The
term “tomb raider” brings to mind a scantily clad video game heroine
before most people associate it with black-clad fundamentalist
terrorists. But the people who illegally excavate archaeological sites
rarely wear daisy dukes while brachiating their way, vine to vine,
across subterranean chasms. The world of antiquities looting has
crossed into the realm of terrorism—the ancient pot you buy on eBay, or
at a prestigious auction house, might be funding jihadists.
The
union of art and terrorism is nothing new. In the 1970s, IRA
operatives stole art on several occasions from Irish private
collections, in order to sell or swap for the release of political
prisoners. In 1999, Mohammed Atta, one of the masterminds behind the
9/11 attacks, flew to Germany with photographs of looted Afghan
antiquities, which he sought to sell in order, in his own words, “to buy
a plane” that would have been crashed into American buildings. Just a
few weeks ago, ISIS bulldozed the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud and
smashed statues at a museum in Mosul, destroying pre-Islamic monuments
and artifacts, while news filtered out that they were earning “as much
as tens of millions” by selling antiquities looted from territory in
occupied Syria alone, to foreign buyers. Just days ago, terrorists
stormed a museum in Tunisia and killed everyone they found inside.
Stolen art and looted antiquities fund terrorist groups. So why has it
taken so long for the world to take this seriously, or even notice?
Of
course, this is old news to those of us who study art crime. As early
as 2005, U.S. Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos and colleagues presented
evidence, much of it still classified due to active operations, at the
annual Interpol conference in Lyon on stolen works of art, that
terrorist groups were funding their activities by selling looted
antiquities abroad. At the same meeting, it was announced that art
crime was perhaps the third-highest-grossing criminal trade worldwide,
behind only the drug and arms trades. This was also the year when Der
Spiegel broke the news about Mohammed Atta trying to sell looted
antiquities in a precursor to the hijacking plan for 9/11.
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But it is only now, 10 years later, in 2015, when
ISIS, with their savvy terror-marketing videos of executions of people,
statues and monuments, that the world has taken proper notice. ISIS’s
activities are just the latest chapter in the story of art and
terrorism, which often mixes the idea that certain artworks have a
corrosive influence and must be destroyed, with the recognition that
this artwork has high value for collectors who love it, and can be
sold. ISIS accepts the value of antiquities but also destroys them,
finding it unacceptable for non-traditional, non-Islamic art to exist
within its territories of conquest. This lack of logic sounds spookily
similar to the indecisive Nazi theories on “degenerate art,” stealing as
much as they could, selling as much of that as they could (much of it
to prominent American and British collectors, who passed cash to the
Nazi war effort), and burning the rest in bonfires. The art they didn’t
like was to be destroyed, unless they could profit from it. Even more
macabre, this attitude to art ran parallel to Nazi views on
concentration camp victims—those of “lesser races” were not killed
outright, but put to work and used as an economic commodity, as long as
they could reasonably be sustained, before being killed or allowed to
die off. It is an easy pairing to see ISIS and Nazis as peas in a pod:
the former obsessed with a warped interpretation of a real religion, the
latter having cobbled together their own pseudo-spiritual amalgam of
white supremacist beliefs.
If experts have known about art funding terrorism for at least 10 years, why is the media talking about it only now?
Three
momentous things happened just weeks ago, in the fight against
terrorists and the theft and destruction of art, both in direct reaction
to ISIS’s YouTube-friendly videos of iconoclasm (the destruction of art
and monuments for symbolic reasons). First, Ahmed Al-Tayed, grand imam
of the Egyptian Islamic Institute Al-Azhar, issued a fatwa forbidding
the destruction of ancient artifacts. The Anglophone world is used to
hearing about fatwas calling for murders, like the one issued against
author Salman Rushdie, though the term simply describes a learned
interpretation of Islamic religious law in the form of a decree, a
spiritual parallel to a Supreme Court ruling on interpreting the U.S.
