Free The Medici Conspiracy by Peter Watson Page B

course on illicit excavation. He himself was physically assaulted on one occasion when he chanced upon looters at a site. In Niger, archaeologists at the Abdou Moumouni University of Niamey estimate that in the Bura, Bangare, and Jebu areas of the country, more than 90 percent of the sites have been looted, and in other areas, such as Windigalo and Kareygooru, 50 percent have been destroyed. And this is nowhere near the end of it.
    The looting of Iraq is of course well known—between the end of the first Gulf war, in 1991, and 1994, eleven regional museums were broken into and 3,000 artifacts and 484 manuscripts taken, of which only fifty-four have been recovered. Following the second Gulf war, in April 2003,
at least 13,515 objects were stolen from the Baghdad Museum, of which, by June 2004, something like 4,000 had been recovered. Despite the Taliban’s high-profile demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas for “religious” reasons, most of the destruction of Afghanistan has been wrought by the search for salable antiquities and manuscripts; it has continued, if not actually worsened, since the Taliban’s removal from power.
    Further information about the material scale of the illegal trade can be extracted from official police statistics. In Turkey, for example, between 1993 and 1995 there were more than 17,500 official police investigations into stolen antiquities. In 1998, the Turkish Department of Smuggling and Organized Crime reported that in the previous year, 565 people had been arrested who had, between them, more than 10,000 archaeological objects in their possession. Greek police reported that between 1987 and 2001, they recovered 23,007 artifacts. In one year, 1997, German police in Munich recovered fifty to sixty crates containing 139 icons, sixty-one frescoes, and four mosaics that had been torn from the walls of northern Cypriot churches.
    The Italian experience is just as bad. The Carabinieri Art Squad was founded in 1969—just as the 1970 UNESCO convention was being prepared—as a result of an upsurge in looting and black-market trading associated with the postwar rise in prosperity of the West and the increasing sophistication of the art market. The official title of this new unit was the “Comando Carabinieri Ministero Pubblica Istruzione—Nucleo Tutela Patrimonio Artistica” (Ministry of Education Carabinieri Division—Unit for the Defense of Cultural Heritage), or TPA for short. Italy at that point became the first country to have a police department specifically assigned to combat art and archaeological crimes. In 1975, the TPA became part of the new Ministry of Fine Arts and the Environment and moved into the fine building it still occupies, designed by Filippo Raguzzini (1680–1771). A computerized database was developed as early as 1980. Among the TPA’s high-profile recoveries have been Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation, stolen from Urbino in 1975 and recovered in Switzerland a year later; Raphael’s Esterhazy Madonna , stolen in Budapest in 1983 and recovered in Greece two months later; in addition to the recovery of works by Dürer, Tintoretto, and Giorgione. The TPA has helped train the art squads of other nationalities, including Palestinians and Hungarians; following the
second Gulf war, in 2003, the Italians were asked to help organize the security at Iraq’s many archaeological sites. Since it was created, the TPA (today the TPC) has recovered more than 180,000 works of art, nearly 8,000 of them abroad, and more than 350,000 antiquities. It has exposed 76,000 forgeries and brought charges against nearly 12,000 people.
    In the 1980s, dealers in the market countries introduced codes of ethics, and museums revised their acquisitions policies but, very often, it has to be said, these moves were not much more than window dressing. In the 1990s, UNESCO sought to tighten up the 1970 convention, in particular with regard to the level of