New York’s Met Museum To Return Looted Antiquities To Cambodia

(Bloomberg) -- New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed with the Department of Justice to return more than a dozen antiquities to Cambodia, a major step in a decade-long investigation into the theft and trafficking of artifacts from the Southeast Asian country.

The pieces being returned “were tied directly to illicit trafficking,” Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement on Friday. In particular, all are connected to Douglas Latchford, a Bangkok-based British art dealer who the DOJ indicted in 2019 on fraud and conspiracy charges related to his sales of Cambodian works into Western collections.

Though Latchford died in 2020 before he could face trial, the effort by Cambodian and US investigators to track down and repatriate the works he sold continued, and gradually expanded into one of the most complex investigations of the art market ever undertaken. Thousands of stone and bronze sculptures — dating to the ancient Khmer Empire, the polity that constructed monuments such as Angkor Wat — were stolen from Cambodia during the country’s 30-year civil war, which ended in 1998 with the final defeat of the Khmer Rouge.

Ripped from their pedestals with picks, shovels and sometimes explosives, the works were smuggled to Bangkok and sold onward to museums and private collectors in the US and Europe. In a deal announced in 2022, Netscape co-founder James Clark agreed to give up more than 30 works that he’d purchased from Latchford for about $35 million. The family of late Florida billionaire George Lindemann agreed to return a similar number of pieces in an accord earlier this year.

The Met said that this week’s agreement amounts to “effectively removing” Latchford-associated Cambodian objects from its collection. The museum also said it was returning two additional pieces to Thailand.

The Cambodian government has long taken the position that virtually all Khmer pieces abroad were illicitly obtained, regardless of their connections to Latchford, because permission was never granted for them to be exported.

Some two million Cambodians perished under the Khmer Rouge, who ruled the country from 1975 to 1979, when they were deposed by an invading Vietnamese army. The US, Soviet Union and China all backed different factions in the violent turmoil that followed, which provided ideal conditions for looters to ransack archaeological sites — and to feed growing global demand for Asian art. Repatriating the stolen objects “is an act of healing for our nation,” Minister of Culture and Fine Arts Phoeurng Sackona said in a statement Friday.

Identifying and proving the origins of looted objects has taken considerable detective work. One of the pieces being returned by the Met, a “Standing Female Deity” dating to the 10th century, was identified by a former looter as having been stolen from Koh Ker, a major archaeological site in northern Cambodia, in 1997. When researchers excavated the site in line with his recollections, they discovered a severed stone foot that they concluded matched the Met statue.

Brad Gordon, a lawyer representing the Cambodian government, said he hopes the Met “will now more closely inspect, and allow us to see, the records for the remaining Cambodian collection to determine if there is any reasonable basis for the Met’s continued possession of Cambodia’s national treasures.” 

For its part, the Met said it is “continuing to review its collection of Khmer art” and will exchange further information with Cambodian representatives, as well as those of Thailand. It added that it hopes to pursue “partnerships and collaborations with our colleagues” in both countries.

Williams said the DOJ will continue to investigate the trade in looted antiquities, and urged institutions in possession of them to come forward. “Come see us before we come see you,” he said.

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