Jordan Times
Wednesday, June 2, 2004
Jordan urges closer cooperation to stop smuggling of Iraqi treasures
AMMAN (Agencies) — The looting of ancient Iraqi artifacts is the crime of the century, the director general of the Customs Department, Mahmoud Qteishat, said on Tuesday.
In a speech at the opening of a two-day symposium
in Amman, which is devoted to curbing the smuggling of Iraq's looted treasures,
Qteishat called for closer cooperation among countries around Iraq to catch the
thieves and smugglers.
The symposium is hosted by the government and Interpol, which is based in Lyon,
France, the Associated Press reported yesterday.
“Customs authorities, concerned regional and international organizations and
countries neighboring Iraq must consolidate their efforts and reactivate
techniques of cooperation to combat the smuggling of Iraqi artifacts,” Qteishat,
said.
He urged Interpol, the United Nations and antiquities experts to compile a
database that would provide a “complete enumeration of all Iraqi artifacts, many
of which have been looted and smuggled, to help us trace them and return them
back to their owners.”
Qteishat called on the other states bordering Iraq to implement “random
inspection” of passengers and goods coming out of Iraq and to use “modern
techniques” of monitoring border traffic.
15,000 artifacts still missing
Some 15,000 artifacts stolen from the Iraq Museum last year are still missing
and neighboring Turkey and Iran are not helping to find the lost items being
smuggled over their soil, the head of the museum said here Tuesday.
“Fifteen thousand objects are still missing from the Iraq Museum,” which was
looted at the end of the US-led war last year, Donny George told Agence France-
Presse.
“We know, we are sure, that Iraqi antiquities are going out through Turkey and
Iran, but we've never had feedback from them,” he said.
He said some of Iraq's neighbors like Jordan, Syria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia had
cooperated with Baghdad and seized hundreds of artifacts smuggled through their
borders in the aftermath of the US-led war to oust Saddam Hussein.
The director general of the Kingdom's department of antiquities, Fawwaz
Khreisheh, told AFP that 1,046 stolen Iraqi objects had been seized and were
being held in safekeeping until the Iraqis request their return.
“We have around 1,046 objects, various ones. They have been listed on CDs and
copies have been given to Iraq and to UNESCO,” Khreisheh said.
George said Syria was holding in safekeeping around 200 Iraqi artifacts looted
during the war while Kuwait managed to seize 35 objects stolen from the museum.
“Saudi Arabia told us they have objects but we don't know exactly how many. We
are in contact with them through the ministry of foreign affairs,” George said.
George said these countries should hold on to the artifacts until stability had
returned to Iraq.
The thousands of missing items include “a half-sized headless statue of Sumerian
king Entemena made of diorite as well as a very important ivory and gold plaque
known as the Lioness and the Nubian which is inlaid with precious stones,” he
said.
More Iraqi artifacts are missing from the country's archaeological sites, where
George said “looters are still digging as we speak and we can't do anything
about it.”
He complained that the US-led coalition forces were not doing “that much” to
stop the looting because “they have, as they say, other priorities such as
security, water, electricity.”
Iraq was planning, however, to set up a 1,300-strong “antiquities police” and
was looking for vehicles to patrol the country's numerous archaeological sites,
George said.
According to a senior Interpol agent, Karl Heinz Kind, matters were made worse
by the fact that there are some 100,000 Iraqi archaeological sites but that only
10,000 are registered.
“This makes it impossible to protect all of them and the major problem we are
now facing is the continuous looting of Iraq's archaeological sites,” Kind said
in a keynote address at the start of the meeting.
The symposium is being attended by representatives of Western police forces,
such as the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and Britain's Scotland Yard, and
the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the International
Council for Museums, and customs officials from Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Qatar,
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen.