Preserving History

NEW YORK—U.S. Marine Corps Colonel Matthew Bogdanos was heading counterterrorism operations in Basra, Iraq, in 2003 when he heard about the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Also an assistant district attorney in New York with a master’s degree in classics from Columbia, Bogdanos took it upon himself to travel the hundreds of his miles to Baghdad and hunt down the stolen antiquities.

A brash, passionate, and compelling public speaker, Bogdanos, who co-wrote a book, Thieves of Baghdad, about his adventures, was selected to kick off a day-long event at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at New York’s Yeshiva University on Tuesday that brought together some of the top people wrangling with the complicated issues of cultural heritage. Filled with images of looted works, statistics, and words of inspiration, Bogdanos’s presentation set the tone for the day: Irreversible damage is happening right now, something needs to be done, and you, conference participants, are the ones to do it.

Titled “War and Peace: Art and Cultural Heritage Law in the 21st Century” and sponsored by the Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal and the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation (LCCHP), the symposium was notable for bringing together different sorts of specialists invested in protecting the world’s cultural treasures: archaeologists, curators, art market specialists, lawyers, and law students. Says moderator and Cardozo professor Lucille A. Roussin, “It will be a long time before you see another panel like this one where every single speaker is number one in their field.”

The conference’s goal was to discuss “how to prevent looting during times of both war and peace, how to deal with looted cultural material that enters into the international art market, and legal issues related to restitution of artworks,” and the program touched on three principal areas: the problem of looting in post-invasion Iraq, archaeology in the Americas, and the hot-button issue of World War II restitution.

Iraq
Panelist Donny George, former director of the Iraq Museum, put the rampant looting of the museum’s collections—and the issue of cultural heritage in general—into a larger perspective. In Iraq, says George, it’s not just local culture that’s being destroyed, but world culture, since the museum is the only one to present an uninterrupted history of civilization, and of artmaking. “It’s a big risk that’s happening to our—and when I say our, I mean everyone’s—culture of mankind,” he says.

George says of 15,000 objects known to have been stolen from the museum since the American invasion, 4,000 have been returned by Iraqis thanks to an amnesty program. Still, artifacts are being removed from the country every day, and Iraq’s neighbors aren’t necessarily doing much to stop it. George says that sources have told him that looted objects are being found on the borders to Turkey and Iran but not being confiscated or reported. And the Iraqi government has also been less than helpful, underfunding, underoutfitting, and ultimately undermining forces hired to curb looting — particularly in the south of the country, where aerial shots of the landscape show looted sites as numerous as potholes on city streets.

Patty Gerstenblith, director of the cultural heritage law program at DePaul University College of Law, says “the looting of cultural heritage is an old process.” She adds that while conventions put in place to curb damage and stealing can’t actually prevent it—most significantly, the Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907 established international guidelines for how parties are to handle opponents’ cultural institutions during warfare—they at least provide the mechanisms for restitution and prosecution.

The problem is that these guidelines aren’t always so easy to decipher. For example, while U.S. law is clear that our troops should avoid damaging and should even protect opponents’ cultural heritage sites unless militarily necessary, it’s unclear whether U.S. troops are required to step in if Iraqi people are damaging or looting from their institutions themselves. Gerstenblith cited the example of an iconic ninth-century minaret in Samarra that is used as a national symbol on Iraqi currency. U.S. troops occupied the structure because it provided a good vantage point (a defensible action), and then Iraqi insurgents bombed and damaged the minaret. Who’s in the wrong?