More Bricks in Wall Against Art: Vietnam Import Ban Sought

Watch for our special supplement articles on Vietnam, Italy, Chile, and Morocco coming January 24!

As 2025 begins, the United States blocks import of virtually all art and antiques from thirty-four countries. Blanket import restrictions deny access to museums, collectors, and hundreds of small businesses to ancient, antique and ethnographic art, coins, and collectibles that have been in legal circulation for 50 or 100 years or more but were not required to have export documentation from countries of origin until today. These virtually permanent blockades can deny Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and Jain communities in the diaspora the rights to their own religious heritage.

Display of seized objects from a Belgium collection in Italy. Credit Carabinieri Nucleo Tutela Patrimonio Culturale.

Instead of focusing on harmful looting, cultural property agreements known as MOUs now prohibit entry of ‘cultural goods’ – anything made by human hands – from 10,000 or even a million years ago, and as recently made as the early 20^th century. Even more agreements, with Mongolia and Lebanon, are already in the pipeline.[1]

Three five-year renewals (and possible expansions) of existing restrictions and one brand new agreement will be considered soon – and almost certainly added to the list. The Cultural Property Advisory Committee at the Department of State (CPAC) will meet February 4-6, 2025[2] to vote on 5-year proposed extensions of U.S. import restrictions on cultural items from Chile, whose original agreement dates to 2020, Morocco’s 2021 agreement, and Italy’s 2001 U.S. import restrictions, which Italy claims it needs in order to stop looting, although they have already been in place for 25 years.

CPAC’s February meeting will also vote on a new request for cultural property import restrictions from Vietnam. According to the announcement for the meeting posted on the State Department website, Vietnam seeks U.S. import restrictions on archaeological and ethnological materials from Vietnam for a period of approximately seventy-seven thousand years, from the Paleolithic to 1945.[3]

The request for restrictions covers virtually every object made by human hands, including objects made from gold, silver, ceramic, stone, metal, copper, bronze, iron, bone, horn, ivory, gems, silk and textiles; lacquerware and wood; bamboo and paper; glass; coins; and painting and calligraphy.

Vietnamese collector Do Hung’s private museum of Nguyen Dynasty artifacts in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Courtesy Nguyen Dynasty Artifacts Museum.

Vietnam’s one-party Socialist Republic passed new cultural heritage laws just this year. Its government espouses Marxism/Leninism and Hồ Chí Minh Thought. At the same time, Vietnam has allowed wealthy citizens to build private museums – filled with goods the U.S. cannot import – and turned temples and sacred spots into tourist havens. Its motives are mercenary and political. It seeks U.S. blessings on its government, not the preservation of heritage. But this comes at a cost to U.S. citizens. Should Vietnam’s socialist government have exclusive access to traditional culture by Vietnamese American citizens who escaped Vietnam and want to see its history honored in American museums?

Despite overflowing museums and neglected archaeological sites, Italy lacks standard immunity laws and withholds loans to American museums unless they pay wildly exorbitant fees. After decades of requests, Italy still refuses to share records from seizures that would enable museums to identify looted objects. Roman coins are among the most common ancient artifacts but they circulated in the multiple millions. Of 14,982 hoards with over 6 million coins recorded (as of December 16, 2024), only 786 hoards (5.24%) were found within modern-day Italy. Such coins cannot be assumed to be Italian cultural property due to their wide geographic distribution.

Vehicle tracks showing destruction of the geoglyphs by off-road racing, courtesy Atacama Desert Foundation.

Chile’s government wants a blanket embargo to claim a diplomatic coup, asking the U.S. to ignore its government’s recent failure to protect irreplaceable, glyph decorated ancient pilgrimage paths from destruction in road rallies and military target practice.

Although lacking evidence of looting or trafficking, neglect of self-help measures, and overly broad and vague restrictions, Morocco wants the U.S. to ban U.S. entry to the same objects sold openly in its bazaars to tourists. Morocco has not provided evidence of significant investment in preserving its cultural sites or prohibiting metal detectoring. In all these countries, the damage caused to lawful collecting and cultural exchange now outweighs any benefits derived from deterring unsupported claims of looting.

To say the least, State Department renewal of these agreements is not respectful of the rules of U.S. heritage law. The number of agreements restricting imports more than doubled in the first decade in which the State Department took over administration of Cultural Property Implementation Act from the United States Information Agency (where Congress placed it to keep it from being used as a diplomatic tool). Then they doubled again, and again.

The State Department has never denied a request – in fact, its Cultural Heritage Bureau actively solicits requests from art source countries – and only Canada’s and Nicaragua’s agreements have failed to renew after five years. (Canada’s renewal failed because its representatives acknowledged it was completely unnecessary, and Nicaragua’s because of State Department policies disfavoring the Ortega government.)

