Last February, Claude Jacques made an impassioned appeal for help on the conservation of Angkor’s monuments during a meeting in Siem Reap. Two steles, or stone tablets, had recently been sold in the US and one was on sale in Belgium, said the expert in ancient Khmer inscriptions.
Those steles—which are Cambodia’s only written records before the 15th century—were priced from $8,000 to $80,000.
Jacques was not asking private collectors to return artifacts for which they had paid thousands of dollars. He just wanted them to reveal where in Cambodia they had been found and let researchers copy the ancient-Khmer texts for the country’s archives. Jacques’ pledge to owners had gone unanswered, which prompted him to make his appeal at the meeting.
Keeping them inaccessible amounts to “stealing Cambodia’s history,” Jacques said.
So is looting prehistoric sites, said Canadian archeologist Dougald O’Reilly.
As far back as the Stone Age 6,000 years ago, Cambodia’s territory was occupied, he said. But little is known about those peoples’ lives, or the interaction between people who spoke Mon-Khmer languages and the Chams to the east, or the Austro-Asians in the south, said O’Reilly. Excavating prehistoric sites, as he has been doing in Banteay Meanchey province since 2000, can help fill the gaps.
While the government and international organizations have focused on curbing looting in Angkor Archeological Park and now are turning their attention to remote locations with large monuments, the hundreds of Iron-Age sites of two millennia ago have become vulnerable.
The extent of looting at some sites led O’Reilly to launch the NGO HeritageWatch, whose activities will include working with villagers so that they can benefit from a site without having to loot it. This may take the form of villagers managing small museums or exhibits on site, he said.
Cambodian artifacts have more or less fallen prey to fashion in the art collection world. In the 1960s, African objects were very much in vogue, said Etienne Clement, representative of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in Cambodia.
During that decade, Cambodia had no difficulty maintaining a ban on antiquity exports, said Son Soubert, an archeologist and a member of the Constitutional Council. Borders were closed, to the east due to the US war in Vietnam, and to the west because of tense relations with Thailand, he said.
In the 1970s, collectors became interested in South American and Asian pieces, and the popularity of Asian objects kept growing in the 1980s and 1990s, said Clement.
But attitudes have changed since Unesco adopted its 1970 convention on the illegal trade of cultural properties, he said. Since most countries have adopted it, placing the convention among universally recognized, international laws, “it is no longer politically correct to sell or buy objects stolen from museums,” said Clement, a lawyer who was in the Unesco’s convention section for nearly 10 years before coming to Cambodia.
The convention stipulates that, at the request of a government or even of an individual, a country will investigate, seize and return any artifact previously in a museum or a private collection, he said.
If an undocumented object was illegally taken out of a country, such as sculptures found deep in Cambodia’s jungle, the destination country of the object has an obligation to investigate, but not to return it, said Clement. In a couple of cases, French art dealers chose to send sculptures back to Cambodia, he said.
These international investigations involve no cost on the part of countries requesting them. However, according to the convention, an owner can claim compensation if he can prove that he was unaware of having purchased a stolen or smuggled antiquity, said Clement.
Thailand opposed the very principle of paying to recover artifacts and has refused to sign the Unesco convention, he said. But an agreement between that country and Cambodia has put an end to smuggled Khmer art being sold openly in Thailand, as was the case a few years ago, said Clement. “The situation has greatly improved,” he said.
Today, Singapore and Hong Kong serve as transit cities for a great deal of the illicit art trade that used to be handled in Bangkok, he said.
The US adopted the Unesco convention in 1983 with a law that added a step to its implementation, making it apply only to antiquities of countries specifically designated. As of January, import restrictions on archeological and ethnological material were in effect for objects from nine countries including Bolivia, Cyprus, Italy and Mali.
In December 1999, the US law extended to Cambodian stone antiquities, according to the US Embassy. Following the US-Cambodian agreement signed in September, it now covers ceramic and metal objects as well.
The Unesco convention is not retroactive, said Clement. It would not apply to objects acquired by collectors decades ago, which occasionally come on the market. This leaves the possibility of a country going to court to claim an antiquity, he said.
