[CPProt.net] April 12, 2003 reports

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                          forwarded reports



April 12, 2003
_____________________________________________


- Baghdad archeological museum looted

- Looters grab priceless objects from Iraqi museums

- Iraq - Threats to Cultural Heritage: Guardian article,10th April 	
and THES 11th April 2003 (reports forwarded by Patrick Boylan) 

- Mosul descends into chaos as even museum is looted 

- Bring indigenous remains home

- Return of ancestral remains from London heralds many more returns  

____________________________________________




Baghdad archeological museum looted

A Baghdad mob looted Iraq's largest archeological museum amid a 
breakdown in civil authority following the collapse of Saddam 
Hussein's regime, an AFP reporter said. A dozen looters helped 
themselves in ground floor rooms at the National Museum of Iraq, 
where pottery artefacts and statues were seen broken or overturned, 
while administrative offices were wrecked. Two men were seen hauling 
an ancient portal out of the building, and empty wooden crates were 
scattered over the floor. Upstairs rooms seemed to have been spared 
for the time being.  

Iraq, among the earliest cradles of civilisation and home to the 
remains of such ancient Mesopotamian cities as Babylon, Ur and 
Nineveh, has one of the richest archaeological heritages in the 
world. The museum housed a major collection of antiquities, including 
a 4,000-year-old silver harp from Ur. International cultural 
organisations had urged that the archeological heritage of Iraq, one 
of the cradles of civilisation, be spared ahead of the US-led war 
launched on March 20.  


http://www.abc.net.au/

________________________________________


Looters grab priceless objects from Iraqi museums
BY AARON DAVIS AND DREW BROWN
Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq - (KRT) - Gold and silver from ancient royal tombs, a 
priceless harp from 2,600 B.C., a solid bronze bust of King Naram-
Sin. These and countless other artifacts from the collective 
birthplace of Christianity, Judaism and Islam were left defenseless 
Friday as Iraq descended into chaos.
At the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad, where a tank shell had 
blackened the museum's ornate facade, Baghdadis came and went through 

the night by firelight, cradling loot.
Broken pottery and overturned statues lined the museum's ground floor 

and two men were seen carrying off an ancient portal.
In Mosul, considered by Iraqis the country's most civilized city, 
home to Iraq's equivalent of Harvard University, gangs stormed a 
museum storeroom containing ancient Assyrian and Babylonian stone 
tablets. A curator held them off, at least temporarily.
As news of looting spread Friday, some archaeologists lashed out at 
the military for not better protecting artifacts from the cradle of 
civilization. Especially important is Baghdad's national museum, 
central repository of Iraq's greatest cultural treasures.
"They've known the importance of this museum, I showed them where it 
was. There's no reason this should be looted," said McGuire Gibson of 

the University of Chicago, one of the world's top Mesopotamia 
scholars.
Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Owens, a spokesman for the U.S. Central 
Command, said he was unaware of any damage to museums.
"We haven't targeted anything, nor are we firing at these precious 
sites," Owens said.
Saving artifacts and quelling looting could not yet be the military's 

highest priority, he added. "We are doing our best to protect our 
forces. We are still engaged with people who want to kill us."
Late Friday, military officials said they could not determine whether 

U.S. forces were in control of the area around the national museum or 

whether the looting of it had been serious.
Gibson, who has traveled more than 30 times to Iraq, said he met 
repeatedly in January with Pentagon officials to map Iraq's museum 
and excavation sites. The meetings were to assure that the sites were 

spared from coalition bombing. Post-war looting was always the bigger 

concern, Gibson and others said.
Seven of Iraq's 12 regional museums were looted and 4,000 artifacts 
stolen during the lapse of authority that followed the 1991 Gulf War.
Before the bombing began this time, Gibson said, Iraqi officials 
moved nearly every artifact that could be safely carried from museums 

and storerooms around the country to the museum in Baghdad. The 
museum is the largest and most modern in the Middle East.
Thousands of the museum's artifacts were wrapped and placed in 
storage before the war, Gibson said. Some may have been placed in 
underground vaults. In 1991, Saddam used vaults of Baghdad's Central 
Bank for safekeeping the artifacts.
The protection has proven porous, however. Even under Saddam's tight 
rule, many of Iraq's treasures turned up on the black market.
"I fully expect to see some of these looted items show up on eBay in 
coming weeks," Gibson said.
It may never be known what artifacts have been lost.
"If the records are destroyed, we won't know they ever existed at 
all," said David Shillingford, a director at the Art Loss Register in 

New York, which maintains a worldwide database of missing and stolen 
art and artifacts.
---
(Davis reported from Washington, Brown from Baghdad. Knight Ridder 
Newspapers correspondents Mark McDonald in Mosul, Iraq, and Jessica 
Guynn at the Pentagon contributed to this report.)

