Museum guards and others tasked with protecting the world’s cultural treasures should be routinely armed to defend heritage sites from the depredations of conflict, according to a leading expert.
Lawrence Rothfield, faculty director of the University of Chicago’s cultural policy center, said that ministries, foundations and local authorities “should not assume that the brutal policing job required to prevent looters and professional art thieves from carrying away items is just one for the national police or for other forces not under their direct control.”
He was speaking in advance of the annual conference of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art, held over last weekend in the central Italian town of Amelia. Rothfield said he would also like to see museum attendants, site wardens and others given training in crowd control. And not just in the developing world.
“Even in the US and other very stable countries, disasters can occur that open the door to looting,” he said, citing New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as an example of how quickly normality can disintegrate.
His controversial proposal follows a string of heritage disasters arising from the turmoil in the Middle East. In 2003, looters ransacked the Iraqi national museum. In January, as protests against the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak gathered momentum, thieves broke into the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo.
Most recently, there have been reports that the Libyan conflict has put cultural treasures at risk. Another conference, held under the auspices of UNESCO and the Italian government at Caserta near Naples this month, heard from representatives of the anti-Qaddafi rebels of a robbery at the Bank of Benghazi in May. One of those present reported that the treasures stolen included Greco-Roman gold and silver artifacts and coins.
Rothfield’s views hardened while conducting a study of the Cairo museum raid. Much remains unclear about the incident, including whether “the whole thing was a well-controlled gambit to persuade the international community that the country was descending into chaos and that the revolt needed to be crushed,” he said.
But two key points had emerged. One was that the museum authorities were unable to count on the police when they needed them most. The second was that no amount of education on the value and importance of cultural heritage would prevent a disaster.
Egyptians have long been schooled to treasure the evidence of their past. But, said Rothfield, “even if you have 90 percent of the people on your side, it doesn’t take many others to do the damage.”
That, of course, does not mean education is dispensable. One of Rothfield’s fellow speakers at the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art’s conference was Laurie Rush, an archaeologist attached to the US Army’s 10th Mountain Division.
Her mission is to help soldiers identify cultural property in their forward deployments and keep damage to a minimum. Five years ago, her unit produced a pack of cards, each with a different message about heritage protection.
The nine of spades, for example, has a picture of a Chinook helicopter and the message: “Rotor rush can damage archaeological sites. Locate your landing zones a safe distance away from known sites.” Rush said she had secured changes to army regulations, and these had saved a Mesopotamian settlement, several thousand years old, near forward operating base Hammer, east of Baghdad.
“A young soldier contacted us having seen military contractors scooping up dirt to make an earthen wall. He realized it was archaeological material and, because of our project, there were military regulations that empowered the base commander to give orders for the protection of the site.”
Many other sites in Iraq have been less fortunate. The invasion was the prelude to a calamity for Iraq’s cultural heritage. Rothfield said it was estimated that looters had dug up three times the area excavated before the invasion.
“The Baghdad museum lost around 15,000 items, half of which were recovered. But the country has lost several hundred thousand items, and they will probably never come back,” he said.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist