Ask Lyndel Prott about the apparent destruction of Buddhist images in Afghanistan, and she flinches as if she’d been hit.
“The international community is scandalized, and is really trying to stop it,” she said. Afghanistan’s extremist Taliban regime “says these images are only stones. Well, if they’re only stones, then why must they be destroyed?”
Prott and other officials of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization begin a four-day meeting in Cambodia this morning to discuss the protection of cultural heritage and how countries can recover stolen art.
Cases like Afghanistan are particularly troublesome, Prott said, because while there’s always at least hope that stolen artifacts can be recovered, Afghanistan’s Buddhist heritage may soon be gone forever, reduced to rubble.
Not since the Red Guard’s cultural revolution in China has a government targeted its own heritage on such a scale, she said.
The situation shows that sometimes Unesco’s biggest tool—moral persuasion—just isn’t big enough, she said. Despite four years of effort, officials could not dissuade the Taliban from destroying the images.
This morning, more than 60 art experts and delegates from 22 countries will convene at the Hotel Le Royal for a conference on returning stolen artifacts to their home countries.
Prott, director of the international standards unit of Unesco’s Division of Cultural Heritage, said it’s the first time a meeting has been held in Asia since Unesco formed a committee on the issue in 1978.
Cambodia, with its fabulous cultural heritage, was a logical site for the meeting. It has experienced virtually all the stresses that lead to looting: it was occupied by a colonial power, it suffered through decades of war, and today has corrupt elements in the government and an undereducated population desperate for money, Prott said.
“Cambodia has massive problems in the international trafficking of stolen art, and it can’t be stopped without international cooperation,” Prott said.
But scores of other countries face similar problems that can date back a century or more, to when developed nations like Britain, France and Germany treated developing countries as their personal shopping centers, Prott said. Explorers and colonial officials were praised—at least in their home countries—for carting off temples, statues, carvings and other artwork, not to mention archaeological treasures.
“There was a tremendous rivalry between the British, French and Germans, which is why they all have wonderful national collections today,” Prott said.
The Unesco committee, which meets every two years, was established as a forum to sort out disputes between nations. One famous case involves marble friezes from the Parthenon in Greece that reside today in the British Museum.
The Unesco committee has been dealing with that incident since 1985, and it will be on the agenda again today, along with the Bogazkoy sphinx, which Turkey wants Germany to return.
“We’re not saying that every single piece of art must go back to its country of origin, not at all,” Prott said.
But at the very least, she said, each country should have a national collection for its own residents to view that fairly represents its cultural heritage.
It’s hardly fair to have the world’s best collection of Khmer art in, say, Paris, if few Khmers will ever get to see it, she said.
But in the last 25 years, attitudes have changed significantly. “In 1970, major museums would say, ‘Our job is to get the best collection we can, and Unesco should not get in our way,’” Prott said.
Today, some of those same museums have returned pieces that proved to have been stolen from other countries, and increasing numbers of private collectors contact Unesco to say they have something they would like to return.
Although moral persuasion appears to have failed in Afghanistan, it is increasingly effective elsewhere, Prott said. Unesco has drawn up an International Code of Ethics for Dealers in Cultural Property.
Dealers who promise not to deal in stolen goods—and who agree to return stolen goods that come into their possession—can post a logo in their shop windows that publicizes that fact
Unesco has also produced a series of postcards bearing full-color reproductions of handsome stolen artwork. Most bear the word “MISSING,” although one, a 10th-century Chinese sculptured wall panel stolen in 1994 from a tomb in China, says “FOUND.”
It turned up in an auction catalog in the US in February 2000.
The postcards all bear the same legend, in English and French: “NO to illicit traffic in cultural property.”
Unesco also hopes to set up a fund, with contributions from developed nations, to help the poorer countries reclaim some of their artifacts. Shipping a priceless Buddha halfway around the world can be expensive, and a dealer or collector shamed into giving it up may not feel like paying the freight.
Or the home country might not have a safe place to keep the artwork, leading to the risk that it might be stolen again.
Other issues likely to be discussed include looting in Iraq, lingering disputes involving artwork “displaced” during World War II and how to better educate the public that looting is a crime.
The Unesco committee is also promoting a uniform system for all countries to record artwork still in their possession, so that they can be more easily traced if they disappear.
Delegates this week will discuss the Object ID program, and how to convince police, art dealers and museum curators to take part.
Prott is optimistic that the art world—particularly the high-end dealers and museums—will be increasingly cooperative.
“You really can moralize the marketplace,” she said. “Just the threat can be enough. These people really don’t want bad publicity.”
