He Sold Away His People’s Heritage. He’s in the Jungle to Get It Back

via New York Times, 24 November 2021: This is a great story about one of the Cambodian looters who helped Douglas Latchford remove hundreds of antiquities from Cambodia and his role in their ongoing recovery.

As Toek Tik recounts it, he was a teenage foot soldier for the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the late 1970s when he first realized that looting ancient statues could be a lucrative trade.

Once, while bartering stolen cattle for clothing along the border with Thailand, he recalled, a trading partner gestured toward his ox cart, which held the heads of statues Toek Tik had collected near his home.

To his surprise, he was offered money, hard currency, for them. For the livestock, he said, “they would give only shirts or a battery.”

So began the prolific looting career of an unschooled man from a thatch-roofed hut who recently began disclosing to authorities how he oversaw hundreds of confederates as they swept through temple ruins, pillaging sculptures and other treasures.

Source: He Sold Away His People’s Heritage. He’s in the Jungle to Get It Back. – The New York Times