Threats to Cultural Heritage in the Cyprus Conflict

Private ‘Rescue’-by-Purchase of Stolen Cultural Goods: The Material and Social Consequences and the Complicity of Europe and North America

“…Following in the footsteps of previous analyses (Brodie 2005;Hardy 2014a;2014b;Thompson 2015), this paper presents recent and still-emerging cases of rescue-by-purchase. In the aftermath of the interlinked destruction and interpersonal violence that have plagued places from Ukraine to Iraq, Yemen and Mali, it assesses the resurgent argument that private collectors should rescue cultural objects by purchasing them.…”

“…Additionally, rescue from the market creates a market for exploitation. For instance, at least one collector organised industrial-scale looting during the 1973 amnesty in Cyprus, while over a thousand noncollectors became collectors in hopes of exploiting the opportunity to accrue legalised assets (Hadjisavvas 2001;Hardy 2014a;2014b). Similar procedural abuses took place in Australia between 1993 and 1994, wherein people 'collect[ed] protected relics and declar[ed] them under the amnesty to "legalise" their collections' (Rodrigues 2009, 100).…”

Cultural Heritage as a Pathway to Sustainable Development in Cyprus: The Case of the Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage

“…Cyprus has a plethora of heritage elements passed down from generation to generation. These elements have played a significant role in the formation of individual and national identity and in the ethnic conflict that has caused an ongoing social, economic, and geopolitical divide between Greek and Turkish Cypriots (at the expense of minority groups such as the Maronite Cypriots) and thus between the RoC and the TRNC [3]. This has made heritage an indelible component of international diplomatic relations with such nations as Greece and the Republic of Turkey and of domestic intercommunal relations.…”

“…Greater powers the likes of the United Kingdom took a hand in promoting this clash for their own political agendas [1,2]. The locals, in the meantime, clashed with each other on an ethno-political basis, with the active negligence, repurposing, and destruction of the others' heritage acting as a tool of war [3]. In 1974, the penultimate year of separation of the island into two parts, the Turkish army landed in the north with the stated intent to protect Turkish Cypriot from the Greek Cypriots.…”

The state of heritage and cultural property policing in England & Wales, France and Italy

“…However, what is known is that heritage and cultural property crimes pose significant policing challenges at local, national and global levels owing to the cross-border activities, violence, shifting crime trends, links to other illicit activities, cultural and financial value of heritage and cultural property, and the belief that some locations and objects are soft targets (Chappell and Hufnagel, 2014;Kerr, 2015). Recent examples of crime trends about which we are aware include the thefts of metal art objects, Chinese art objects (particularly jade), and the continuing looting of antiquities that occurs in many source countries across the globe to be sold in demand countries (for example, Brodie, 2014;Hardy, 2014;Mackenzie and Davis, 2014;Yates, 2014).…”