____________________________________________




------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent:      	Fri, 11 Apr 2003 17:50:10 +0100 (BST)
From:           	P Boylan <P.Boylan at city.ac.uk>
Subject:        	Iraq - Threats to Cultural Heritage: Guardian 
article,10th April
	and THES 11th April 2003


Three articles for information.


Patrick Boylan

P.S. The BBC Radio news is reporting that the Bagdhad National Museum 

is
at the present moment being "ransacked" and emptied of its 
collections by
looters. Canadian Radio news this morning claimed that the National 
Museum
of Natural History has been set on fire.

===============================

THE GUARDIAN EDUCATION

US lobby could threaten Iraqi heritage

Donald MacLeod
Thursday April 10, 2003

Apparent lobbying by American art dealers to dismantle Iraq's strict 
export laws has heightened fears about the looting of the country's 
antiquities as order breaks down in the last stages of the war.  

After the last gulf war a lot of treasures disappeared onto the black 
market and archaeologists in Britain and the US are concerned this 
will be repeated on a much larger scale in the power vacuum after the 
fall of Saddam Hussein, as happened in Afghanistan. For poor Iraqis 
the temptation to sell stolen antiquities will be greatly increased 
if it is known there is a ready market in the west.  

Iraq, which encompasses Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilisation, is 
so rich in remains dating back 10,000 years that it has been 
described as one vast archaeological site.  

Dominque Collon, assistant keeper in the department of the ancient 
near east at the British Museum, said today that alarm bells had been 
set ringing by reports of a meeting between a coalition of 
antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling itself the American 
Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), with US defence and state 
department officials before the start of the war. The group offered 
help in preserving Iraq's invaluable archaeological collections, but 
archaeologists fear there is a hidden agenda to ease the way for 
exports post-Saddam.  

The ACCP's treasurer, William Pearlstein, has described Iraq's laws 
as "retentionist", and the group includes influential dealers who 
favour a relaxation of the current tight restrictions on the 
ownership and export of antiquities.  

Dr Collon said: "This is just the sort of thing that will encourage 
looting. Once there is American blessing they have got a market for 
these antiquities and it becomes open season. The last thing we want 
is condoned looting."  

The ACCP denied accusations of wanting to change Iraq's treatment of 
antiquities and said at the January meeting they offered post-war 
technical and financial assistance and conservation support.  

This week an international group of archaeologists petitioned the UN 
and Unesco, a cultural education body, to ensure that whatever body 
oversees post-war Iraq takes steps to preserve its priceless heritage 
from destruction and looting.  

They urge that security personnel be posted throughout Iraq at its 
many archaeological sites and museum storage facilities as soon as 
possible to halt future thefts. "In the aftermath of the previous 
gulf war, Iraqi archaeological sites and museum collections suffered 
from extensive looting, the fruits of which continue to disappear 
into the international black market for illegally procured 
antiquities," they say.  

The archaeologists and scholars want their Iraqi colleagues to 
continue in or be restored to their positions in museums, 
archaeological projects, and universities.  

The Iraqi antiquities authority should be offered the assistance of 
specialists from around the world to begin restoration and 
preservation of antiquities that have been damaged and the training 
of a new generation of Iraqi experts.  

They add: "Whatever body oversees post-war Iraq [should] be ready to 
offer material assistance to the Iraqi authorities and any concerned 
international agency prepared to apprehend and prosecute persons 
responsible for the theft and purchase of Iraqi cultural heritage 
materials, and to strive for the recovery of those materials and 
their restoration to the Iraqi people".  


