MUSEUM GUARDS and others tasked with protecting the world’s cultural treasures should be routinely armed to defend heritage sites from the depredations of conflict, according to a leading expert.
Prof Lawrence Rothfield, faculty director of the University of Chicago’s cultural policy centre, said ministries, foundations and local authorities “should not assume that the brutal policing job required to prevent looters and professional art thieves from carrying away items is just one for the national police or for other forces not under their direct control”.
He was speaking in advance of the annual conference of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art, held over the weekend in the central Italian town of Amelia.
Prof Rothfield said he would also like to see museum attendants, site wardens and others given thorough training in crowd control, and not just in the developing world.
“Even in the US and other very stable countries, disasters can occur that open the door to looting,” he said, citing New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as an example of how quickly normality can disintegrate.
His controversial proposal follows a string of heritage disasters arising from the turmoil in the Middle East. In 2003, looters ransacked the Iraqi national museum. In January, as protests against the regime of Hosni Mubarak intensified, thieves broke into the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo.
There have been reports that the Libyan conflict has put some cultural treasures at risk. – (Guardian service)
