to preserve and protect our shared culture heritage for those who follow
us"
by Franklin Lamb
Damascus
One of the many gut-wrenching dimensions of the soon
to be five-year Syrian crisis is that whenever one surveys the conflict on the
ground and concludes that the maelstrom can’t possibly get any worse, it
plummets deeper into the abyss. The condition of people in Syria has never
been worse in modern times.
This is also the case with the spreading cultural
cleansing of our shared global heritage in Syria which this observer views as
a precursor to ethnic cleansing. This scourge has been documented in detail by
studies from the UN, EU, Archaeologists, Syria’s Directorate General of
Museums and Antiquities (DGAM) and others who closely monitor the desecration,
looting and destruction at archaeological sites. According to the Association
for the Protection of Syrian Archaeology (APSA) and other surveys, more than 1/3
of Syria’s 10,000 archaeological sites are currently under the control of
Da’ish (ISIS) who are looting them on an industrial scale for sale globally on
the black market. It is not known with precision which or how many other Islamist
nihilist militias are controlling other sites. A new report from the US Congress reports that 30,000 people have traveled,
including 250 from the US,
to join terror groups in the Middle East and Isis
in particular, doubling the numbers of one year ago. “We are witnessing the
largest global convergence of jihadists in history,” the report warned.
According to the Antiquities Coalition, raising just
$1 million from illicit trafficking of historic artifact in Syria supplies
the group with more than 11,000 AK-47 machine guns or 1,250 rocket launchers.
This is one of the reasons why Satellite images are revealing that archaeological
sites in Syria
are increasingly dotted by thousands of illegal excavations.
It is recalled that the looting following the United
States-led 2003 invasion of Iraq
involved organized international gangs, sometimes with corrupt “Operation Iraqi
Freedom” coalition military personnel involved that were contracted to raid the
National Museum
in Baghdad and Mosul Museum.
Mosul Museum
director Bernadette Hanna-Metti and Mosul
Museum curator Saba al-Omari reported
that radio carrying looters also targeted specific antiquities at Nimrud, some with
“shopping lists” in hand. Site director Muzahim Mahmud reported that the
looters “ignored everything else, went right to that frieze” of a winged man
carrying a sponge and a holy plant, “and took it” in a customized looting
operation, fulfilling “orders from a buyer.”
The 18 statues that were intercepted as part of one
lot in Jordan during 2004
were determined to be filling orders from dealers and within weeks of the
looting of the National Museum in Baghdad,
US. Customs
intercepted an illicit shipment of 669 of its artifacts en route to an
antiquities dealer in New York.
But apart from police reports labeling these acts “looting to order”, “theft to
order”, “stolen to order” or “commissioned theft” no one has even been charged
with a crime. Going back to 2005, when al Qaeda was trafficking in looted
antiquities, it was second as a source of funding only to kidnappings and
ransom.
Similar cultural crimes are being committed today in Syria. It has
been documented that Da’ish (ISIS), and Jabhat a-Nusra (al-Nusra Front) use
WhatsApp and Skype (Parkinson, Albayrak, & Mavin, 2015), and some militia
are using smartphones (Sogue, 2014) as well as employing social-media savvy
experts around the world, often teenagers, to design and execute looted
antiquities marketing programs.
The financial incentives to looting are very powerful
such that to date the international community’s existing methods of prevention
are largely ineffective.
But we must not be idle bystanders to a fire sale of
our and Syria’s
national and historical heritage.
So what can we do now that the continuing destruction
of our cultural heritage has sparked a fresh round of global outrage? How can
it be harnessed to save other heritage sites under nihilist Da’ish control?
Short of defeating the entrenched jihadists militarily which appears highly
unlikely anytime soon?
The challenges are great. The tens of thousands of
foreign would-be jihadists who have now poured into Syria,
most to join the perceived “A-team-Varsity Squads” of Da’ish (ISIS)
and Jabhat Al Nusra. There is little evidence of success from international
efforts to diminish their ranks. Few on the ground are much impressed by the
new Russian hyped 4+1 planned coalition or the Russian proposed bilateral
coordination with the U.S.
against Islamic State. This is partly because currently, an average of about
1,000 foreign fighters are arriving every month ready to turn Syria into
Russia’s new “Afghanistan” with pledges to fight for as long as it takes to
expel Putin’s arriving forces. In the past year jihadists from 20 additional
countries have entered Syria
bringing to more than 100 the total number of countries with fighters in Syria.
Many suggestions have been heard by this observer in Syria including
from local officials and citizens who are on the front lines trying to preserve
and protect the cultural heritage that we all share. Some are proposing that
cultural heritage benefactors buy the looted objects off looters and errant
regular citizens and secure them in safety vaults somewhere until the fighting
ends. This has actually been done in Syria with modest success but given
its sensitivity, without much publicity. It has been reported that nearly
330,000 artifacts, many from lawless non-state actor areas, have been moved to
safety from imminent danger from jihadists and profiteers.
