Sunanda K Datta Ray: Treasure trade

WHERE MONEY TALKS

The raja here is the billionaire businessman prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, whose supporters are trying to amend next year's budget so that the past can be pillaged and privatised at immense profit to the enterprising.

Their "looters' charter", as a distinguished British archaeologist calls it, will allow treasure hunters to keep whatever they find, providing they pay the state a nominal 5 per cent of the object's estimated value. Estimates, as we know, are a matter of opinion.

Under the present law, in Italy as in India or Britain, all antiquities found in the soil are regarded as national property to be handed over to the authorities. Two recent British finds highlighted this practice.

In one, the bit of glinting metal that a gardener thought was the discarded foil round the neck of a champagne bottle turned out to be a golden Roman artefact. The other was a more obvious find "" a tiny gold coin struck by England's earliest Saxon kings.

No doubt, both will soon be on display in some museum in London. The British are mindful of their own. They are even more mindful of what they have seized or stolen from others.

There is a historical logic, therefore, for London to be the centre of the clandestine global traffic in antiquities. Many would say this has happened because of the ruthlessness with which Britain looted the world during those decades of imperial dominion over palm and pine.

The Rosetta stone, the Koh-i-Noor and the Elgin marbles are only three famous treasures that belong to distant peoples who were too weak at the time to defend themselves against plunder.

Apparently even today, anyone can wander into the British Museum or the Victoria and Albert museum with a vase or a pendant and get it appraised with no questions asked.

No wonder Neil Brodie, co-ordinator of the Illicit Antiquities Research Centre at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University, estimates that up to 20 per cent of the objet d'art that is offered for sale in London does not have an archaeological provenance.

The business received a fillip during the invasion of Iraq when American soldiers mounted guard on every oil installation but abandoned nuclear sites and museums to carefully preplanned looting. London was flooded with Sumerian and Mesopotamian relics but the supply dwindled and faded when emergency legislation was enacted last year.

The new law forced anyone who possessed such an object to prove that it was legally exported from Iraq before the imposition of United Nations sanctions.

The excitement now is over ancient sites in Pakistan and Iran. Of the 18 new archaeo-logical sites dating back to the first millennium BC found in Pakistan's Hindu Kush region, 14 had already been damaged by illegal digging.

As a result, the 100 or so London dealers who specialise in Asian material are suddenly flooded with antiquities created between 500 BC and 400 AD. Asia is the flavour of the month and the past is the territory of the fashionable rich.

Italians are as enterprising as Indians or Iranians when it comes to making a fast buck on the side. More so, in fact, for theirs is the land of the mafia. Tombs are regularly vandalised to sustain a flourishing trade in stolen artefacts.

But no one really knows the magnitude of the traffic. It was estimated just over a decade ago that art and antiquities worth about £150 million were exported annually from Italy. In 1996 police in Geneva seized 10,000 smuggled Italian artefacts worth about £18.8 million. This was one of the biggest hauls ever. An Italian who robs Etruscan tombs told an interviewer that he averages a break-in every 10 days.

The two amendments to the 2005 budget that Berlusconi's followers have proposed would make officials who are already entrusted with supervision and maintenance of Italy's enormously rich archaeological heritage also responsible for pricing and taxing newly discovered treasures.

Cynics suggest that the steady clandestine export of Italian artefacts must owe something to the efficiency or otherwise of these functionaries. People ask if they should then be subjected to further temptation.

Under the proposed law, if officials fail to value an artefact within a reasonable time, the holder would automatically become the legal owner.

Once it is legalised, the artefact could legally "be the object of contractual activity." In short, the man who holds it can then sell his find for a whopping profit to some rich American collector.Think of a similar law in India.

Sooner or later, someone would cover the entire Taj Mahal in soil, then happen to stumble on one of the minarets. His excavation would be rewarded with the whole edifice emerging from the earth, whereupon it would be his duty to persuade overworked and underpaid archaeological officials to drag their feet on the matter of setting a value on the stately mausoleum.

If they belie expectations and do the job within the statutory period, the finder would pay 5 per cent of the sum to the government. If the time limit expires without a value being set, we can expect some wealthy buyer to fly the Taj Mahal out, marble by marble, to the Arizona desert or some other American location, there to be re-erected in splendidly artificial glory.

If anything, Italians are even more ingenious and enterprising than Indians.