In early July 2023, the Netherlands announced a large-scale return to Sri Lanka and Indonesia of state-owned objects from their national museums. To Indonesia, 478 cultural artefacts including the famed Lombok treasure, stolen as war booty in 1894 from a Balinese palace, will be handed over to the National Museum in Jakarta. To Sri Lanka, six colonial objects, selected by a committee representing Sri Lankan and Dutch researchers, will be returned to the National Museum in Colombo. The process of repatriation in this instance included Indonesian and Sri Lankan interests, especially in the provenancing of collections and the defining of objects of special (national) significance.
In November 2018, French academics Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr published their report on the restitution of African cultural heritage, prompting French president Emmanuel Macron to commit to their return. Just six months later, the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures (NMWC) produced guidelines for countries to make claims on looted objects and other artefacts of cultural significance and “pledged to proactively return” artefacts in its collection identified as stolen.
In 2020, the findings of the Advisory Committee were published in a report calling for “the recognition that an injustice was done to the local populations of former colonial territories when cultural objects were taken against their will.” An emphasis on the language of justice is carried throughout the four-page report, even in its justification for excluding objects which were not deemed “involuntarily lost”. It states, “In the case of these requests, the fundamental argument is not one of redressing an injustice but of honoring an especial significance to the source country.”
Alongside the culture ministry’s advisory committee, a Pilot Provenance Research on Objects of the Colonial Era (PPROCE) ran from November 2019 to March 2022, a joint initiative of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (RMA) and the National Museum of World Cultures (NMVW), carried out under the direction of the NIOD and its in-house Expert Centre Restitution (ECR). Upon conclusion of the project, PPROCE published a report and fifty provenance reports on objects from Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
A few insights emerge from broadening this single return event into a timeline or process of restitution. First, guidelines, policies, and pledges released by governments or museums do not equate directly to action. When the Guardian reported on this story in 2019, it referenced staggering data: 4,000 objects of Sri Lankan origin, 1,000 stolen objects in the Rijksmuseum collection. The Art Newspaper as well mentions some 450,000 items in the collection of the National Museum of World Cultures which were acquired in colonial contexts. Even the official report states that “in total there are hundreds of thousands of objects” in Dutch collections. The reality of return events, as can be seen in July, is much more selective.
Second, and related, though official returns falling under the 2020 recommendations are, in the words of the committee, “a matter to be agreed between states,” it is often dedicated researchers who fulfill the burden of proof—of illicit trade, looting, or provenance. Yet, according to a press release issued by the culture ministry in Sri Lanka, PPROCE was the first intense study into Kandyan objects’ provenance since a Provenance Report by the National Museum in Colombo in the 1970s (a report most likely spurred by the landmark 1970 UNESCO Convention). For this reason, the foundations of close cooperation with Indonesia and Sri Lanka proclaimed along with the July return are all the more crucial. Funding the work of training provenance researchers, writing critical collection histories, and researching illicit trade markets needs to be prioritized at both a museum and university level, not just in source countries but within the vast networks along which these objects have travelled.
