Trafic d'art : le trésor de guerre du terrorisme

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Vendredi 24 juin 2011 de 12h30 à 13h25 sur Canal+ Décalé
Trafic d'art : le trésor de guerre du terrorisme - Une enquête de Romain Bolzinger.

Berceau de l'une des plus anciennes civilisations au monde, l'Irak est une mine d'or pour les archéologues : le sous-sol de Mésopotamie regorge de vestiges qui se négocient très cher dans les salles des ventes occidentales. Or, certains objets sont issus de fouilles illégales. A la chute de Saddam Hussein, le chaos a permis le pillage des musées de Bagdad. Au Liban, berceau de la civilisation phénicienne, le trafic d'art finance le Hezbollah. Le monde très fermé des collectionneurs d'art ne s'embarrasse pas de ces «détails». Milliardaires passionnés, galeristes fortunés et antiquaires sans scrupules font affaire. [...] Ironie de l'Histoire : les descendants des Sumériens, Assyriens et Babyloniens, fondateurs de notre civilisation, participent involontairement à sa destruction via un trafic d'antiquités qui finance le terrorisme le plus sanglant ! C'est la piste suivie par cette enquête passionnante et rigoureuse qui nous mène d'Irak au Liban, en passant par les salles de vente les plus réputées et les moins scrupuleuses à travers deux exemples très concrets.

En 2005 se vend à Drouot une statuette sumérienne d'une provenance douteuse, accompagnée d'un certificat suspect. Un cas d'école. Le commissaire-priseur auteur de cette forfaiture siège au Conseil des ventes volontaires censé sanctionner ces pratiques... L'Irak réclame en vain la restitution de la statuette. Personne ne bouge, alors qu'il a suffi d'un coup de fil à Romain Bolzinger pour vérifier, auprès des héritiers du collectionneur auquel aurait appartenu cette statuette, qu'ils ne l'ont jamais vue. Tout comme, d'un saut d'avion à New York, le journaliste débusque le galeriste trafiquant ayant pignon sur Madison Avenue et coutumier des descentes du FBI. Puis Romain Bolzinger se rend au Liban, dans le fief du Hezbollah, qui se comporte en parrain des transactions issues du pillage des sites archéologiques. Le mouvement terroriste est le plus gros fourgue de la collection du milliardaire américain James Ferrell, capable de publier sans état d'âme, et en toute impunité, un catalogue de deux cents pièces maîtresses sans pedigree.

And here's an estimate of a "statistic" for David Gill's current survey of opinions:

Avec 6 milliards de dollars, le trafic d'oeuvres d'art arrive en troisième position, juste après la drogue et les armes.

There is a video interview with the programme's author here:

Interview de Romain Bolzinger - Trafic d'art przez tacpresse

Here is the book to which he refers: Treasures of the Ferrell Collection by Jeffrey Spier.
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Hands off the Cunies: US Ruling in Legal Battle Over Iranian Antiquities

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This is more fully covered with legalese in Derek Fincham's blog (where I picked up the story), so I will just signal the next development in the unusual case involving Iranian antiquities in the US:

Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute won a victory on Tuesday in their efforts to maintain possession of thousands of ancient Iranian artifacts. In a ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed a lower court's order that might have handed the artifacts over to several American victims of a 1997 terrorist bombing in Jerusalem.

(David Glenn, 'U. of Chicago and Museums Win Key Ruling in Legal Battle Over Iranian Antiquities', The Chronicle of Higher Education March 29, 2011)

Here is the News for Dullards

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Newscaster-for-dullard-coin-collectors-unable-to-discern-when-the-wool-is-being-pulled-over-their-eyes Peter Tompa wrote a shock-horror expose for a coiney rag supported by Lanz, Gorny und Mosch und Fritz Rudolf Künker GmbH & Co.of the recent SAFE event I reported elsewhere (P. Tompa, 'U.S. Law Enforcement Accepts Award from Anti-Collector Advocacy Group' Coins Weekly). It begins as it means to go on:

An anti-collector advocacy group has awarded two former and two current members of U.S. law enforcement honorary awards for their efforts to stamp out the illicit trade in antiquities. The group, Saving Antiquities for Everyone or SAFE, has argued that unprovenanced artifacts, including those as common as ancient coins, should be considered “stolen” from countries such as China, Cyprus, Greece and Italy.

Is SAFE "anti collecting" or anti-no-questions-asked collecting and anti-looting advocacy group? I rather think it is the latter. Also I would be interested in seeing the lawyer's take on where SAFE has said that "unprovenanced artifacts, including those as common as ancient coins, should be considered “stolen” from countries such as China, Cyprus, Greece and Italy". Where, Mr Tompa? Nevertheless where do all those unprovenanced coins "surfacing" (from underground) on the market come from? Given the number of coins we know have been coming into the US from Bulgaria at least some will be stolen (no inverted commas) from Bulgarian sites, won't they? Which ones, well the dealers who sold them are unlikely to reveal that aren't they? Would there be any ACCG members among them, I wonder?

Well, US ancient dugup coin collectors seem to be dullards as they routinely let this sort of thing pass without comment or challenge. Likewise they are unlikely to see through the ambiguities of the lawyer's hardly-silver-tongued discussion of the following statement:

Senior Special Agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement James McAndrew, [stated], "Stolen and looted art trade sums up to almost $6 billion," and that "In many cases, the money is used to finance terrorism activities".

