How Iraq Can Recover Its Plundered Treasures

by Louis E.V. Nevaer

On Christmas Eve, 1985, 140 objects, including priceless jade and gold pieces from the Maya, Aztec, Zapotec and Mixtec cultures, were stolen from Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology and History. One piece alone, a Maya vase shaped like a monkey, was valued at $20 million.

With the cooperation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Interpol and the customs services of the United States and Canada, Mexican officials made every effort to ensure that the artifacts did not leave the country. "It was clear that we had to act quickly to notify museum officials, scholars and art dealers around the world about the stolen artifacts," Constance Lowenthal, then-director of the New York-based International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), said at the time. IFAR, the leading registry for stolen art, compiled and distributed a catalog of the Mexican treasures.

Such steps, combined with careful scrutiny at Mexican borders, prevented easy entry of the artifacts into the illicit market for antiquities, a multi-billion dollar global industry. Less than four years from the date of the theft, investigators from half a dozen nations and Mexican detectives located the artifacts -- incredibly, in their entirety -- in the possession of a drug trafficker.

Contrast this with the fate of Persian treasure spirited out of Iran during the last days of the Shah's rule. When the deposed Shah fled his country, he wandered the globe until, at the request of the Carter administration, Mexican president Lopez Portillo granted him and his entourage asylum. Spirited away to the colonial city of Cuernavaca, an hour south of Mexico City, the Shah sought to recreate his royal court -- including magnificent treasures plundered from Iran.

Raquel Romero, one of the few Mexicans who was entertained in Cuernavaca, recalled seeing "crates and crates" of Persian and Islamic art.

The Islamic Republic, denying that it had been looted, refused to provide a list of objects stolen, or their description. Inquiries from officials at UNESCO and from concerned Western scholars were ignored or dismissed by revolutionary officials as "the slander of infidels."

After the Shah's death in 1980, his family and cronies dispersed around the world -- and so did the stolen treasures. Hundreds if not thousands of pieces are still missing.

In Baghdad today, important questions remain about the extent of the museum's loss. Initial reports by Mohsen Hassan, the museum's deputy curator, put the number of objects stolen at "more than 170,000." This is a remarkable number, particularly given that so many artifacts were said to be plundered in "less than 48 hours."

Furthermore, officials at Iraq's Department of Antiquities spent six weeks before the start of the war removing thousands of the more valuable and important pieces for safekeeping. One Western scholar familiar with the museum says "no more than 40,000 to 50,000 objects" were left in the museum's 28 galleries.

Whatever the exact accounting, the nature of the looting that occurred in Baghdad inspires hope that these stolen treasures can be recovered.

It seems that two kinds of looters ransacked the museum. The majority, according to Hassan, appeared to be by "impoverished people from slums" in the eastern district of Baghdad, whose residents expressed their rage at Saddam Hussein by looting anything in sight. They stole for vengeance, and, as order is restored, can be convinced to return the artifacts.

It is not na•ve to appeal to people's sense of decency or to offer cash rewards -- $100 to $200 per item -- for these artifacts' safe return. Throughout Europe after WWII, officials appealed to people's honor and national pride to get them to return what had been stolen by the Nazis. Tens of thousands of priceless treasures were recovered in this way.

Mr. Hassan told reporters he also saw "well-dressed" looters helping themselves. "They knew what the most valued pieces in our collection were," he said.

Iraq's Department of Antiquities must quickly provide a complete catalog and description of what was stolen from its collection and alert the international art market.

It is here that coalition forces -- consistent with their requirements under the 1954 UNESCO Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict -- can secure the borders to prevent the removal of these treasures from Iraq. Simultaneously, UNESCO, Interpol, the European Union, the United States and Japan can work to prevent the importation of these artifacts into neighboring states.

If Iraq hopes to recover its cultural patrimony, it must follow the Mexican example, and not turn a blind eye as the Iranians, to humanity's detriment, have done.