Cultural baggage

Diplomatic bags are being used by embassy staff to smuggle antiquities from Afghanistan and elsewhere, according to an article in the Art Newspaper.

In an unpublished paper, Dutch researcher Jos van Beurden has collected anecdotal evidence of diplomatic privileges granted under the 1961 Vienna Convention, being used to circumvent laws prohibiting the export of cultural heritage. The practice appears to be widespread, and has been noted in several countries including Cambodia, Nigeria and Bangladesh.

At Illicit Cultural Property, Derek Fincham says he is not convinced that this is a huge problem, though he admits that its scale is impossible to judge. It seems though, that even if the matter has not been judicially investigated, the reports are more than just “speculation”. Indeed, they accord with a long history of diplomats collecting and exporting antiquities.

In the nineteenth century, cultural institutions in colonising states employed diplomats as mediators to procure and export antiquities. Ottoman Turkey had a flourishing antiquities market and a large expatriate community, especially at the coastal city of Smyrna (Izmir), where foreigners purchased objects to enrich private and public collections in their home states. One such figure was Alfred van Lennup, the Dutch vice-consul, who had a semi-official role securing items for the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden.

National patrimony laws were introduced in Turkey in the 1890s, and it seems that by this time, diplomat-smugglers were well aware that they were acting illegally. In his excellent book Oriental Panoramas: British travellers in 19th century Turkey, Reinhold Schiffer describes how in the early-nineteenth century, Ottoman authorities were ambivalent to the export of cultural material, unless it happened to include valuable metals. But by the early-twentieth century, treasure hunters such as the French engineer Paul Gaudin, were going to great lengths to conceal sculptures, so thay they could be exported to Europe.

The practice of diplomats smuggling cultural heritage should not be downplayed just because it cannot be properly quantified, or the offenders prosecuted. It can be understood and addressed as being the continuation of a long-running tendency for states to appropriate heritage from subordinate territories.