The first is nonsense says Tompa because Kate Fitzgibbon in a book Tompa likes to quote (because he has a free copy as he has a chapter in it too) says: “Press and public statements about the antiquities market often cite estimates of a billion or more dollars per year..." who spotted the difference between "art trade" (Picasso, Warhol, Tracy Emin and Damian Hirst) and "antiquities market"? Tompa is hoping nobody did, as he builds his case on it. Well it is a shame for him that not everybody has the lack of critical facilities it takes to collect artefacts no-questions-asked...

Tompa reckons he knows better than federal government employee Senior Special Agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement James McAndrew, who must be mistaken when he asserts that artefact sales are one of the sources used by groups like the Taliban to support terrorism because Wikileaks only mentions antiquities "sixteen times". Well, actually the connections between antiquity sales and all sorts of unsavoury business practices really do go a little beyond what we can learn (or not) from wikileaks. It's not exactly something antuiquity dealers are going to be trumpeting from the rooftops - but then how IS it that those huge numbers of artefacts are somehow getting across those borders? Somebody has the "connections" and resources to engage in illicit activity on a huge scale with impunity. Are all these REALLY the people the majority of clients of Mr Tompa's dealer sidekicks would want to be buying artefacts from? Just think about it.

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Blood Antiquities: The Afghan Taliban and the Ancient Artefacts they've Sold

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Fox News: Afghan Taliban Hang 7-Year-Old Boy to Punish Family
June 11, 2010. And which ancient coin collectors have coins in their homes from John Rieske's so-called "Taliban Hoard" allegedly sold by these people to raise revenue for their activities? What "stories" lie behind all those dugup ancient artefacts collected "no-questions-asked" from those supplied by law-breakers and sometimes organized criminal gangs?

Collectors of ancient artefacts do not know where they come from. They shut their eyes to the consequences of not knowing where their artefacts came from, whose hands they passed through, what activities the funds raised were being used to support. They delude themselves that every time they buy an ancient dugup artefact no-questions-asked they are doing everybody a good turn by providing an artefact with a "good home", that their money might be feeding somebody's starving family. That this particular object "most probably/must have" come from an "old collection" and not some criminal-funding archaeological looting spree. That's what they prefer to think. So much so that they "prefer to think" this more than insisting on finding out the true facts before buying.

Nevertheless many collectors today have blood antiquities in their proudly displayed collections. Which ones? They'd rather not know.

Vignette: Antiquity collectors prefer to keep what they call "politics" out of their discussion lists, they want to ignore the social and political context in which collecting exists, it is more comfortable that way. But is is realistic?

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Sartorial Elegance in the Field...

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This is how the British gentleman "takes the air in the country" these days. The very picture of sartorial elegance: townie in baggy track suit bottom tailored to go over the wellies, rustling polyester knee-length hooded anorak carefully colour coordinated to blend in with the background, fluffy yellow mittens, squeaking box on a stick and his own pooper scooper.

I wonder how much of the archaeological record of this piece of grassland he took home?

Are those yellow spots wild flowers he seems to be trampling? Were they recorded too?

Photo: Courtesy Heritage Action. Twywell/Slipton, Northants Commercial Artefact Hunting Rally.

The Blood Antiquities of 9/11 Who Bought Them?

According to reports in the autumn issue of the Journal of Art Crime, based on information gathered by the German secret service, it was reported that in 1999 terrorist Mohamed Atta had allegedly tried to make some money dealing artefacts from Afghanistan to a German archaeologist. While the archaeologist did not buy them, it seems somebody else who has not come forward probably did.

Atta had moved to Germany from his native Cairo in 1992 to study at the Hamburg University of Technology. It was there that he became increasingly radicalised, eventually forming the so-called Hamburg Cell of terrorists who organ­ised the 2001 attacks on the US. Atta then spent several months in Afghanistan in late 1999 when he met Osama bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda leaders and trained to be a terrorist. Here, if the reports are to be believed, he might have made arrangements to sell looted Afghan antiquities in Germany, apparently in order to fund flying lessons in the United States. We have reports of one such attempted transaction, there may have been more. In 1999, Atta is said to have approached an archaeologist at the University of Göttingen offering him artefacts for sale. The unidentified researcher declined the offer. Presumably however somebody else less concerned about the ethics of obtaining such items may have accepted, maybe a German private collector. As we know somehow Atta raised the money for his flying lessons, and as a result two years after it has been suggested that he'd been peddling antiquities to no-questions-asked buyers, was the lead highjacker in the September 11th attack on the World Trade Centre.

This is the problem with the no-questions-asked market, collectors have no way of learning into whose money the money they pay for decontextualised artefacts goes, and what it will be used for. They fondly imagine that they might be "feeding starving families" in some poor village somewhere, but evidence shows that by the second decade of the current millennium, much of the trade in such items is in reality in the hands of organized criminal groups and that some of the money is going to support the activities of militants. Whoever ultimately bought the blood antiquities reportedly being offered by Atta probably does not even know it, and that it was their that their money was used to finance the 2001 attacks on the lives of innocent people. I bet the majority of antiquities dealers and collectors would not even care that this might be the case - if they cared, they would be much more careful about what they buy and from whom.