=======================================

TIMES HIGHER EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT

Alarm bells over future of Iraqi treasures

Phil Baty
Published: 11 April 2003

Academics fear that Iraq's cultural heritage is in danger as an 
influential group of American antiquities collectors manoeuvre for 
influence with the planned postwar military regime. International 
archaeologists and historians have criticised the activities of the 
American Council for Cultural Policy, which has held meetings with 
the Pentagon and the US Defense Department about the fate of Iraqi 
antiquities during and after the war.  

UK and US scholars said the ACCP's remit to protect the interests of 
US collectors and dealers was "diametrically opposed to scholarly 
research".  

They said that any form of collecting created a lucrative market that 
encouraged looting and illegal trade in antiquities, destroying the 
archeological and scientific value of artefacts.  

"There is bound to be looting of archaeological sites and museums in 
the period after war," said Lord Renfrew, professor of archaeology at 
Cambridge University. "We must guard against the selling-off of Iraqi 
heritage."  

The ACCP, which has offered financial and technical support to the 
planned post-Saddam regime in Iraq, denied that it had any interest 
in Iraq other than to protect its rich heritage.  

Its critics claimed that the group was seeking to have US laws 
relaxed to make it easier for dealers to trade in foreign artefacts 
illegally removed from countries such as Iraq.  

The ACCP said it had no policy on US law, but some of its members - 
including its president, New York lawyer Ashton Hawkins - have 
criticised US law that recently led to the conviction of a leading 
dealer for handling stolen property.  

Critics also pointed out that the group's treasurer, lawyer William 
Pearlstein, has criticised Iraqi laws that forbid the export of 
antiquities and has reportedly said he would like the postwar regime 
to allow some exports.  

Law professor Patty Gerstenblith, a member of the Archeological 
Institute of America, claimed that the ACCP's goal was to "weaken the 
laws of the US so that illegally exported and looted objects can be 
brought into the US and so that dealers and others cannot be 
prosecuted for handling certain types of stolen archaeological 
objects". She said that any move to relax laws in Iraq could lead to 
the legalised plundering of Iraq's heritage.  

Lord Renfrew said that it might be time to ask questions in 
Parliament to clarify the intentions of the ACCP in the postwar 
regime.  

McGuire Gibson, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago who 
attended the ACCP's meetings with US officials at the Pentagon in 
January, was also concerned. He said he objected in principle to the 
ACCP's activities.  

"Collecting and dealing in antiquities are diametrically opposed to 
scholarly research. Any artefact is best left in place... 80 per cent 
or more of what the object could tell you is lost when it its ripped 
out of the original context."  

Mr Pearlstein told The THES this week: "The American Council has 
never tried to reform either American or foreign law."  

He said he had spoken in a private capacity about Iraq's laws and 
stressed that the group was "not a dealer group" and represented 
legitimate collectors.  

Mr Hawkins confirmed that the ACCP had concerns about the application 
of US law, but he said he was more concerned about the wider 
constitutional implications of the law than about protecting the 
interests of collectors and dealers.  


================================

TIMES HIGHER EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT

Say 'no' to Iraqi loot

Colin Renfrew
Published: 11 April 2003

Any attempt to relax the laws on the trade of artefacts must be 
resisted, says Colin Renfrew. Iraq is one of the most 
archaeologically significant countries in the world. The earliest 
urban civilisation and the earliest known writing emerged in the land 
between the Tigris and Euphrates. And in the hills of Iraq we have 
some of the earliest farming sites, going back to 7000BC.  

Successive Iraqi regimes, including Saddam Hussein's, have been proud 
of their antiquities and have enacted strict laws to protect them. 
The country's archaeologists and its antiquities service are well 
regarded.  

In the next few weeks, it seems inevitable that some Iraqi 
archaeological sites and museums will stand the risk of being looted. 
Such acts can happen in any country where civil government breaks 
down. It was a concern during the previous Gulf war, when some 
museums in northern Iraq were looted and the remnants of Assyrian 
palace reliefs came on the market in London.  

