Addis Tribune 13 December 02

AFROMET, the Association for the Return of Ethiopia's Maqdala Treasures, reacted yesterday to the recent statement of European and American Museum Directors opposing the restoration of cultural artifacts to their country of origin.

AFROMET said that the Museum Directors, seeking to cling on to their treasures, many of them acquired by loot or other doubtful practices, claimed that their collections enable audiences to gain a comparative view of world culture.

AFROMET, in its statement signed by its Chair, Professor Andreas Eshete, declared that the Museum Directors' statement was no more than Eurocentric special pleading.

Referring to the extensive looting of religious and secular artifacts from Maqdala in 1868, AFROMET declared that the Museum Directors' statement ignored the fact that such acquisition had no basis in international law, and was indeed no more than a theft, involving sacrilege, according to a statement from AFROMET.

The Directors, as AFROMET sees it, are now conducting a rearguard action, for the principle of restitution of cultural artifacts to their country of origin is now increasingly accepted.

The right to restitution is now supported by both UNESCO and the African Union, and the Italian Government declared itself committed to the return to Ethiopia of the Aksum obelisk looted from Ethiopia on Mussolini's personal orders in 1937, the AFROMETrelease said.

AFROMET believed that Ethiopia's culture, and that of the African people as a whole, should be accessible to the descendants of those who produced it.

Few of Ethiopia's sixty or so million inhabitants are in a position to visit the great museums of Europe or America to inspect their heritage; and it is unseemly of the museum directors to expect those robbed of their rightful inheritance to have always to grovel for it, it said.