My contribution to the “Art Trafficking and Restitution” roundtable

organized by Walk of Truth at the Peace Palace in The Hague

16 September 2013

 

Ladies and Gentlemen,

In the late 1970s, when Kabul was still known as a stop on the hippy trail, the city’s museum boasted one of the richest collections of Asia. It spanned from the early Indus valley civilizations to the highlights of Islamic civilization, from Roman glass to Indian ivories; indeed Afghanistan had been the cradle of Zoroastrianism and highly syncretic cultures such as Hellenic Buddhism, producing highly developed art forms unique to this area.

I will describe the actions a few individuals undertook to preserve the most valuable parts of the collection of the National Museum of Afghanistan for posterity. This allowed us all to see the magnificent exhibition of the National Treasures of Afghanistan, in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam or elsewhere in the world. I have a few books here for those interested

How did these national treasures survive the protracted civil war and the looting of the museum? This is what I will set out to explain. This case will certainly provide some interesting perspectives for our roundtable about Art Trafficking and Restitution. It shows that legal frameworks such as the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention and the 1970 UNESCO convention do not always provide guidance, and it once again highlights the frilled moral issues a private individual or a non-governmental organization may face when trying to save cultural heritage from traffickers.

Dr. Sultan just mentioned the Bactrian Gold, a treasure consisting of more than 20.000 gold objects, one of the greatest treasures ever found in the world. One can imagine how eager some of Afghanistan’s warlords were to get their hands on it. As mentioned it was just part of a large, very valuable collection. So this national treasure stayed on all parties’ minds throughout the 23 years of civil war.

A bit of history: in 1979 Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. Their arrival, in support of a puppet government in Kabul, fanned the flames of civil strife, leading to a full-blown civil war. During all these years Kabul was safe, firmly held by the government. Between 1987 and 1989 the Soviet troops left, defeated, but the national-communist government of Dr. Najibullah survived until 1992.

In 1989 the museum director, Najibullah Popal, sensing the wind of change, requested the permission of the President to bring the main treasures of the museum to safe haven. The President signed, and the Bactrian Gold as well as the ‘catalogue’ items of the museum were transferred in total secrecy to an Austrian-made vault under the national palace. The dynamite-proof vault was locked, and over the keyhole were posted the signatures of five keepers. Each one had a key, but the approval of all five was required to open the door. It remained locked until 2003.

The rest of the collection, including large Buddhist statues and non-transferrable installations, the numismatic, ethnographic and pottery collections as well as numerous valuable but not essential artifacts: all this remained in the museum, located in Darulaman district of southwest Kabul.

In 1992 the mujahideen captured Kabul, but they immediately fell to infighting, and Kabul transformed into a warzone. This was the most traumatic part of the 23-year long civil war of Afghanistan. The museum found itself on the front line, was looted several times by competing factions, and incessantly shelled. When some calm returned, what was left over of the collection – the large statues, but also quite a lot of valuable objects, as the illiterate plunderers were mainly looking for gold and other shiny metals – was transferred to the Ministry of Interior and the gutted museum was shut.

It was then estimated that 70% of the collection had been looted. (In hindsight, this figure may apply to the number of objects in the collection, but not to its value). Where did these plundered artifacts end up? Much of it in neighboring Pakistan, where there already was a flourishing black market for antiques. Some well-connected collectors such as the retired general Babar of the Inter Services Intelligence got the first pick; and from there onwards to the rest of the world, mainly London but also a lot to Japan, Paris, Italy, South East Asia and the United States.

Before long recognizable pieces from the National Museum collection were surfacing in the official circuits, in Parisian auction houses or among London antique dealers. This prompted some international individuals who had known the museum  to act. The most famous of these was undoubtedly Mrs. Nancy Dupree, who had worked closely with the museum since the mid 1970s. In fact she had helped write the catalogues for the museum, and, unwilling to leave the region when the Afghan communist government started its dreadful purges, she had relocated to Peshawar, Pakistan, close to the Afghan border. There she enlisted the help of concerned diplomats to found the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage, SPACH, in 1994.

Working with dealers in London such as John Eskenazi, shady connections in Pakistan’s military and intelligence services and the goodwill and modest funding of a fair amount of Western Embassies in Islamabad, SPACH managed to retrieve some valuable pieces from the market. They decided to keep them in a safe in Pakistan. They also engaged in international advocacy to draw attention to the plight of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage.

Another individual who must be named here is Paul Bucherer, who set up the Afghan Museum in Exile in his house in Bubendorf, Switzerland. He did not work within an institutional setting. His solitary crusade to retrieve Afghan cultural heritage from the black market did not attract many allies, but nevertheless he managed to establish a collection of some 1500 pieces, some of them valuable.

SPACH and Paul Bucherer’s efforts were not so much important in terms of value – which pales in comparison to the amount of artifacts that found their way onto the black market for antiquities – but also as an important gesture when the rest of the world seemed to be turning a blind eye to the looting of Afghanistan.

For besides the plundering of the museum collection, illegal excavations were taking place all through Afghanistan. Incredible discoveries such as the treasure of Mir Zakat – six big bags full of gold and silver coins from the 3^rd century AD, found in the bottom of a well by a peasant woman looking for water – were putting the Afghan population, impoverished by incessant war, into an excavation frenzy. Subsistence archaeology, this has been called, but it was feeding well-oiled channels of the international black market in antiques.

