Baghdad loot -- so where is it?

"Where's the loot?" asks this article in the Washington Post:

Despite scattered rumors of artifacts turning up from Tehran to Paris, not a single one of the 90,000 or 120,000 or 170,000 plundered artifacts -- no one knows for sure how many -- is known to have been offered for sale anywhere in the world. And investigators and legitimate art dealers think they know why.

If not still stashed in Baghdad, the pieces are already trickling out of the country in trucks and suitcases, headed for a shadowy world of high-end, high-risk collectors of such loot who fancy themselves art connoisseurs and get a charge from owning forbidden objects. . .

"They're not going to try to get this stuff out of the country right away. I think they're going to sit on it until some of the pressure dies down," said Robert Wittman, an FBI agent who has worked on several cases of art and antiquities theft and is headed to Iraq next week. . .

With a mix of educated guesswork, speculation and solid knowledge of how the trade in looted antiquities works, dealers and industry-watchers are starting to piece together scenarios about where the plundered objects might be headed. In the process, many are concluding that chances are good some might be recovered.

Perhaps eventually, but by all prior indications (as noted later in the article), not likely anytime soon. Art loot from the WW2 era is still coming out of the woodwork, and it should also be kept in mind that dealers with deep pockets often keep artworks in inventory for decades.

In legitimate markets, "the major pieces are absolutely unsellable because they're so well known," said Jerome Eisenberg, owner of New York's Royal-Athena Galleries and founding editor of Minerva magazine, which covers the antiquities business. "But I could visualize some multimillionaire hiding a piece away and gloating over it." Looters and smugglers sometimes wait years for market conditions to improve before selling their plunder. Items looted more than a decade ago in Iraq during the first Gulf War are still "dripping onto the market," Eisenberg said. . .

The possibility of damage to the pieces is extremely great now, as is the temptation for looters to melt down gold artifacts that are too well known to sell -- a fate too horrible to contemplate for many. . .

Looters first swept through the Baghdad museum on April 10, barely 24 hours after U.S. tanks pushed into the city center. Museum officials have said the first wave of looters went straight for the most valuable objects, including clay tablets with some of the oldest writing known to man, and a 4,330-year-old bust of an Akkadian king that is the earliest known copper casting in existence.

Once the most valuable pieces were gone, more looters picked through the rest for the next two days, grabbing, bagging or smashing countless smaller objects including pottery, coins and statuettes. . .

Some of the looters knew the combinations to locks on cases or carried glass cutters, suggesting they were experienced pillagers working with help from current or former museum employees. In another sign it was no mere smash-and-grab operation, the looters took pains to destroy thousands of documents in the museum's archives, making it much more difficult for curators to give police information or images that could be used to recover the pieces. Some are so well known that identifying documents aren't needed; thousands more are now gone without a trace.

"Everything about it sounds like an inside job, at least in the beginning. They knew which objects to go for, they had the combinations, and they destroyed the documentation. It was done by people who obviously had some knowledge of antiquities," said dealer Torkom Demirjian, who sells expensive Greek, Roman and Near Eastern artifacts at his Ariadne Gallery in New York. "Clearly they did have [buyers] in mind."

Judging from his knowledge of trade routes for illicit antiquities, Demirjian said the Iraqi loot would probably find its way overland in trucks or on foot to Iran and from there by plane to Japan and Western Europe. Syria is not a likely destination because U.S. troops are keeping close tabs on the border -- not to keep loot from flowing out but to prevent weapons and suicide bombers from coming in.

"I don't think much of it is going to turn up on the market soon," he said. "This was not some sleepy act that happened when no one was watching. This was a barbaric act that happened in front of the whole world, and no one can claim ignorance about it. . .

Dealers said few of the Iraqi museum objects would reach the United States because of tight customs controls and federal laws involving stolen property. More likely destinations would be Switzerland, known as a transshipment point for looted antiquities, and other European countries, such as Germany and Belgium, that have not signed or ratified a 1970 international treaty intended to combat the trade in illicit antiquities, dealers said. The United States ratified it in 1983, France in 1997 and Britain last year. . .

Demirjian speculated that the main market for Iraqi loot would be Japan, which he said has a culture of secrecy among collectors, little interaction with museums and a long-standing taste for Mesopotamian antiquities.

Posted by David on April 23, 2003 10:06 AM