The Trade in Looted Antiquities Endures for One Reason: Demand

One evening in 1997, a band of men began digging toward the base of a towering square chamber at Koh Ker, a 10th-century temple in northwest Cambodia. It was dangerous work. When multiple groups coveted a site like this one, they sometimes resolved their dispute by Kalashnikov. And every one of the men knew that the combatants in their country’s ongoing, 30-year civil war—the Khmer Rouge and proxy forces backed by the United States and the Soviet Union—had littered the countryside with land mines. So the crew moved gingerly as they dug, coming closer with each spadeful of earth to the treasures they were pursuing.

The best of Artnet News in your inbox. Sign up for our daily newsletter. The best of Artnet News in your inbox. Sign up for our daily newsletter. Please enter a valid email address Signup failed. Please try again later. Thank you! You have successfully subscribed to Artnet News.

Two were divine female figures in stone; the third was a powerfully built male, likely a representation of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. It took hours to excavate the statues, and then days to move them to Cambodia’s border with Thailand. There, brokers were standing by to transport them to Bangkok, mainland Southeast Asia’s portal to the world.

The male figure would ultimately be purchased by an American billionaire. One of the females would be sold by a London dealer and then disappear into a private collection. The third took a more rarefied path: By 1998, it was in the possession of a dealer in Manhattan. Not long after that, it was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Two of these three statues are now back in Cambodia, the result of a series of sprawling investigations of a British dealer, the late Douglas Latchford. For decades, Latchford allegedly trafficked stolen Cambodian sculptures—many of them taken by men affiliated with the Khmer Rouge—to Western buyers willing to pay seven-figure prices. Thanks to extraordinary investigative work by the Cambodian government, independent activists, and American law enforcement, his network has been largely dismantled.

But their efforts exposed an uncomfortable truth: that despite widespread claims from museums, auction houses, and dealers that they now take provenance seriously, many antiquities are still being stolen and trafficked around the world, feeding an illicit market that remains robust.

Cambodia is far from the only example. Thousands of works looted from Iraq and Syria during 21st-century conflicts remain missing. The horrific civil war in Sudan has resulted in widespread losses of artifacts, including the reported theft of 60 percent of the collection of the country’s National Museum. In Ukraine, there’s extensive evidence that Russian forces have engaged in the systematic looting of artworks, which have since disappeared to the other side of the countries’ shared border.

These crimes don’t just rob countries of their heritage and cultural assets. They can result in the destruction of priceless objects as thieves attempt to remove them with construction equipment or even explosives. They also get people killed, whether in turf battles between looting crews or attacks on guards trying to protect collections.

To be clear, there have been serious if overdue efforts to address this outrageous trade. The U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have conducted complex investigations of looted art from some regions—notably Cambodia, to which hundreds of pieces have been repatriated. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office now includes a specialized Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which has relentlessly pursued stolen works held by collectors and museums, above all the Met. With the legal and reputational risks of holding such pieces now obvious, New York’s largest museum has made a number of high-profile returns and taken steps to clean up its collection, including the establishment of a team dedicated to provenance research.

... continue reading