During a conference in Marseille, on October 12 and 13, around forty specialists highlighted the lack of means to fight against the looting of ancient works of art.
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The tone is almost playful but the subject serious. Going forward to the gallery to open the conference “Acting together against archaeological looting and antiquity traffic”, the perpetual secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, Nicolas Grimal, protests gently: “This affair Concerns us all, in the same way as the traffic of human beings or endangered species: plundering a small currency does as much harm as massacre with dynamite of the Buddhas. “
No need to convince the forty international stakeholders locked up for two days on October 12 and 13, in the amphitheater of the Marseille History Museum. For participants, gathered a few months after the case of questionable objects bought by the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the urgency is to place, finally, the legal and human means at the height of the greed of traffickers.
For Nicolas Grimal, everyone must take their share to break the traffic chain. Amateurs and merchants must resist temptation, and scientists refuse to endorse, when asked for notices, objects of dubious provenance … No tenderness either for the Sunday detector, the flirting of the allegedly innocent waters because, Adds the Egyptologist, extracting a work from a historical context is “erasing the memory of humanity”. And, incidentally, feeding organized crime: trafficking in cultural goods is considered the third most important to the world after those of drugs and weapons.
conflict zones, looting areas
“Pillage and traffic are linked to laundering illegal capital, corruption,” says Jean-Philippe Lecouffe, Director General of Europol, the European agency specializing in the repression of crime, in Visio since the HAYE (Netherlands). But also to terrorism, recalled Hubert Percie du Service, head of the Central Office to Combat Cultural Property (OCBC): “15 % to 20 % of Daesh financing rested on archaeological looting”, assures the Colonel, named in August.
Following the first discoveries made in the hiding places of Abu Sayyaf during the 2014 American raid in Syria, the soldiers seized several receipts of antiques: in four months, in the province of Deir Ez-Zor, L ‘Islamic State Organization had recorded the levy of a tax of $ 265,000 (271,790 euros) from sales totaling $ 1.32 million, perfectly documented by a meticulous Islamic bureaucracy.
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