Astonishing MOU with Afghanistan

Of course ! In the rule of law, everybody is considered innocent until proven guilty, and everything not forbidden by law is authorized (while in dictatorships everything not forbidden by law is compulsory). This is the ideal.

But these principles have evolved. Let's consider rapists. 50 years from now, most rapists could get away with it because, when accused by their victims, they just had to deny: it is almost impossible to prove a rape, especially if the complaint is filed years after the fact, even more if the victim was a child at the time. Same thing with money laundering: the defendant may always protest he won the money playing poker with people he did not know (there are no laws against playing poker with people we do not know), or he just found the money in an abandoned pouch in the wild while walking his dog. For the good of the community, justice had to adapt. In rape cases the burden of proof is now on the defendant. In money laundering cases, the defendant must prove the provenance of the money.

Same thing for antiquities trafficking. We know that in some countries the destruction of archaeological sites has become a real industry because there is a flourishing international market for portable antiquities - and this includes coins. When a stone head arrives at the customs, the authorities have the duty of checking it, and not just be satisfied with the paperwork (exported by some Emirati company, artisanal work, from an old family collection made before 1950, etc.). An expert must examine the item. If it is - for example - the head of a Buddha in typical Gandhara style, the expert will state this object likely comes from Afghanistan or Pakistan and, unless its owner can prove it was actually already in his granddad's garden in 1950, this head will be considered recently looted from some archaeological site. Same thing for coins. They often come in lots. If the lot includes Hellenistic Seleucid coins, Roman tets and bronzes from Antioch, city-coins of North Syrian and Mesopotamian cities, Byzantine folles, Umayyad, Zengid bronze dirhams and so on, the expert will conclude this whole lot likely originates from North Syria, precisely where the looting of archaeological sites is the most active. The burden of proof is now on the dealer: he must prove these coins were actually already in a "collection made before 1970".

We just cannot give a hand to the destruction of historical heritage by tolerating and legalizing looting and trafficking, just because it is impossible to prove that coins and antiquities have just been looted from war-torn countries.

 

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Certainly the burden of proof has not shifted in rape cases. Not in the USA or any other common-law country I know of. I have no idea about France or other civil law countries.

Yes, the corroboration requirement for rape cases was eliminated a long time ago, but rape was the only crime for which such an evidentiary requirement existed in the first place.

 

@GinoLR : Why do you quote me selectively and leave out the part of the sentence before that ? For that is crucial and has nothing to do with rape victims.
Some coin types on this list come from regions over 1000 km away from the nearest Afghan border.
So every time you buy a French ancient or medieval coin in the future you want to be forced by law to prove that this coin was not looted from Bulgaria ? For Bulgarian heritage has to be protected at all cost, so also all French coins are declared illegal from now on, because our experts say so.
Thats a much closer analogy for the contents of these import rules.

 

I suppose this MOU mentions Roman coins because it happens that Roman coins are found in Afghanistan... Sure, the wording of this MOU sounds bizarre and awkward. I think they wanted to say that this protection is not limited to artefacts made on what is today Afghan territory, but encompasses all type of archaeological material likely to be found on Afghan soil. The ultimate goal being the protection of archaeological sites, by making it uncertain and hazardous to export antiquities from Afghanistan... Else the traffickers could hire some good lawyers who could say : "OK for the Bactrian coins, but you cannot forbid importation of coins minted in Sardis (now Turkey) or Rome !" Don't you think it is what they meant, in their MOU?

 

The detecting and enforcing mechanism for antiquities, including coins, from Afghanistan and other countries with MOUs with the US is the CBP, part of the Department of Homeland Security. For shipments arriving from overseas to the US, two factors can trigger a letter of detention, and potentially seizure by Customs:

1) a shipment that is suspicious in terms of country of origin or shipper; content of the shipment, such as a large object like a part of a mosaic; questionable or dubious information on the declaration form.