But there is another threat. There are some who want to see the 
relaxation of US laws restricting the import of archaeological 
artefacts, based on a free-trade ethic to make antiquities more 
available worldwide. There has even been talk of trying to get Iraqi 
laws loosened after the regime is changed. Iraqi law does sound 
severe, declaring that antiquities found in the soil of Iraq are the 
property of the government. That's not how we run things in the UK or 
in the US. But similar laws are enforced in Greece, Turkey and Egypt, 
and there is no reason why Iraq should not continue to have 
legislation of that kind.  

We do not know the US administration's position on this issue. But 
the interim government must make every effort to keep Iraq's 
antiquities in Iraq. Any move to make it easier for their export 
would, in my opinion, amount to the legalisation of looting.  

Today, if you want to conduct a dig in most countries, you apply to 
the culture minister for a permit. All your finds are given over to 
the state.  

What you get is the chance to publish your findings and to increase 
knowledge, not the opportunity run off with any antiquities.  

I find it astonishing that in the US you can divide museums into two 
groups. Some, such as the University Museum of Pennsylvania in 
Philadelphia, do not buy unprovenanced antiquities. Others, however, 
simply do not ask where an artefact came from so they can say they 
never "knowingly" buy such looted antiquities.  

If Iraqi laws were relaxed, it would make it easier for antiquities 
to be exported legally. One fears it would also allow looted 
antiquities from illicit and secret excavations to leave the country 
more freely.  

This would almost certainly lead to a greater scale of looting and to 
some of the bigger museums or private collectors claiming that this 
material could come into their ownership legally. If you have a law 
that says some antiquities can leave legally, you do not have a clear 
distinction. In the resulting flow of finds from Iraq, it would 
become much easier to break the law by exporting major antiquities.  

I am hopeful that when serious people really think the issue through, 
they will see how outrageous it is that collectors encourage the 
looting process by buying illicit pieces. The money they pay goes to 
fuel the process and keep people digging and destroying the sites.  

The loss of knowledge is not simply in the fact that the pieces 
themselves leave the country - it is in the fact that sites are 
destroyed to supply those pieces.  

The worst scenario is almost unthinkable. I think highly of the 
professionalism of US archaeologists and academics, and I do not 
believe that they would countenance this. And there is every hope 
that organisations such as Unesco would make a great fuss should 
there be any moves towards relaxing Iraqi law.  

But there is a fear that some misguided Dr Strangelove character in 
the US government will take this rather deluded nonsense seriously 
and be unwise enough not to gain professional opinion from senior US 
archaeologists. If that happened, it would present a shocking example 
to the rest of the world.  

Lord Renfrew is professor of archaeology at the University of 
Cambridge and director of the Illicit Antiquities Research Centre.  

