Hundreds of looted treasures have been returned to Afghanistan with the help of the British Museum and UK police and border forces.
The haul is just a fraction of what has been stolen from Afghanistan’s national museum and rich archeological sites in recent decades.
“The pieces, and their enormous range, bear testament to the incredibly rich cultural history of Afghanistan,” said Colin Crokin, UK consul general in Afghanistan, at the handover ceremony for the 843 meticulously catalogued items. “In a sense, they are symbols of Afghanistan’s struggle for national unity and peace — scattered by the civil war, recovered, and now passed back to their own people for safekeeping.”
Among the important recovered artifacts is a 2nd-century schist Buddha, who now gazes down from a niche on the museum’s main stairwell, unmoved by a 20-year odyssey to other corners of Asia.
The statue was part of the museum’s collection, but disappeared in the early 1990s, when the building was on the frontline between warring factions who repeatedly raided its storerooms.
The Buddha ended up with a Japanese collector, who refused to return it and could not be legally compelled to do so even though it had been looted. However, an anonymous British dealer stepped in, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to buy it for the museum.
“It’s very important for us to get these artifacts back, because they are part of our cultural heritage and history” Afghani Deputy Minister of Culture Sayed Masaddeq Khalili said.
About 9,000 looted artifacts have been returned from a number of countries since 2001, he added.
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
Chinese authorities are snuffing out any remembrance of the deadly 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which happened 37 years ago yesterday, in a further tightening of a years-long campaign to erase what happened from public memory. Police told relatives of the victims they would not be allowed to visit a cemetery in Beijing on the anniversary of the crackdown, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Relatives of the victims visited the cemetery on the anniversary for more than 30 years to read memorial statements with police keeping watch, Amnesty International said. Hundreds of people,
RSS