The Syrian government currently has 2,500 people
working to save Syria’s
past, on both sides in many parts of Syria. Fourteen DGAM employees have
been killed so far. It’s Director-General Dr. Abdul Karim has reported to this
observer and others that “We saved 99 per cent of the collection in our museums.
It’s good. It’s not just for the good of the government. It’s for the
opposition, for humanity, for all Syria. It is our common identity,
our common heritage.”
Ricardo J. Elia, an archaeologist at Boston
University, endorsed a moratorium on purchasing trafficked item, arguing that
“looting is a function of a system that runs on supply and demand. Would it not
be possible for museum associations, dealer associations, auction houses, and
private collections to say “look: this is a horrific crisis. Let’s just stop
these things. Let’s diminish the demand side.” To avoid collecting potentially
looted antiquities, Richard Stengel, US under Secretary of State for Public
Diplomacy and Public Affairs, recently proposed: “Don’t sell; don’t buy. That’s
the best solution.”
A similar proposal comes from American cultural
heritage lawyer Rick St. Hilaire who has prepared a proposal to avoid
purchasing “blood antiquities.” It also promotes as a protective measure a
“Don’t Buy” initiative backed by strict due diligence. It is worthy of
implementation and can be linked to the 2009 Code of Ethics for Collectors of
Ancient Artifacts authored by individual collectors that is being considered
again given our current cultural heritage crisis. It urges the public and all
buyers to protect archaeological heritage and uphold the law, check sources,
collect sensitively, recognize the collector’s role as custodian, keep
artifacts in one piece and consider the significance of groups of objects,
promote further study, and dispose of artifacts responsibly.
To achieve these goals, the ethics code highlights
common sense due diligence and acquisitions advice, including: “Ask the vendor
for all relevant paperwork relating to provenance, export etc. Take extra care
if collecting particular classes of object which have been subjected to
wide-scale recent looting. Verify a vendor’s reputation independently before
buying. Assure yourself that they are using due diligence in their trading
practices, and do not support those who knowingly sell fakes as authentic or
offer items of questionable provenance. Do not dismember any item, or acquire a
fragment which you believe to have been separated from a larger object except
through natural means. Consider the implications of buying an item from an associated
assemblage and the impact this could have on study. Liaise, where possible,
with the academic and broader communities about your artifacts.”
One encouraging sign that those destroying our
cultural heritage may be more apt to face legal accountability before the
International Criminal Court in The Hague is this month’s arrests and
extradition of the alleged Islamic extremist Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi also known
as “Abu Tourab” who the ICC claims was a member of Ansar Dine, an affiliate of
Al Qaida. He appeared on 9/30/2015 before the ICC and was formally charged with
involvement in the 2012 destruction of 14 of the 16 mausoleums and other
historic buildings including a Mosque, in Timbuktu,
Mali. The
entire city of Timbuktu, nicknamed the “City of 333 Saints’” is listed as a
World Heritage Site by UNESCO and during the 15th and 16th centuries, operated
180 schools and universities that received thousands of students from all over
the Muslim world. According to Corrine Dufka of Human Rights Watch’s Africa division, “The Abu Tourab case signals that there
will be a price to pay for destroying the world’s treasures.”
On a related matter, during his 9/28/2015 UN General
Assembly address, Ban Ki-moon called for the Syrian crisis to be referred to
the International Criminal Court. This would include jurisdiction over all
cultural heritage crimes committed at Syria’s archaeological sites.
Several encouraging and admirable public and private
initiatives are employing creative ways to protect Syria’s millennia-long cultural
heritage are currently underway as experts and locals scramble to save what
they can. Others are about to be launched, and all warrant our support.
.
Some of the current initiatives include, but are not
limited to the following.
The Million Image Database is a large-scale scholarly
project targeting both object documentation, and trafficked object
identification. The project is sending thousands of low-cost, easy-to-use 3-D
cameras to volunteers across the Middle East
to document sites and objects in their area. Images and videos collected in
this way are received for processing by the project’s technical team in the United Kingdom
via uploads to the project’s website. Some of these images will be used to
create detailed maps of Syrian sites, and to create 3-D models of buildings and
artifacts that will be usable as blueprints for full-scale reconstruction. The
project website is closed to the public to protect volunteer’s anonymity and
also to ensure that the initiative remains a purely scholarly venture, not a
social media platform for activists, according to Alexy Karenowska, the
project’s director of technology. But she assures that as project progresses,
it will find a way to share storytelling from the material to the public. The
images are to be collated in a huge, publicly accessible database. Available to
all, and under development in collaboration with UNESCO, the vision for this
resource is for an ever-growing archaeological catalogue which brings together
scholarly information about sites and artifacts, raises awareness of cultural
heritage and cultural heritage preservation, and provides a new platform for
the identification of trafficked objects. The database will be integrable with
existing catalogues and lists of known missing or stolen items and employ the
latest image comparison and feature recognition based search technology,
removing the need for those inspecting suspect cargo or objects to have
specialist knowledge.
