Trade in looted antiquities needs to be countered from both ends, and the acquisition of such items made into a criminal offense directly tied with funding terrorism, Amr al-Azm, co-director of the Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research (ATHAR) Project, told Sputnik in an interview
GENOA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 28th November, 2019) Trade in looted antiquities needs to be countered from both ends, and the acquisition of such items made into a criminal offense directly tied with funding terrorism, Amr al-Azm, co-director of the Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research (ATHAR) Project, told Sputnik in an interview.
"The problem of trafficking in antiquities is like anything else it's a supply and demand. You have to address the supply side, but you also have to address the demand side," al-Azm said.
One way of achieving this, according to the researcher, would be to make people understand that the items of suspicious origin they buy have a "fairly high chance" of having been "looted and trafficked by an entity, person or organization with terrorist connections," thereby making the buyer a funder of terrorism.
"If we can somehow get that to become a legal thing, criminalize it, then it's not just that you are buying a questionable item - you are now funding terrorism. That becomes a much bigger issue legally," he continued.
Such an approach could be a "game changer," al-Azm said.
"Until that I don't think we will be doing anywhere near what should be done. ... But I do not think there is a will on the part of the international community to go that far either. Unfortunately, in the absence of all that, it's only going to get worse," he said.
Al-Azm co-authored the ATHAR Project's report that studied the digital market in looted antiquities from the middle East and North Asia and, in particular, looked into the activities of 95 Arabic Facebook groups using the platform for antiquities trafficking. In the report, published in June, the project found that individuals associated with Islamic State and Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham terrorist organizations (both banned in Russia) were among the members of these groups.
Terrorist groups partially fund themselves by trading in looted antiquities, Edmund Fitton-Brown, a UN monitoring team coordinator, told Sputnik earlier in November. However, it is impossible to assess the full scale of the damage.
In terms of international response, the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court defines deliberate attacks against buildings of a religious or artistic nature and against historical monuments as war crimes. However, the ICC is authorized to prosecute culprits only if the country concerned cannot ensure prosecution itself.
