Dispatches and the Missing Evidence

Having been approached by a member of the production team for a Channel 4 Dispatches programme for my input last year, I watched the final outcome with interest on Monday night ("ISIS and the Missing Treasures", Radio Times, 18 April 2016). For those who missed the first showing there are repeats and a streaming video. And Channel 4 has issued a summary.

The amount of preparation for a TV documentary is impressive and the team must find it painful that the project ultimately has to be ruthlessly edited to cram it into only 30 minutes. Although such programmes may draw on scholarly research, it is of course inevitable that their paramount objective is to attract as large an audience as possible within that short span. Thus, they tend to focus on 'popular', 'topical' and 'compelling' - sometimes even favouring the pull of being 'sensational' at the risk of overlooking a mainstay of true scholarship: impartial objectivity.

The catchy title - ISIS and the Missing Treasures - had an Indiana Jones ring to it. The programme did indeed promise to be sensational. However, I am not entirely convinced that the two main "treasures" featured had much, if any, connection to ISIS (also known as ISIL, IS or whatever other acronym is used to denote an organisation currently calling itself the Islamic State).

A carved stone lintel being offered by a minor dealer in Grays Market, a London antiques arcade, was discovered to have been documented as having formed part of a ruined Jewish building at Nawa in Syria in 1988. The lintel had no provenance and it is almost certain that it was stolen and smuggled - but the question is when and by whom.

The programme's title - plus strategic footage of Islamist forces - inferred the culprits were ISIS. But Nawa was captured by al-Nusra Front and other rebel factions, most recently in November 2014, and al-Nusra Front had already split from ISIS by the end of 2013. So, were the real culprits al-Nusra Front?

It is certainly true that civil strife fosters conditions that encourage and often facilitate looting but pinning the blame on any specific group can be difficult. In the absence of more information, all we can safely say is that the lintel was removed from Syria sometime after 1988 and it is quite possible that those responsible were simply part of one of the looting and smuggling networks that have existed in that part of the world for many decades.

The second "treasure" was a Quran advertised on eBay by a seller using the username 'london_oriental'. A team met up with the seller to examine the book in Copenhagen. A fragment torn from the top of an endpaper suggested that a previous owner's seal or inscription had been removed to hide the fact that the book had been stolen. Although the book was advertised as "Persian", an expert identified it as 19th/20th century and "suspect[ed] it was originally taken from a Syrian library". The freshness of the tear on the endpaper caused another expert to speculate that it had been "probably removed quite recently" (though in fact paper tears can remain fresh-looking for decades).

The book may well have been stolen from a Syrian library - but again the question is when and by whom. Objects stolen from various places have been filtering onto the black market for centuries.

The programme's caption on the Channel 4 website - "A battle to stop the Isis cashing in on looted antiquities is being waged in the UK" - expresses a noble aim but, even leaving aside the notion that a modern Quran is an "antiquity" in the first place, the documentary failed to track down a single object in the UK that had definitely been looted from Syria or Iraq since civil unrest began in 2011, let alone one that had definitely helped to fund ISIS.

The Channel 4 Dispatches programme was quite right to emphasise that buyers must insist on a provenance when considering the purchase of any object they even vaguely suspect may have been stolen, and it made attempts to give a balanced view of the situation. However, we are still left wondering why the media is fixated only on ISIS (it is far from being the sole reason for Syria's appalling loss of its heritage both before and during the crisis) and, despite wild claims, just how much money that organisation is really making from the sale of antiquities. And how many of those antiquities are really reaching the UK.

Even only one object is one object too many and we must be utterly vigilant but this programme did nothing to dispel the suspicion that the involvement of the UK market in ISIS loot may be greatly exaggerated. If it is not exaggerated, that omission is counterproductive. If it is, we are largely left tilting at windmills for the sake of sensationalism.

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Images are screenshots from a named TV programme used for the purpose of review.

Yugoslavia anyone? A future for Syria and Iraq ...

Hmm, so the West (Britain and France) created two huge artificial political "nations" named Syria and Iraq by simplistically drawing lines on a map during and after World War I - largely based on competing imperialist claims to oil but almost completely ignoring the ancient tribal/cultural differences of the regions within those artificial "nations" they created. And now, surprised at the lack of homogeneity and the inherent violent internal rivalry caused or inflamed by their short-sighted creation and exacerbated even further by their bungled attempts to "fix" what was already wrong to begin with, the West's proposed solution is to simply bomb one of the most bitter factions into submission.

Yeah right, like that's gonna work ... because a sure way to stop people being bitter about perceived inequality and injustice - so bitter in fact that their desperate situation provides a fertile breeding ground for extremists to gain power - is to make them even more bitter. 

'Islamic State' is a symptom of the frustration of that wider faction, not the cause. A lasting solution to the crisis in Syria and Iraq can only be achieved by addressing some of the basic causes of the bitterness and hostility rather than merely snipping at the symptoms. One of those causes was compounded by the political insensitivity of the West in the early 20th century.

Nations that have formed and evolved naturally over the ages tend to have done so because the overwhelming majority of its population throughout its territory broadly shares a common culture. But a "nation" created artificially by outside powers may have no such natural unity. The fabrication of arbitrary political boundaries that ignore substantial internal populations of opposing cultures can so easily be a recipe for injustice, violent friction and even genocide. Where the government of that "nation" is a dictatorship, the result can be humanitarian disaster and even where it is ostensibly a democracy, the result can be the subjugation of a very sizeable minority to the overall will of a hostile majority and widespread abuse. 