2) a shipment that has been randomly selected for inspection by Customs. I am not sure just how random this process is, but apparently the intent is to make shippers less likely to export or misrepresent restricted items.

Now US Customs also detain and seize antiquities brought into the US by individuals entering the country. That potential seizure is what makes me very hesitant now to take a coin with me overseas or to buy coins to bring back to the US. If I were to do the latter, the coins would need documentation that they can be legally imported, something that might be problematic buying coins from a small shop or at a venue such as the Charing Cross bourse that is held every Saturday in London.

 

Some random thoughts.

It's a unilateral order, not a "memorandum of understanding". The difference is significant.

Similar orders have been in effect for Afghanistan for 15 years or more. There is little or nothing new here.

Only two classes of non-Afghan coins are mentioned in the order, "common Roman Imperial coins" and "Chinese coins belonging primarily to the Tang Dynasty". Both classes are further qualified by the phrase "found in archaeological contexts in Afghanistan". There is no attempt here to generally restrict Roman imperial or Chinese coins.

 

I am starting to feel a bit like shouting in the desert in this thread. So this will be my last contribution. I am afraid that the confidence that some of the contributers have in their opinions is inversely related to their level of knowledge of the complex history of this region and its coinage.

You are factually incorrect. As i mentioned in my first post in this thread, many categories of coins are incorrectly or to broadly defined and include cointypes which have nothing to do with Afghanistan.

One of the historical complexities of Afghanistan is that it was ruled by a succession of a large number of different dynasties. Most of these ruling dynasties did not originate within Afghanistan but were foreign invaders conquering the region. These dynasties ruled Afghanistan for a period and coinage was minted under their authority. However, repeatedly the ruling dynasty was displaced by a new invader and moved out of the Afghan region to a new territory. For example the Ghorids drove the Ghaznavids out of Afghanistan. The Ghaznavids then continued to rule in the Punjab for several decades, producing different coins there. The Khwarezmshahi drove the Ghorids out of Afghanistan. But the Ghorids moved to North-Western India and formed the basis for the Dehli sultanate there. Again, the Indian coinage of the Ghorids had nothing to do with Afghanistan anymore.

I demonstrated this one earlier:
"p. Ghurid coins include silver and gold tangas with inscriptions and abstract goddess iconography."
The "abstract godess iconography" refers to this coin type:

And this is where it was minted and circulated:

The red bullet indicates the city of Kannauj which came under Ghurid control after they expanded from Afghanistan to the east. This abstract "seated Lakshmi" coin type is a continuation of the previous city coinage there, just replacing the name of the ruler with that of Ghorid ruler Muhammad bin Sam in the typical Nagari scriptstyle of this Northern Indian region. (There are two coin types with this iconography, the other one is from Bayana in the same region). For easy reference i indicated the distance to the Afghan border. To declare this coin type as important Afghan heritage is simply preposterous.

I believe that legislation is most effective and best accepted when people can trust that the rule making process is accurate and rules are just. This list of coin categories and the ensuing rules was made up by, possibly idealistic but, factually incompetent fools.

 

Yep, pretty much...

 

This is absurd. Of course it's relevant -- not only relevant but crucial, especially if by reason of such errors the restrictions apply on their face to coins never minted or even circulated in today's Afghanistan. Because practically speaking, and given the way that I understand some Customs officials confiscate any coins on one of the restriction lists regardless of actual origin -- it isn't as if there's any sort of "expert" determination made before Customs takes such actions -- the fact that the restrictions apply in theory only to coins found in archaeological contexts within Afghanistan won't necessarily prevent broad confiscations of any coin types listed.

Would it be OK if the importation of all pre-1842 British sovereigns were practically impeded because of the theoretical possibility that some of them might have been in the possession of the 4,500 British soldiers lost in the course of the disastrous 1842 retreat from Kabul during the First Afghan War (memorably recounted in the first Flashman book by George Macdonald Fraser), and subsequently found?