By now most specialists had given up the hope on retrieving the Bactrian Gold and other main treasures of the National Museum. It was conjectured that they had been plundered and sold by the Northern Alliance. Most likely: they had been melted back into gold and sold for their nominal value, which was already considerable. Only the five keepers of the key to the vault under the national palace knew the treasure was safe. At one point one of them, forced by a commander who demanded to see what was hidden in that vault, broke his key in the lock. Attempts to blow open the safe were unsuccessful.

In the meanwhile the Taliban had captured power (in 1996). For the lovers of Afghan cultural heritage, it was a welcome respite after years of nightmare. In 1997, when the Taliban commander capturing Bamiyan announced his intention to blow up the ‘idols’ – the biggest statues of the Buddha in the world – he was stopped by his leader. It was the first good news in 18 years. In 1998, surprisingly, the Taliban leader Mollah Omar issued a fatwa for the preservation of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage, including that of the pre-Islamic period. For the Taliban it was a question of law and order, but also a way of gaining legitimacy in the eyes of the international community. It was in this context that I was sent to Afghanistan in March 2000, to establish an office of SPACH in Kabul which could liaise with professionals and the authorities, survey the condition of the remaining cultural heritage, and perform emergency operations where necessary.

In terms of cultural heritage preservation, the Taliban were doing much better than anyone would have expected, at least in the period 1996-2000. The question then posed itself for SPACH and Paul Bucherer: should they return their objects to the Afghan government? The Taliban demanded just that, the return of their missing cultural heritage. Under the existing conventions (Unidroit 1995) that seemed the right thing to do, as they held sovereign power in Afghanistan. If one wanted to seriously engage the Taliban on cultural heritage policies, it was also the thing to do. The Taliban wanted UNESCO to open an office in their country. They even reopened the National Museum with SPACH support in 2000. But the Taliban were not recognized by most nations, and SPACH and Paul Bucherer couldn’t fully trust them, so they stalled. They engaged the Taliban in talks (through me) but  didn’t yet return the artifacts they kept. It was this lack of forthcoming, among others, that eventually frustrated the Taliban, leading Mollah Omar to reverse his policy and order the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas.

In February 2001 Taliban soldiers under apparent command from the Minister of Information and Culture broke into the National Museum and destroyed a couple of the few remaining (pre-Islamic) statues. They also opened some of the crates in the Ministry of Interior and smashed their contents. With the backing of UNESCO Paris I went on a privately undertaken undercover mission to Peshawar, the main trading center for Afghan antiques, to find out if they were also selling the cultural heritage on the market but found no trace of that. I did find other courtiers scouting for antique collectors, in the hope that new objects would find their way onto the market.

The Taliban assault on the few remainders of the National Museum collection drew scant international attention. But the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas a month later was universally condemned as an act of barbarianism, and it paved the way for international acceptance of the US destruction of the Taliban government after 9/11. Incidentally, this shows the importance of cultural heritage in international relations. The Taliban government fell in November 2001, and an internationally supported government, under the leadership of President Karzai, was appointed to steer Afghanistan through its reconstruction.

In 2003, finally, the Afghan presidency decided to announce that the Bactrian Gold and other national treasures had safely survived the war and the looting, and it was first seen in 2004. Interesting that it took more than 2 years to decide the moment had come to announce this – as the Museum Director Omara Khan Massudi told me, they weren’t sure it was safe enough until then.

 

Of course the clear heroes of this story are the museum staff members of 1989, along with President Najibullah, mainly because they knew to keep their secret. Their action was private; if the National Museum would have taken this course of action as an institution, it could not have kept the secret from the subsequent mujahideen and Taliban rulers of the Ministry of Information and Culture, which oversaw the museum. From an institutional point of view, their action was therefore reprehensible, although it counted with the blessing of the then President Najibullah. Let’s say it’s one positive example of the much maligned principle of ‘privatization’ of Afghan ministries.

But I would like to point out the difficulties faced by SPACH and Paul Bucherer in their efforts to preserve Afghan cultural heritage. I’m quite sure their actions would be applauded by the participants of this roundtable. But in fact they were highly problematic:

1. The main problem is that it is difficult to find sponsors ready to spend their money on the black market to buy back stolen artifacts. Because receiving stolen goods is a criminal act. This is why UNESCO, among others, could not support these activities of SPACH and Bucherer.
2. There is also a problem of perception: how does anyone know if SPACH or Bucherer are not keeping the best pieces for themselves? With its board of European ambassadors, SPACH’s reputation was relatively safe, although as I found out not only the Taliban but other anti-imperialist Afghans had serious misgivings. But Paul Bucherer was kept at arm’s length by most specialists. In other words, official institutions cannot act, but private initiative is viewed with suspicion, making it very unrewarding.
3. Another thorny issue: when is the right moment to return the stolen artifacts to the country? And who decides? SPACH, being based in Pakistan, which did recognize the Taliban, was being pressured by Pakistan to return the artifacts to the Afghan Government. Knowing the legal framework, what authority did SPACH have to refuse doing so? As to Paul Bucherer: we must remember that before 9/11/2001 it seemed to most people that the conflict in Afghanistan would go on forever. Mr. Bucherer could have sustained his museum in his private dwelling in Switzerland forever. Why did Paul Bucherer decide to return his collection only in … 2007?.

I therefore want to finish my intervention with a plea, to develop some kind of mechanism, including a relaxed legal framework, to allow private actors to continue these valuable efforts to save the cultural heritage of a country when its government is uninterested or incapable of doing so, and when international organizations are hamstrung.