Two stolen works of Khmer art will be returned to the government on April 26 by a delegation from the Honolulu Academy of Arts in the US state of Hawaii.
The items to be returned include a 9th-century stone head of the Hindu god Shiva and a 12th-century stone head of a demon, or asura. Both disappeared from Cambodia during the years of civil war.
They are to be presented to the government in a ceremony at the National Museum, where they will be exhibited in the future. Minister of the Council of Ministers Sok An is expected to attend, along with Minister of Culture Princess Norodom Bopha Devi and officials from the museum and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
George Ellis, the Honolulu museum’s director, said in a statement posted on its Web site that “we hope the return of these sculptures will contribute greatly” to an improved relationship with Cambodia.
Ellis and several other museum officials will tour the Angkor Archaeological Park as guests of the government, and will also visit cultural sites in Vietnam, according to a museum statement.
Both pieces were donated to the Honolulu art museum in the early 1990s by wealthy collectors who bought them from reputable dealers and did not know they had been stolen. The pieces were listed in “One Hundred Missing Objects: Looting in Angkor,” first published in 1993.
That publication, one of a series produced by the International Council of Museums, alerted museums and art dealers around the world to the fact that most Khmer art being traded in the 1990s was stolen.
Since the booklet was published, about 20 percent of the items featured in it have been located. Some have been returned, while negotiations are underway with a number of countries to bring items home to Cambodia.
Etienne Clement, who head Unesco’s office in Cambodia, said the US was an early signatory of the UN’s 1970 convention prohibiting illegal trade in artwork.
By 1996, 86 countries had ratified the convention, although the US and France remain the only major art-buying countries to do so. The convention encourages countries to cooperate in the return of stolen artifacts; a second convention adopted in 1995 makes it easier for countries to prove the stolen material was originally theirs.
During the past two centuries, artworks from many poor countries have migrated to richer countries by a variety of means. Sometimes it was colonial powers shipping home spoils from conquered countries; sometimes it was art historians or archeologists building collections for museums. Still other artworks went into private collections.
In the last 30 years, Clement said, Unesco has been working to return some of these works to their countries of origin. It’s not Unesco’s goal that every piece of art must go back to its original country, he said. But the organization believes each country does have the right to possess a representative collection of its own heritage.
The repatriation movement gained strength after some countries were essentially stripped of all examples of certain items, such as Kissi statuettes in Sierra Leone or damascene swords in Iran.
They were so thoroughly snatched up by collectors that none can now be found in the undisturbed state necessary for archeologists to learn something about the cultures that made them, according to the International Council of Museums.
“The looting of cultural, archeological and ethnological property is tantamount to a crime against human heritage,” says a statement posted on the ICOM website, www.icom.org. “It destroys evidence from the past, deprives future generations of the fundamental components of heritage, and so erases the memory of ancient civilizations.”
Clement said Unesco hopes that, as wealthy collectors die, and as the mores of museums and art dealers change, more artifacts will be returned to nations like Cambodia that have been too poor, too ignorant or too traumatized to protect their own heritage.