========================


------- End of forwarded message -------


______________________________________________


Mosul descends into chaos as even museum is looted 

Luke Harding in Mosul
Saturday April 12, 2003
The Guardian 

By the time Asif Mohammed turned up for work yesterday morning, the 
ancient contents of Mosul's museum had vanished. The looters knew 
what they were looking for, and in less than 10 minutes had walked 
off with several million dollars worth of Parthian sculpture. The 
2,000-year-old statue of King Saqnatroq II - one of Iraq's forgotten 
monarchs - had disappeared from its cabinet. Lying on the glass-
strewn floor were the remains of several mythical birds and an 
Athenian goddess, apparently broken by the looters as they made their 
escape. "Iraq has a great history," Mr Mohammed, the museum's 
curator, said yesterday, just hours after Mosul, Iraq's third largest 
city was officially "liberated". "It's just been wrecked. I'm 
extremely angry. We used to have American and British tourists who 
visited this museum. I want to know whether the Americans accept 
this." It was a good question. Unfortunately, as Mosul descended 
yesterday into a hellish self-feeding chaos, there were no American 
troops to ask. The Pentagon had earlier promised that thousands of 
its soldiers would secure Mosul - a pleasant city of 1 million on the 
banks of the Tigris - and prevent the kind of mass looting seen 
elsewhere in Iraq. They would also keep out the Kurds. Since the 
embarrassing invasion of Kirkuk two days ago by Kurdish peshmerga, 
the White House had been keen to reassure the world - and Turkey in 
particular - that it was in charge of northern Iraq. The Kurds would 
do nothing without US supervision, Washington soothed Ankara. 
Yesterday it was abundantly clear this was not true. A quick tour of 
central Mosul revealed there were no American troops there at all. 
Several thousand were stationed just down the road in Irbil, inside 
Kurdish-northern Iraq, but they had failed to arrive. The Iraqi 
government abandoned Mosul late on Thursday night. Just as in Kirkuk, 
Iraqi soldiers garrisoned in the city took off their uniforms and 
simply drifted away. Overnight American special forces entered 
briefly with groups of Kurdish peshmerga. The Americans then 
disappeared. By midday yesterday - as Kalashnikov fire echoed around 
Mosul's looted central bank - they still hadn't come back. A huge 
crowd was trying to help itself to piles of Iraqi dinar. Fights were 
breaking out. Kurdish fighters were shooting wildly into the air. 
Nearby, looters were ransacking Mosul's former seat of power, its 
imposing governorate building, sending glass cascading into the 
street. However, last night a US special operations team met Mosul's 
tribal and community leaders in an attempt to put an end to the 
unrest. Colonel Walter Meyer told the group that US soldiers were 
being redeployed there from the Kurdish cities of Arbil, Dohuk and 
Akra. Across the city fires burned from ruined government offices. "I 
beg you to stop these terrible things," Mufti Mohammed, one of 
Mosul's leading Sunni clerics, said yesterday, as dozens of 
worshippers, furious at the self-destruction of their city, poured 
out of his mosque after Friday prayers. "If some kind of order is not 
restored in the next 24 hours we're going to take things into our own 
hands. We will start up our own armed groups to keep the peace." Mr 
Mohammed said he had persuaded the Fedayeen and Arab volunteers still 
in the city not to fight coalition soldiers. Now he wished he hadn't 
bothered. "This is anarchy," he said. Other residents were angry. 
"Why don't the American troops enter this city? I've spent all 
morning looking for them," said Ali Sahif, a 34- year-old engineering 
student. "Everything is being ripped apart." Mr Sahif said looters 
had wrecked his engineering institute, as well as Mosul University, 
the hospital and the College of Medicine. He now wasn't sure what to 
do. Most of the murals of Saddam, meanwhile, had not been damaged or 
defaced. Perhaps people wanted him back, or at least the stability he 
represented. Either way, three days after the fall of Baghdad, it was 
clear that the honeymoon between the Iraqi people and their British 
and American liberators was turning sour. Mosul has traditionally 
been one of Iraq's most ethnically mixed cities. Arabs, Syriac 
people, Armenians, Kurds, Turkomans, Christians and Yazedis -an 
esoteric Muslim sect who refuse to wear blue - all call Mosul home. 
But in the end it was Kurdish fighters who poured into Mosul 
yesterday, to an enthusiastic welcome from the city's Kurds, but a 
more muted one from everyone else. Their presence in Mosul and Kirkuk 
has not pleased Turkey, now incandescent at the prospect of a vast de 
facto Kurdish state on its doorstep. The fighters from the Irbil-
based Kurdistan Democratic party had been given orders to defend 
several key buildings, including the Mosul Museum, with its priceless 
Assyrian antiquities. They didn't manage to get there in time, 
although they did secure the natural history museum a short walk 
away. A Kurdish com mander, Wahid Majid, proudly showed me the dusty 
toucans and pickled reptiles he had just saved from the mob. The 
museum's stuffed brown bear was still safely in its display case, he 
pointed out. "We have not allowed anybody to take anything. We were 
told to defend the museum and other important establishments." Had he 
seen the Americans? "They were here earlier but they were unable to 
control the situation so they left," he said. On the other bank of 
the Tigris, looters were demolishing Mosul's only five-star hotel, 
the ziggurat-shaped Nineveh International. It was perhaps a 
legitimate target: until yesterday an entire wing had been reserved 
for senior members of the Ba'ath party. Most ordinary Iraqis were too 
scruffy to venture inside, let alone afford its £16-a-night rooms. 
Yesterday they removed all the hotel's bedding and furniture instead. 
"It is our money. It is our money," 17-year-old Hassan Ali explained. 
"This hotel has been built with money from Iraq's oil. The oil 
belongs to us. That's why we are looting." To begin with, the mass 
collective stealing was good-humoured and democratic, with all of 
Mosul's different groups taking part. But as dusk set in, the 
beginnings of what looked like ethnic collapse were all too apparent 
as Kurds and Arabs wrangled about who owned what. Iraq is a large 
country with ancient fault lines. Unless coalition forces began to 
restore order it is in danger of disintegrating. Back at the Mosul 
Museum, Mr Mohammed sat next to two giant Assyrian winged friezes, 
similar to a pair in the British Museum, themselves looted by 19th-
century British archaeologists from nearby Nineveh. The friezes had 
clearly been too heavy for anybody to cart off. "I watched Kofi Annan 
appear on TV," he said. "He said that Iraq had a very great history 
and civilisation. I'm very sad at what has happened here. I feel pain 
in my heart." Mr Mohammed recalled that he had had his photo taken 
with an elderly American tourist who visited. What did he think of 
Americans now? "I think George Bush and Tony Blair are war 
criminals."  