There may come a time when Syria and Iraq can overcome the difficulties of fairly and peacefully accommodating a diverse population but, in the meantime, it may be worth considering proposals to divide the territory at least temporarily into districts that more sensitively reflect the current gulfs. 

But I guess bombing people is so much easier than the West admitting the borders were totally mucked up in the first place, helping to renegotiate them properly and sensibly to reflect the reality of people rather than just oil this time around, and redrawing the stupid map.

Yugoslavia anyone? Maps - and the practice of lumping inherently incompatible cultures all together into the artificial "nations" created by them - are NOT immutable. When the old cartographic divisions so obviously ain't working and instead are causing human suffering on a massive scale, change them!

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My apologies for veering from the primary topic of this blog but I am somewhat irritated by the reluctance of the West to fully acknowledge its part in contributing to this situation and to take responsibility for helping to resolve it in a sensible manner.

US "returns" Syrian lamp to ... Iraq

After seizing antiquities in a raid at Deir ez-Zor in Syria, it seems the US Government handed over ALL the items to Iraq in a well-publicised ceremony.

One problem with that ceremony is highlighted by a lamp displayed with other items on a triangular blue sheet in one of the photographs (see image). It appears to be authentic and is a Syro-Palestinian type of the 3rd - 4th centuries AD. In other words, the lamp which was seized in Syria is likely to have been made and found in Syria.

The bits and bobs handed over to Iraq are a strange assortment - including a tiny fake bust of Nefertiti, a modern metal-smelting crucible, a leather manuscript in Aramaic, pieces looted from Mosul Museum, Islamic coins, and so on. After a proper analysis of what the items really are, it is intended that any Syrian antiquities will eventually be transferred on to Syria.

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Paul Barford and Sam Hardy have covered this topic in admirable depth.

Out of the fire and into the frying pan?

In a post bizarrely entitled "Better Burned then Smuggled?" (I suspect the word he is looking for is "than", not "then"), Peter Tompa has slammed "UNESCO and the Iraqi cultural bureaucracy" for complaining that rare Iraqi manuscripts have been stolen from libraries in Mosul and smuggled into Turkey. He naively seems to think that stealing the manuscripts was a good thing as they will now be safe.

I rather doubt that either UNESCO or Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage would want the manuscripts to be endangered by immediately returning them to a location under threat and let's be clear: the act of looters stealing them was unlikely to be an altruistic rescue operation. They are probably being smuggled into Turkey to be sold on the black market, where they are very likely to be broken up (disbound and covers discarded) both to avoid detection and because flogging individual leaves fetches a higher price than the whole. If Tompa innocently believes the rare manuscripts will remain intact - or that even bits of them will ever see Iraq again - he doesn't know the darker side of the antiquarian book trade very well.

The manuscripts have escaped the vague risk of being burned into the near certainty of being mutilated beyond recognition. Are the authorities really wrong to be concerned?

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A priceless comment below the post also caught my attention. An English detectorist uses the occasion to have a go at Paul Barford ...

"With people being slaughtered on an industrial scale in Syria thousands made homeless refugees, and with increasingly savage and vile atrocities reported on every news bulletin, what does Barford see as the pressing issue to complain about in Syria? Antiquities."

In his frenzy to attack the archaeologist, the detectorist appears to have missed the title of Paul's blog: "Portable ANTIQUITY Collecting ..." Just a wild guess ... and I may be going out on a limb here ... but perhaps the blog is likely to be about antiquities? Dunno, just a thought ...

Iraqi Jewish Archive - ethics are seldom easy

Campaigns to renegotiate an earlier agreement reached with the Iraqi government by the United States to return a large collection of items seized from Iraq’s Jewish community are steadily building. Examples of coverage are here and here. There are some who applaud the rethink and some who feel the original agreement must be honoured no matter what.

I see a problem. But the problem is not so much whether the property should be returned unconditionally to a virulently anti-semitic nation that stole it. It shouldn't. The problem is that an agreement to return it unconditionally should never have been arranged in the first place.

Regardless of how the present custodians came to be in possession of the property and regardless of any ill-advised agreement to return it unconditionally to Iraq, the property rightfully belongs to the Iraqi Jewish community. That factor trumps anything else. There are only two ethical options:

1. Return the property to the Iraqi Jewish community. Since literally only half a dozen or so members are still precariously living in Iraq and the main cultural centres of the exiled community are now based in Israel or the US, the property should go to one of those centres.



2. Return the property to the Iraqi government under certain conditions. It would need to be appropriately and securely curated, perhaps in a dedicated memorial candidly explaining its origin, with the provision of unhindered access to anyone (including those people living in Israel or the US) with a right to see it. That provision would of course entail a complete renouncement and reversal of the current anti-semitic attitude prevailing in Iraq, including a clampdown on all racist actions and propaganda - not unlike the policies in Germany after the Holocaust. 

There are no other ethical options. Both options are fraught with difficulties and potential repercussions but that is often the nature of acting ethically. To take the easy course and simply go along with the original agreement no matter what is not only irresponsible, it is abetting the racist oppression of a cultural minority.

(To pre-empt any silly semantics: I think we all know that Iraqi Arabs are ethnically Semitic too. The word "anti-semitic" here is used in its traditional sense, referring specifically to Jews.)