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"Art owners and museums still pay huge ransoms for stolen art," Geoffrey Clarfield laments in his Saturday Globe essay Museums should not be held to ransom

"Our publicly funded museums and private auction houses have encouraged the illegal trade in antiquities by buying imported antiquities and muddling their provenance.

"Anyone who buys antiquities smuggled out of Iraq is indirectly financing the civil war there.

"In the nineteen thirties the British had a word for this kind of behaviour — appeasement.

"It would be wise for museums and the public to reject and actively oppose this underground trade and its addiction to paid ransoms.

"Although last month's heist of $2-million worth of artifacts at a museum in British Columbia was carried out by local thieves, it is simply a matter of time before the larger syndicates see Canada and Canadian museums as easy targets.

"If we continue to appease thieves, smugglers and terrorists we can be sure that more of our museums and galleries will be plundered and held for ransom.

"By doing nothing we will be giving a free hand to organized crime in our own and other countries."

Whether you agree or not, it's a provocative argument, so we are pleased that Mr. Clarfield will be online today from 3-4 p.m. ET to take your questions and his essay and about the broader issues he raises in it.

Join the Conversation now or and submit a question or comment.

Your questions and Mr. Clarfield's answers will appear at the bottom of this page when the discussion begins.

Geoffrey Clarfield is the former curator of ethnography at the National Museums of Kenya.

He is now a Toronto-based anthropologist, musician and writer.

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Christine Diemert, globeandmail.com Thank you for joining us today Mr. Clarfield. I'll start with our first question from a reader.

Jasmine Francis, Halifax: In your essay, you wrote: "Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the rise of the Internet and the globalization of the world economy, trade in stolen art and antiquities has been rising steeply." Why is that happening?

Geoffrey Clarfield: First of all, piracy and smuggling of all sorts has gone up as the bi-polar division of the world into pro Soviet and anti Soviet forces has created a multi polar world. When this has happened at various points in history the ability of strong centralized states to control everything that happens in their territories goes down. Related to that is that the internet makes all kinds of commerce, both legal and illegal, a lot more easy to carry out. You can send out all sorts of messages and pictures of pieces for sale to a a whole range of potential buyers and then follow up by telephone call. The authorities in democratic countries do not have and have not yet committed the resources necessary to track this sort of thing. Only the Italian government has a unit of the national police dedicated to recovering art theft and tracking illegal excavators and their clients.

Art Hostage, United Kingdom: Art and Antiquities theft comes in different forms.

1. Smuggling antiquities, which stricter laws and co-operation between countries has stemmed to some extent.

2. Art theft of Iconic art such as the Gardner art etc, which can only be stopped if there is a minimum 10 years jail time for art theft from public buildings or museums. This will create dispersal but the private sector of art collectors who are better placed to pay for security.

3 Art theft from residential homes, which is by far the biggest, not in value of each theft, but in numbers per year. To stop this the art trade has to be strictly regulated whereby the art trade faces severe penalties if caught in possession of stolen art from residential homes, minimum ten years jail-time if caught in possession of stolen art from museums or public buildings.

4 How to successfully recover stolen art without paying Dane geld ? Easy, make sure the informant, who helps law enforcement is paid extremely well, not just a small token for risking their life and becoming an informant.

5 Treat each art theft on its own merits and if a deal is done, then it needs to be kept secret, unlike the Bill Reid deal which is about to burst open, leaving authorities rather embarrassed.

Consider this: If there were legislation in place whereby the thieves of the Bill Reid icons were facing minimum ten years jail-time would they have gone through with the theft? I think it is unlikely, therefore the Bill Reid thieves would have targeted some up-market private art gallery instead.

Let's face it, museums and public buildings cannot afford very tight security so the best that can be offered is a deterrent of the ten years jail-time tariff for theft from a public building or museum. Please comment.

Geoffrey Clarfield: You have diagnosed the situation quite effectively, but sometimes answers are counterintuitive. What I mean by this is yes, by all means we have to tighten up the punitive affect of the law internally, especially when it comes to thefts from Canadian museums but, this may be the tip of the iceberg.

For example the remarkable pre Islamic Buddhist sculptural heritage is up for grabs these days. Ghandaran sculpture smuggled out of Afghanistan is being sold on the black market in Pakistan for upwards of a million dollars a shot. Somehow the OECD countries are in the awkward position of being the only countries with the dollars to fund such programs. Right now the development agencies of the West, the World Bank and bilaterals like CIDA and USAID believe that "culture" is the icing on the cake and their programs are all about the poorest of the poor-the old mantra of water, health and education.

