Hungary creates a police unit for the protection of art treasures

Citation

Ország-Land, T. (1998), "Hungary creates a police unit for the protection of art treasures", European Business Review, Vol. 98 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.1998.05498fab.009

Hungary creates a police unit for the protection of art treasures

Hungary creates a police unit for the protection of art treasures

Thomas Ország-Land

The Hungarian police service is to set up a specialist task force for the protection of threatened art, antiques and other cultural treasures. The unit will supervise arrangements for safeguarding vulnerable collections and assemble a database of their contents. It will also co-operate with other countries in the recovery of stolen objects and promote a regional strategy to stamp out trans-frontier smuggling.

Raymond E. Kendall, the secretary-general of Interpol, has recently visited Budapest to help in the establishment of the unit. Interpol will hold a regional conference in the Hungarian capital in June to seek a collaborative arrangement to end the intensifying plunder of museums, churches, private collections and archaeological sites throughout East-Central Europe.

The trade in stolen cultural treasures is a relatively recent but increasingly important activity of the Russian mafia. It has already set up an efficient smuggling network throughout the region. The number of art robberies in these countries has nearly doubled since the beginning of this decade ­ roughly coinciding with the emergence of a vigorous new, legitimate art auction market.

Kendall told:

The geography of Hungary makes this place the centre of East-West developments ­ and that fact has not escaped organized crime.

Gábor Kuncze, the Minister of the Interior who acted as Kendall's host, added:

We have already appointed the staff of the police task force who will begin their activities at once. The assembly of a key Hungarian database listing sensitive material is under way. The unit is in effect in place.

Just before the announcement, police had arrested two Russians with eight priceless medieval icons in their car, apparently stolen from a church across the Ukrainian border. The notes found on the suspects identified several well known Hungarian are dealers and established a vital connection with numerous previous robberies and arrests. Lieutenant István Tibori of the Békéscsaba Customs Service hopes the arrests may thus provide a global view and lead to the smashing or a major organised crime ring.

The inventory of vulnerable Hungarian art treasures assembled by the police task force will be linked up for easy reference with Interpol's central database of stolen objects. The task force will also concern itself with the return of objects stolen in neighbouring countries and smuggled through Hungary, usually towards the West. In the longer term, it may well assist Interpol in promoting the establishment of many similar police units elsewhere in the region.

Hungary expects to gain a direct access facility to Interpol's global database of stolen art by the time the conference gets under way. Kendall describes this as

a small technical issue, just a matter of finding the funding (under £1 million)... I expect to move very quickly.

The real significance of this in police terms is that there is plenty of information available and it must be made accessible as quickly as possible, especially in the case of groups of countries, such as East Central Europe, where the borders are very close to each other.

The Budapest conference will provide a forum to work out an effective system of regional co-operation enabling post-communist Europe to mount a collective defence against the traffickers.

These countries will receive much practical assistance as well as encouragement from Interpol which has amassed great experience in the fight against this branch of trans-frontier crime. They can also expect vigorous support from such nearby, traditional exporters of stolen art and antiques as Italy and Greece which are determined to smash the traffickers where they find them.

In 1990, 702 robberies of art treasures took place in Hungary causing an estimated total damage of 71m forints (worth £710,000 at that time), rising to 1,025 recorded robberies last year with a loss of 425m forints (£1.42 million). Developing from very modest beginning at the turn of the decade, the legitimate Hungarian art auction market last year yielded an income of 1.6 billion forints, up from 1 billion forints a year earlier.

The picture is somewhat similar throughout the region. The Czech republic, for example, has recently lost some 60,000 valuable pieces of art and antiques, mostly from unprotected churches. The recovery rate is less than 10 per cent. But there have been spectacular success stories, thanks largely to international police co-operation and the ability of some museums to identify stolen works.

The Hungarian task force is being set up under a tripartite arrangement linking the Ministries of the Interior and Culture as well as the police. It was signed at the Dezs(breve)o Laczkó Museum of Veszprém, the site of a 1992 robbery in which several valuable Medieval golden plaques as well as two Roman sculptures were stolen. Most of them were recovered later in neighbouring Austria and nearby Switzerland.

Other significant recent robberies in Hungary took place in the Jewish Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, both in Budapest.

Miklós Móritz, a specialist spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior relates:

Criminals exploiting the illegal trade in cultural treasures tend to deploy the latest technologies ­ while the police usually plod after them using obsolete techniques.

But this is about to change. With the help of Interpol, we are to introduce state-of-the-art data processing techniques that will make possible the easy identification of stolen objects on the basis of instant information exchange between the police forces of different departments and indeed countries.

The database of art works will also help in the prevention of crime. So will a new system to be established for the protection of vulnerable collections that will be continuously supervised by the new pole task force.

The Jewish Museum of Hungary was robbed in 1993. All exhibits displayed in two vast halls were taken, comprising priceless scrolls and other sacred objects made of precious metals, silk and parchment.

This was the biggest single such theft committed anywhere in the world since the Nazi plunder of Jewish property during the Second World War.

All items were recovered, neatly packed, in a village near Bucharest, thanks to very close co-operation by the Hungarian and Romanian police. Their recovery was made possible by the detailed and highly accurate catalogue of the stolen items which the museum handed to the police immediately after the robbery.

But Róbert Turán, director of the Jewish Museum, says the symbolic importance of the recovery of these treasures was even greater than their financial value.

As he put it:

The return of these religious objects tends to restore the sense of security of a community of aged Holocaust survivors who saw the robbery as a racially motivated outrage intended to wipe out our collective history in this traditional Jewish centre of Europe.

It took police only six weeks to recover a set of old masters stolen from the Museum of Fine Arts in 1983. The thieves were allegedly employed by a Greek art dealer, but there was insufficient evidence to secure his conviction. However, the case yielded important lessons for the police.

Kendall recalls:

I saw those paintings after they had been returned to the museum. We were lucky to recover them, some in Italy and some in Greece. The case taught us that there is a great deal of preventive work that can be done before any theft takes place. In that case, the work of the thieves was made easy by some scaffolding erected outside the window, providing easy access to the room where the paintings were exhibited.

All over the former Eastern Bloc, there has been inadequate protection put in place by museums of works of art under their care, and inadequate inventories and descriptions of their treasures maintained by them. Yet good databases are essential for the identification of works if they are stolen.

There is a wonderful collection of icons and Zagorsk in Russia, for example. When I saw them first, they were protected only by a nice fat lady drinking tea by the door... Now of course the awareness is there and many collections are properly protected.

Another difficulty in the Eastern countries was that the value of these works was not always realised in the international market. But we will learn more about this in June.

Interpol's global database is highly visual. Kendal explains:

You can easily give the dimensions of a painting or describe an object ­ but unless you can actually see what it looks like, the chance is small of your identifying it. The database usually includes a picture or other representation of the stolen item, and the system permits you to enlarge certain parts for very close examination of a small area and to facilitate absolutely positive identification.

It works. Indeed, it has prevented the sale of objects in auction houses by identifying them as stolen.

The system was designed to be used by "policemen", who Kendall says, "are not necessarily capable of valuing or identifying art as the professionals are. You must appreciate that the police also need specialist education and training.