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Photo: © Yaser Jawad / Xinhua / Newscom / ABACAPRESS.COM

Coins, statues, manuscripts, ancient inscriptions. Since 2011, about a hundred objects looted in Yemen have been sold in auction houses in Europe and the United States for an estimated $1 million. The Museum of Raqqa – one of the first Syrian cities to fall into the hands of ISIS in 2014 – was stripped of several hundred major pieces. The following year, nearly 10,000 valuable artefacts were stolen from the Idlib Museum. 

In both Iraq and Syria, the terrorist organization, knowing the market value of these objects, engaged in the methodical and massive looting of museums and archaeological sites in the areas it controlled. It even introduced a tax on the value of the looted items. In a November 2015 Report on the protection of heritage in situations of armed conflict, Jean-Luc Martinez, president and director of the Louvre Museum in Paris, notes that “blood antiquities” may have represented “up to fifteen to twenty per cent of ISIS’s revenue sources”. This makes the trafficking of cultural goods one of the most important means of financing terrorism, along with the trafficking of oil resources.

In recent decades, from Afghanistan to Mali, through Yemen or Iraq, cultural heritage and goods have been at the forefront of armed conflicts. Direct targets of deliberate destruction, collateral damage of conflicts, coveted objects for organizations that see them as sources of profit, cultural goods are at the heart of criminal networks and contemporary security issues.

By undermining the identity of populations, looting and illicit trafficking contribute to the profound destabilization of conflict-torn regions. As a source of financing for terrorism, they fuel the spiral of violence, and mortgage the future of these regions. “Illicit trafficking, destruction of sites, extremist propaganda and the denial of history are all elements of a global strategy, and to respond to them, the community of nations must address them in a holistic manner,” UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said at a United Nations Security Council meeting on the protection of cultural property on 30 November 2017. 

An awareness of the extent of this traffic and the damage it causes, has led to a series of recent initiatives. These have given new impetus to international co-operation, fifty years after the adoption of the UNESCO Convention against Illicit Trafficking.
In 2015, Resolution 2199 was adopted, prohibiting the trade in cultural property from Iraq and Syria. Two years later, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2347, which for the first time made the protection of cultural heritage a security imperative and condemned the deliberate destruction of cultural property as a war crime.

In the wake of this UN resolution, a legal response began to be organized at the national level. The Council of Europe adopted a Convention on Offences relating to Cultural Property in 2017. In the same year, Uruguay announced the creation of a national committee against illicit trafficking.

Following the example of the United States, which passed a new law in 2016 controlling imports of cultural goods from Syria, several countries have restricted “blood antiquities” in their markets. Sweden, on its part, has set up a specialized unit within its police services to deal with the problem.
 
Read more:
“We must punish the looters, but also the buyers”, The UNESCO Courier, October-December 2020
A historic resolution to protect cultural heritage, The UNESCO Courier, October-December 2017