Cambodia to search British Museum for plundered art

Specialists seek artefacts taken from the country after the Khmer Rouge regime fell in the 1970s

THE British Museum is to be scoured for “stolen” Cambodian artefacts, after experts granted permission to inspect its vast collection.

Cambodia had demanded the right to recover art it says was looted during the chaos that followed the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s. It suspects items were trafficked by a British dealer, Douglas Latchford, and were sold into the museum’s largely unseen collection.

The British Museum has now granted unprecedented permission for specialists to inspect antiquities and identify potentially stolen objects, according to ministers in Cambodia. It is also claimed the Victoria & Albert Museum has given permission for inspections of its collection, which is also thought to contain items fraudulently sold by Latchford, who died in 2020.

Phoeurng Sackona, Cambodia’s minister of culture and fine arts, said: “We are delighted to be invited by the highly regarded British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum to survey precious objects of cultural heritage.”

The minister said Cambodia is “looking forward to an open and forthright dialogue” after the inspections which are due within the next two months.

Inspections led by expert antiquarians will first seek to establish what Cambodian objects the museums hold, and then establish how they arrived in the respective collections, and whether they match objects believed to have been looted from conflict zones during and after Pol Pot’s communist rule.

Cambodia’s experts believe the British Museum and V&A may contain statues sold by Mr Latchford, who made millions selling South-East Asian art from his Bangkok base before being charged with smuggling stolen treasures over two decades. Former looters have recently co-operated with Cambodian authorities to provide descriptions of some of the objects plundered from ancient temples.

Claims about the suspect provenance of some items may be contested by the museums’ experts, and there will probably be a need for negotiations over any potential repatriation.

The V&A has previously stated that it has been open about the provenance of its objects, while being happy to learn more, and the British Museum has maintained objects in its collection were acquired “in good faith”.

However, Cambodia’s legal team has previously raised concerns about treasures entering foreign museum collections during and after Pol Pot ’s extremist rule and during the later unrest – a time when no official exports of art were sanctioned, casting doubt

‘Latchford was engaged in a scheme to sell looted Cambodian antiques to the international art market’

over all acquisitions made by museums from the 1970s to the 1990s. The antiques looted during this time largely date from Cambodia’s Khmer Empire, which lasted from the 9th to the 15th centuries, and examples of devotional Hindu and Buddhist statues from this period have sold for millions on the modern art market.

Antiques dealer Latchford was charged with fraud by US authorities in 2019, when he was accused of being “engaged in a scheme to sell looted Cambodian antiques to the international art market”. A 25-page indictment stated that he provided fake provenance information for objects taken by looters, allowing them to be sold to buyers in the US and UK. He died before the case was advanced. In 2021 his daughter Nawapan Kriangsak agreed to repatriate the family’s entire collection of Cambodian artefacts.

Both museums were contacted for comment.