The Economist 07 October 04

IT IS a poor country with a rich history. Through force and unfair dealing, many of Ethiopia's historical relics have left the country. Ethiopians want to bring them home, not just to celebrate their past, but to earn tourist dollars in future.

The main contention is a 150-tonne granite obelisk, 24 metres high, which is now lying in pieces in a police yard in Rome. Until 2003, the obelisk-carved intriguingly with doors and windows as if it were a ten-storey building-spent 66 years standing at one of the city's busy intersections. The obelisk dates from the fourth century and comes from Aksum, a northern Ethiopian town where it probably served as a royal tomb marker and ceremonial altar.

When the Italians invaded Ethiopia in 1935, the obelisk-which by then had fallen down and fractured into five chunks-was shipped as fascist booty to Rome. In Aksum one elderly Ethiopian, Abebe Alemayehu, remembers the trouble the Italian army had shifting the obelisk, their trucks bogged down by the weight.

As part of a treaty in 1947, Italy promised to return the obelisk and other objects looted during the occupation. Fifty years later, the two governments signed yet another agreement to send the obelisk back. A damaging lightning strike two years ago was a catalyst at last to dismantle the monument and pack it up for shipment. Since then, it has not budged from Rome.

Still, the Rome University professor in charge of the obelisk project, Giorgio Croci, is hopeful. He says that the monument should start the long trip home by early next year. It will cost €5m ($6.1m) to ship and re-erect it.

The Italian government has yet to announce that all of the money has been earmarked. Then there are logistics. The port through which the obelisk left in 1937 now belongs to Eritrea, with which Ethiopia has fought a bitter war. The nearest feasible port, Djibouti, is 900 kilometres (560 miles) from Aksum, across roads and bridges which may not take the strain. The current plan, says Mr Croci, is to hire an ex-military Russian transport plane to fly the pieces over, one by one.

Back in Aksum, people are confident of the obelisk's return. It will be a happy day, says Amare Lemma, a retired Ethiopian senator, not just for Ethiopia, but for other countries which have lost their cultural treasures and want them back. The whole world, he says, will have to rethink.

Ethiopians are also pushing for the return of the Maqdala treasures, looted by the British army in 1868. Richard Pankhurst, a historian at Addis Ababa University, reckons that at least 500 crosses, crowns, shields, manuscripts and such are still abroad, most of them in British collections. Most controversial are the "tabots"-carved blocks of wood or marble sacred to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The British Museum has 11 tabots kept in a special room, currently seen only by priests.

This is unsatisfactory, says Gebre Georgis Dimtsu, a priest living in London, since the tabots can scarcely perform their function in religious ceremonies while in a museum. The Church's Patriarch has called for their return. The British Museum says it cannot take the tabots out of its collection, because of the law governing its accessions. A House of Commons committee calls the current situation a "patent absurdity". One possibility is to loan the tabots to Orthodox churches in London.

Just as daunting for Ethiopia as getting back its relics is preserving the ones it still has. Conservation is tricky, in part because of a serious shortage of trained experts. The World Bank hopes to help Ethiopia with a $5m loan to develop the country's cultural assets, improve inventory systems, foster training programmes and encourage people to make good handicrafts-better than selling loot.

Although laws exist against removing cultural property, opportunities abound. When this correspondent stopped by a shop with a collection of ancient pottery, the shopkeeper insisted, in front of a local official, that he was saving the stuff to start his own museum. As soon as he was out of official earshot, the line changed: "How much do you want to pay?"