Mataveri Airport, Easter Island, Chile, By Jialiang Gao www.peace-on-earth.org, via Wikimedia Commons.

Although the early agreements under the 1983 Cultural Property Implementation Act were within the scope envisioned by Congress, covering only objects that were subject to looting that was endangering the county’s heritage, that is no longer the case. Over the last two decades, MOUs blocking imports have been signed for both diplomatic reasons, giving foreign governments a ‘soft power’ public relations win, and to promote the aggressively anti-art trade, anti-collecting policies dominant at the Cultural Heritage Bureau. Today, the State Department claims to be “protecting” cultural heritage by keeping it locked within national borders.

While diplomacy is often a matter of tit-for-tat exchanges – do this for us and we’ll do something for you – three things are striking about the State Department’s ever more frequent and ever broader, and never-ending cultural property agreements.

• First, countries that cannot meet the the four tests Congress set for signing an MOU under the law now predominate. Sites are damaged through development and because countries fail to protect them.
• Second, the lists of prohibited items have become comprehensive blockades on everything from the foreign country, covering objects legally, openly sold inside the source countries, thus discriminating against U.S. buyers.
• Third, cultural property agreements are being signed with the most authoritarian regimes and dictatorships in the world – governments that arrest and torture dissidents, journalists, and civil society actors, persecute religious and ethnic minorities, falsify history and manipulate culture to serve political ends, and even deliberately destroy the cultural monuments that they are supposed to protect.

Destroyed Jewish Cemetery, Tangier, Morocco. Photo by Diego Delso. 11 December 2015. CC-by-SA. Wikimedia Commons.

Disregarding these signatory countries’ anti-American policies, the US has an agreement with Turkey, which is persecuting Orthodox Christians and has made Hagia Sofia into a mosque, with Egypt, notorious for repression of free expression and torture of critics, with Libya, with Yemen, Algeria, and other Arab and North African nations that have driven out all Jews, destroying temples and graveyards. We’ve signed MOUs with Pakistan, where false charges of blasphemy justify murder of Christians, and India, where Hindu supremacists are bulldozing mosques and denying citizenship to Muslim families who have lived there for centuries.

The U.S. has recently renewed an agreement with China, which is committing genocide against its Tibetan and Muslim populations, destroying monasteries and mosques, placing a million innocent people in concentration camps, and more than a million children in locked boarding schools. The U.S. even has an agreement with Afghanistan, where the Taliban’s repression of women and minorities, to say nothing of bulldozing ancient sites for antiquities, has taken Afghanistan into a new Dark Age.

Tourists ride in the Erg Chebbi. Merzouga, Oasis du Sud Marocain Biosphere Reserve, Morocco, photo Lefidele, 17 September 2015, CCA-SA 4.0 International license.

Agreements that do nothing to protect archaeological sites and everything to enhance the reputations of dictators, should not be signed. Agreements with foreign nations must meet the requirements of U.S. law or be allowed to lapse – and never renewed. That’s the real American way.

Make your voice heard!

Registered participants may provide oral comments at the virtual open session of CPAC on February 4, 2025 for up to a maximum of five (5) minutes each. Register to speak at the open session by sending an email with your name and organizational affiliation by January 27, 2025 to [email protected].

The public can observe the virtual open session on February 4, 2025. instructions on how to observe or provide oral comments at the open session are at https://eca.state.gov/​highlight/​cultural-property-advisory-committee-meeting-february-4-6-2025.

The Committee will review written comments if received by 11:59 p.m. (EST) on January 27, 2025. Written comments may be submitted at https://www.regulations.gov, enter the docket DOS-2024-0048 and follow the prompts.

Our special supplement with articles on Vietnam, Italy, Chile, and Morocco is coming your way January 24!

[1] For example, the Department of State signed an agreement with India in July 2024 but the list of restricted objects isn’t yet published. Hearings on requests from Mongolia and Lebanon took place on September 24, 2024, but import restrictions are not announced until the day that they go into effect.

[2] U.S. State Department Notice of Cultural Property Advisory Committee Meeting, 89 FR 106722, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/12/30/2024-31255/cultural-property-advisory-committee-meetingperty Advisory Committee Meeting.

[3]   Vietnam’s request seeks import restrictions on virtually all objects from Paleolithic (c. 75,000 BCE – 10,000 BCE), Neolithic period (c. 10,000 BCE – 2000 BCE), Bronze Age (c. 2000 BCE – 1000 BCE), and Iron Age (c. 1000 BCE – 200 CE), the Ancient period (2879 BCE – 179 BCE), Northern domination period (179 BCE – 939 CE), and the Dynasty and Monarchy period (939 – 1945 CE)