The Brits have a major Africa Museum project that tries to deal with the problem at sources but this is not a major plank of international development thinking.

Oddly enough art and archaeology need to be put high on the agendas of international development-joint excavations, joint care of collections, travelling exhibits, community museums, local ecotourism and the employment of poor labourers on archaeological digs.

Jason Schmidt, Saskatoon: You say the Italian government is taking a tougher line than many others, including Canada's government. Why?

Geoffrey Clarfield: The reason that the Italian government is much tougher about theft of art from museums and churches and the smuggling of illegal artifacts out of the country is because in the minds of most educated Westerners (Europeans and North Americans) "Italy is the museum of mankind"

Those countries such as Canada that identify in some way with Western Civilization gain much of their identities from identification with the visual heritage of Greece and Rome. We have so many Roman and Greek symbols in our life that the attraction of having the "real thing" is for many people and Museums, overwhelming. The same can be said with artifacts from the Biblical countries, Egypt, Israel and Jordan-having that kind of artifact on your mantelpiece gives you a direct connection with those "hallowed" times and places.

In the last 50 years these countries have been so despoiled of their archaeological and artistic heritage that it has become a point of national honour to stop the flow of antiquities outside of their country.

In addition, when these countries succeed in keeping antiquities "at home" it becomes is a win win situation as it contributes to growth in the tourist industries there. Canada and the United States and much of Northern Europe are "consumers" of these artifacts and have little to lose, materially from such transactions. If a Museum in North America gets a beautiful Greek vase they gain prestige and they do not fear that they will lose the source of such objects. The sources is overseas.

On the other hand, by not policing what comes in through Sotheby's or Christie's auction houses in Canada we are in some ways accomplices to the archaeological looting of Europe. The same can be said for paintings that get taken from museums. However with the publishing of art data bases and data bases of stolen art from the world's museums, the Internet is proving to be a good defence against auction houses selling stolen canvases and Church art.

c l from Canada writes: Mr. Clarfield, Do museums have an obligation to return stolen artifacts? For instance, the Royal Ontario Museum and its collection of Chinese ancient artifacts and antiquities that were smuggled out illegally during the Cultural revolution?

Geoffrey Clarfield: This is an excellent and troubling question. Legally, museums that reside in countries who have signed on to treaties brokered by UNESCO are obliged to make efforts to return artifacts that have a provenance after 1970. This means if they were excavated after 1970 this should be reported and some way of sending them back to the "mother country" should be enacted.

My understanding is that much of the ROM collection was purchased in China during the warlord period of the 1930's by the late Bishop White who also founded the Asian Studies Department at the University of Toronto. I am not aware of materials smuggled out during the cultural revolution which was almost four decades later.

However, we should not forget that the Chinese government during the cultural revolution had "the destruction of the old" as one of its main platforms. All sorts of cultural treasures were destroyed during that time, especially if they had some religious symbolism or value. The destruction of temples, paintings and manuscripts in Tibet by the Chinese Communist authorities is only slowly coming to the public's attention. They are not very good or proven "stewards" of their own cultural heritage let alone anyone else's. Imagine of the ROM's Chinese treasures were in China at the time-they could all be dust by now.

The issue that you raise is profound. One must measure not only who do artifacts belong to but at the same time who can be the best steward of the artifact for future generations. Given the authoritarian nature of the present Chinese regime there is good reason for the ROM to hold on to hits artifacts for future generations, including democratic citizens of a future democratic China.

Christine Diemert, globeandmail.com: Thanks for joining us today Mr. Clarfield. Before we close, do you have anything you'd like to add?

Geoffrey Clarfield: I would like to thank the participants in this online forum whose statements and queries have raised important issues in the battle to equitably protect the world's cultural heritage from thieves and tomb robbers.

Their comments and questions have given me the opportunity to share this dialogue with interested readers who are concerned with the perilous state of much of the world's cultural heritage and which motivated me to submit the essay to The Globe, which was published on Saturday, July 5.

The art and artifacts of countries in Europe and the "archaeological countries" of the developing world, will only be protected by the focused efforts of the media, concerned citizens, policy makers and law enforcement agencies. I would therefore like to thank The Globe for providing this online forum where informed debate on pressing issues can link writer and citizen.