[MSN] AP Interview: Investigator of Baghdad museum looting says antiquity smuggling finances terror

[MSN]

AP Interview: Investigator of Baghdad museum looting says antiquity
smuggling finances terror 

The Associated Press 
Wednesday, March 19, 2008 

ATHENS, Greece: When Baghdad fell to the U.S.-led coalition that toppled
Saddam Hussein, the world watched in horror as looters ransacked the museum
that housed some of Iraq's most prized treasures.

Today, trafficking of stolen Iraqi antiquities is helping to finance
al-Qaida in Iraq and Shiite militias, according to the U.S. investigator who
led the probe into the looting of the National Museum.

U.S. Marine Reserve Col. Matthew Bogdanos, a New York assistant district
attorney called up to duty shortly after 9/11, said that while kidnappings
and extortion remain insurgents' main source of funds, the link between
terrorism and antiquities smuggling has become "undeniable."

"The Taliban are using opium to finance their activities in Afghanistan,"
Bogdanos told The Associated Press in an interview. "Well, they don't have
opium in Iraq. What they have is an almost limitless supply of is
antiquities. And so they're using antiquities."

Bogdanos spoke on the sidelines of a UNESCO-organized international
conference Monday and Tuesday on returning antiquities to their country of
origin.

The murky world of antiquities trafficking extends across the globe and is
immensely lucrative — private collectors can pay tens of millions of dollars
for the most valuable artifacts.

It's almost impossible to put an authoritative monetary value on Iraqi
antiquities.

But as an indication, the colonel said one piece looted from the National
Museum — an 8th century B.C. Assyirian ivory carving of a lioness attacking
a Nubian boy, overlaid with gold and inlaid with lapis lazuli — could sell
for US$100 million (€63.4 million).

"That would be cheap, I really believe," he said of the object, which is
still missing.

Bogdanos described the route for smuggled Iraqi antiquities as follows: From
illegal excavations or plundered museums, they are driven overland either
west to Jordan or north to Syria; they are then usually sent to one of three
cities — Beirut, Dubai or Geneva — in order to obtain papers and "surface";
they can then be sold on to private collectors or even well-known auction
houses.

Bogdanos said the complex routes for the trade in plundered antiquities
appear to have generated an underground tariff system. "According to my
sources, (Lebanese) Hezbollah is now taxing antiquities," he said.

Bogdanos, 51, an amateur boxer with a Masters degree in Classics who won the
Bronze Star fighting in Afghanistan, said the antiquities trade was not an
immediate source of revenue for insurgents after the U.S.-led invasion.

"That was not something they did initially. They were not that
sophisticated," he said, adding that it was not until late 2004 "that we saw
the use of antiquities in funding initially the Sunnis and al-Qaida in Iraq,
and now the Shiite militias."

Although security has improved dramatically in Iraq since mid-2007, the
country is still violence-ridden, with bombings and kidnappings a daily
occurrence. In such a climate, it is all but impossible for Iraq's 1,500
archaeological guards to protect the country's more than 12,000
archaeological sites.

"Unauthorized excavations are proliferating throughout the world, especially
in conflict zones," Francoise Riviere, the assistant director-general of
UNESCO's cultural branch, said at the conference.

She said UNESCO was deeply concerned about the "decimation" of Iraq's
cultural heritage.

"The damage inflicted on the National Museum in Baghdad, the increasingly
precarious state and the systematic pillage of sites, are alarming facts
which are a great challenge to the international community," Riviere said.

Bahaa Mayah, an adviser to Iraq's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities who
attended the conference in Athens, says looters sometimes use heavy
machinery to dig up artifacts — and destroy the site while they loot.

Mayah decried a lack of cooperation among some European countries, which he
refused to name, in returning trafficked goods seized from smugglers.

"We are facing now, especially in Europe, tremendous difficulties in
recovering our objects that are seized," he said.

Bogdanos said smuggling networks did not appear with or after the war. "It's
a pre-existing infrastructure ... looting's been going on forever."

But it was in the days after the fall of Baghdad in March 2003 that the
National Museum was looted. The U.S. came under intense criticism for not
protecting the museum — a treasure trove of antiquities from the stone age
and Babylon to the Assyrians and Islamic art.

Bogdanos said that according to the latest inventories, a total of about
15,000 artifacts were stolen. Of those, about 4,000 have been returned to
the museum, and a total of about 6,000 have been recovered.

Bogdanos was already in Iraq searching for banned weapons and investigating
terrorist funding when he volunteered to lead the investigation into the
looting after Saddam Hussein's ouster.

Much of the museum's looting was carried out by insiders and senior
government officials of the time, said Bogdanos, who co-authored a book
about the investigation, "Thieves of Baghdad," with William Patrick.
Royalties from the book are donated to the museum.

Bogdanos said not enough is being done by organizations such as UNESCO to
protect Iraq's heritage. "There's no other way to say it. There's a vacuum
at the top," he said.

http://www.iht.com/