When troops marched into Kinshasa on Saturday, 27 May 1997, looting came hard on their heels. Besides the presidential palace, the headquarters of the Zaire Institute of National Museums was searched from top to bottom, much of the collection smashed and many items removed in accordance with what appears to have been a carefully laid plan. The most valuable pieces, well-known through exhibitions and art publications, simply disappeared into thin air. For his part, the President of France was offered as a birthday present from his staff a statue of a ram strangely resembling that belonging to a site in Mali, a country which enforces a total ban on the export of objets d'art. Some embarrassment, to put it mildly, ensued in France, while positive shock waves of emotion flooded Mali.
These are just two recent incidents which bring home to all involved the urgent need for action to stay the escalation of art theft and the illegal export of works of art. While such works are indeed at times returned to source - for example, the two Angkor treasures handed over to their rightful owners in Paris on 17 March 1997, in a move very much in keeping with the ethical and legal standards defended by UNESCO and its 1970 Convention - it is only too evident that both the available human and financial resources and the national rules and regulations in force fall woefully short of providing a satisfactory defence.
The Unidroit Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects, which was adopted in Rome on 24 June 1995, is one instance of how States are attempting to put a stop to this illegal trade. Yet experience shows that it is one thing to adopt an international Convention and quite another to implement and enforce it. In legal terms, international efforts to protect and safeguard the national cultural heritage from such plunder can really only be described as co-operation "up to a point", with most of those involved belonging to the group of art exporting countries.
The Unidroit Convention sets out to remedy this state of affairs, yet it continues to be the object of passionate and at times violent debate often sparked off by false rumours and misinformation. One problem is that not many of its detractors are really familiar either with the text or its objectives. Certainly it would seem to be high time especially for art dealers to drop the rhetoric and undertake an in-depth study of the text, whose provisions, it is true, can only be properly understood if measured against the present state of the law in this area. This is a point which has been amply stressed and extensively commented by Professor Pierre Lalive.