Constitution. Here was a decree from the “foremost authority of Sunni
Islam,” prohibiting the destruction of artifacts. As Al-Azhar declared
in its official statement, “These artifacts have important cultural and
historical significance. They are an important part of our collective
legacy that must not be harmed.” The statement went on to point out
ISIS’s hypocrisy, on the one hand selling ancient artifacts for enormous
cash profit, on the other destroying them on principle as non-Islamic
“idols.” Second, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed
Resolution 2199, which condemned ISIS, al-Qaida and other terrorist
groups for using “the looting and smuggling of cultural heritage [as a
means to fund] recruitment efforts and strengthen their operational
capability to organize and carry out terrorist attacks.” This was
quickly followed by G-7’s Financial Action Task-Force announcing that
ISIS might “have earned as much as tens of millions” by selling
antiquities looted from Syrian territory alone, to buyers abroad. And
just days ago, terrorists entered a museum in Tunisia and shot everyone
they found inside who did not look like one of them.
The reason
for the delay in links to art and terrorism being taken seriously has to
do with statistics, or lack of them. There are tens of thousands of
art thefts reported each year worldwide, and far more go unreported.
Particularly, instances of antiquities illegally excavated are nearly
impossible to monitor, because the objects extracted from ancient tombs
have never existed before for modern humans—they were last seen when
they were buried, perhaps thousands of years ago. So no one knows what
was pulled out of the ground by tomb raiders—authorities might not even
find the empty tombs or sites. So we really have no idea of the scale
of the problem, only that it is indeed vast. With more anecdotal
evidence than empirical, authorities have taken a “maybe—let’s see”
approach. But ISIS’s P.R. savvy has made the problem impossible to
ignore, whomping anyone with a computer screen on the head with videos
of grotesque devastation, to people and artworks.
The extent of
the damage done to Nimrud this March is impossible to tell. It may be
that ISIS made a show of demolishing a portion of the ruined city, and
left it at that, as it seems they did at the museum in Mosul—just enough
to inspire terror, like their hostage execution videos. Never mind the
loopy logic of blaming a civilization that flourished some 2,000 years
before the birth of Mohammed, and whose DNA was likely woven densely
into the fabric of the Prophet’s, for failing to be Islamic. That’s
like destroying a Gutenberg Bible because it was not in a Kindle.
If
it can be said that there is a thimble-full of lemonade to be made out
of the ISIS bagful of lemons, it is that their focus on high-visibility
targets for their activities has made protecting cultural heritage, and
keeping saleable antiquities out of terrorist hands, a priority. So,
now that we have governmental attention, what can (or should) be done?
The
first step is to stop buying antiquities from ISIS-occupied
territories. Period. Unless an object has a documented history of
having been legally excavated and exported decades ago, it should not be
touched with a 10-foot pole. That may seem painfully obvious, but no
terrorist would be able to turn pots and statues into cash unless there
was someone handing cash to them in exchange. Armies already map out
culturally sensitive zones to preserve, whenever possible, to avoid
collateral damage while fighting. But such sites should likewise now be
targeted for protection. Local guards should be posted at known
archaeological sites and museums—studies have shown that trained,
reasonably paid locals make for the best security in such situations.
While debates continue as to whether such guards should be armed, in
situations like the recent Tunisian museum attack, it was the fact that
the armed guards were absent (one hadn’t shown up for work, another was
on break) that the assailants were able to waltz into the museum at
all. One wonders what would have happened if the guards had been in
place. The main lessons are to protect cultural heritage sites as you
would any high-price, saleable commodity that you do not want to fall
into terrorist hands. A museum can be worth as much as an oil field,
provided there is someone willing to buy what has been stolen from it.
Which brings us to the second point: stop buying anything that could have come from terrorist-occupied territories.
Whether
the concern is the preservation of cultural heritage from obliteration,
or keeping cash from its sale out of the hands of terrorists, art,
antiquities and monuments must be protected. It is not just the art
that is at stake.
A
militant hammers away at a face on a wall in Hatra, a large fortified
city recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site, 68 miles southwest of
Mosul, Iraq. (Credit: AP)
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