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As the third largest illicit business in the world (after drugs and organized crime), the black-market antiquities trade stretches from local bands of looters to larger gangs and networks (who are often involved in drug trafficking) to auction houses and dealers in Switzerland, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Turkey, and elsewhere. Looted goods typically are smuggled across borders and change hands many times, making their origins murky by the time they reach their ultimate destination: a private collector. Since the 1970s, organizations like UNESCO have pushed for tighter controls on what museums consider acceptable purchases, and the International Council of Museums has issued ethical guidelines for dealers. But the age-old illegal trade is being fueled by new factors. The Internet has provided a hard-to-control forum for illicit auctions: and advances in technology have given looters better tools to find treasures in tombs and other archaeological sites. Exploitation of sites in Asia and Africa, in particular, is booming. Because the trade is clandestine, experts say it is nearly impossible to define the size of the market. Estimates range widely, to as high as $4 billion, said Dr. Neil Brodie of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. NBC news correspondent Kevin Tibbles said in an article about the trade in 1999: The priceless artifacts are not simply being scooped up and dumped onto a black market to be peddled in the antique and curio shops of Western Europe and North America. Nicholas Postgate of England’s Cambridge University says the black market also includes unscrupulous dealers who pass the goods on to wealthy collectors for huge sums. “Sometimes it may be obvious to any reasonable person that the artifact must have been stolen,” he says. "But because it can’t be [proven] a dealer will say, ‘Well, why should I worry?’ [The artifacts] are gone, and are presumably in some collector’s collection out of sight of the rest of the world,” Postgate says. The network of illicit antiquities dealing in Iraq is also well developed; thousands of antiquities had disappeared from the country even before the recent war. To those who argue that the illicit trade brings economic benefit to hard-pressed local communities, the reality of the long-term situation is quite different. According to Stealing History: The Illicit Trade in Cultural Material, “a fossil turtle bought from its finder in Brazil for $10 fetched $16,000 in Europe.… But the story does not end there. Once commodified on the Western market, objects continue to circulate for years, perhaps centuries, generating money in transaction after transaction. None of this money goes to the original finders or owners or their descendants. And this point is critical. Some say…no one could complain of people’s selling pots or fossils to help feed their families. But if culture is regarded as an economic resource, then selling it abroad is a poor strategy of exploitation. Cultural heritage is, after all, a non-renewable resource.” Law-enforcement agencies around the globe retrieve only a tiny percentage of major stolen items. The illicit antiquities trade is a low priority. As a result, the black market in art and antiquities has persisted for centuries, plundering the world’s museums and archaeological sites for personal profit. WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT IRAQ’S CULTURAL TREASURES? WHAT HAPPENED TO ANTIQUITIES IN IRAQ ? HOW WERE TREASURES PLUNDERED IN THE MUSEUMS? |
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