Another project would carry out far more detailed
scans of antiquities in Syria
using laser scanners. The scanners bounce lasers off the surface of objects in
the field, measuring millions of points a second to create a data set known as
a point cloud. The data can be used to create 3-D images accurate to two or three
millimeters to create models or virtual tours of the sites or allow full-scale
reconstructions. This project, called “Anqa,” the Arabic word for the phoenix,
the legendary bird that rises from the ashes, aims to laser-scan 200 objects in
Syria, Iraq and other
parts of the region, according to the California-based scanning company CyArk.
It hopes to work with DGAM and other antiquities agencies in Syria, as well as UNESCO, to deploy teams in Damascus and other
accessible areas.
A recently launched campaign is taking a more
low-tech approach aiming at directly protecting at least some sites. The
project, by the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), provides supplies
and funding to local experts and volunteers for crates and other items to store
artifacts and also sandbags to pack around unmovable structures to give some
protection against shelling or bombs. This, according to LeeAnn Gordon, project
manager for Conservation and Heritage Preservation at ASOR also using satellite
images to track destruction of antiquities. One problem this initiative has to
deal with is that US policy
toward Syria
prohibits the funding of governmental groups, thus limiting ASOR’s options in a
country divided between government-controlled, and jihadist held areas.
We can all help raise awareness in our communities
and instruct our politicians to tighten and enforce current national and
international laws and to ratify the instruments of international humanitarian
law that protect cultural heritage. Specifically the Convention for the
Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (The Hague 1954)
and its two Protocols (1954 and 1999), as well as the Convention on the Means
of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership
of Cultural Property (Paris 1970); to implement them swiftly and efficiently
into national legislation and in accord with their spirit and overarching goal
to preserve cultural heritage, and to observe and enforce them.
Irina Bokova, the Director of UNESCO has called on
governments to implement the U.N. Security Council’s Resolution 2199 which was
adopted in February of this year and lays out serious penalties for the illegal
importation of antiquities trafficked from regions under cultural threat.
Traveling around Syria one comes upon many heritage
unfunded preservation projects through the initiative of local private citizens
who love their country and want to preserve the cultural heritage of all of us.
Some are reportedly being accomplished in rebel held areas where there is
little technology and no resources. One of countless examples is the work of a
history teacher, Suleiman al-Eissa who lives in Busra Sham, one of UNESCO‘s six
World Heritage sites in Syria. As reported recently by the AP, Suleiman
al-Eissa, a history teacher leads a self-created “revolutionary” antiquities
department to protect the ruins in his hometown of Busra Sham in southern Daraa
province one of the six UNESCO World Heritage sites. Mr. Al-Eissa, like many
Syrians, is documenting in writing current damage at local archaeological sites
while guarding some sites from looting.
We can and must support new dedicated groups like
Heritage for Peace and the more than two dozen NGO’s recently formed that are
working to protect archaeological sites in Syria
and Iraq.
In each of our communities we can work on strengthening our national
capacities, training for soldiers, more resources, experts on the ground, and
better coordination with armed forces, Interpol, and other actors while
encouraging volunteer organizations willing to send international volunteers
experts as Cultural Heritage Monitors on the scene. Their work would be to
assess, protect, and investigate cultural property destruction and looting. All
this while working with locals of all religions and ethnicity who want to
protect our and their cultural heritage. In other words we need to establish
the cultural equivalent of the Red Cross and Blue Shield providing an emergency
response to cultural property at risk from armed conflict.
As Dr. Emma Cunliffe, an archaeologist at Oxford University
pointed out recently: “Today’s Monument’s Men are often volunteers. Some are
local people, such as the Syrian Association for Preserving Heritage and
Ancient Landmarks, who work in Aleppo (a UNESCO World
Heritage City)
to try and save the monuments and buildings there during the current conflict.
In 2006, America
formed a Committee of the Blue Shield, a group of individuals committed to the
protection of cultural property worldwide during armed conflict. The UK Committee
was established last year, and other committees are located across the world.”
And there are many others.
The growing global groundswell of popular support
spawning an international volunteer movement to confront and expel the
non-state actors endangering our cultural heritage in Syria is cause
for hope. And it’s a clarion call for each of us to join the growing public
support for confronting ‘looting to order’ and ‘cultural racketeering’ in Syria
to preserve and protect our shared culture heritage for those who follow us.
TRAITOR
Like father like son
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