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

_____________________________________


From:           	"Lyndon" <ormond_parker at hotmail.com>
Subject:        	Govt objects to tests on remains
Date sent:      	Thu, 10 Apr 2003 12:25:51 +0100


Govt objects to tests on remains

Thursday 10 April 2003, 6:05 AM

Australia will formally protest to Britain over its museums' ongoing 
experimentation on the remains of indigenous Australians. An 
Aboriginal delegation that brought back the remains of 60 indigenous 
people from the Royal College of Surgeons' collection said it had 
evidence that an enormous amount of experimentation on remains was 
continuing. The delegation said it was told at London's Museum of 
Natural History this week that dentists were continuing to analyse 
its collection of human remains. "Scientific investigations on 
Aboriginal ancestral remains and biological tissue is still 
continuing today," delegation head Bob Weatherall said.  

"The barbaric practice still continues; it has to stop."

Indigenous Affairs Minister Philip Ruddock described the past British 
practice of taking Aboriginal bodies for scientific examination and 
experimentation as obscene. "In terms of the issue of continuing 
experimentation, I must say I think it is more the exception than the 
rule," Mr Ruddock said. "But I will take the matter up formally with 
my (British) counterpart to make known the concern that exists here 
if there continues to be experimentation on remains." The skeletal 
remains of 60 Australians placed for storage in the National Museum 
in Canberra brings to 750 the number of bodies repatriated from the 
United Kingdom. ATSIC chairman Geoff Clark used the occasion to take 
a swipe at the federal government's 1998 amendments to the Native 
Title Act.  

He said when the bodies were stolen in the early years of 
colonisation,
Aborigines still controlled their land.

"It's a sad moment, I think, that they have now been returned when
they've been dispossessed - dispossessed by the 10-point plan and the
native title processes," Mr Clark said.
Mr Ruddock said he expected a British government working group
would next month recommend amending their museum laws which
would accelerate the repatriation process.
"When that occurs, it's likely that there will be many more 
collections
returned from museums to traditional custodians in the next few 
years,"
he said.
But Mr Weatherall, who has campaigned for 20 years for the British
museums to give up their human collections, estimated another 8,000
bodies remained in the UK.
©2003 AAP

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/04/10/1049567771387.html

_____________________________________


 ATSIC Media Release: Return of ancestral remains from London heralds 
many
more returns

9/4/2003 - "They have been absent for a century or more, the remains 
are not complete,
but now at least their spirits have returned," said ATSIC 
Commissioner
Rodney Dillon today at a welcoming ceremony in Canberra for the 
remains of
some 60 Aboriginal people returned to Australia from the Royal 
College of
Surgeons in London.

"The trade in our remains was once vigorous and prolonged-it happened 
within the memory of people still alive," the Commissioner said. 
"There were those who made a living from taking our remains. Our 
graves were robbed. Some of us were murdered to order. "Imagine how 
the spirits of those returned must now feel, their graves violated, 
their people dispersed and dispossessed over the period of their 
absence. "And what would they think of the country they're returning 
to, where their descendants are still second class citizens and their 
traditional lands continue to be degraded and desecrated? "Today is a 
happy occasion, but repatriations such as this also stir up powerful 
emotions. They remind us of the profound sadness underlying many 
Indigenous lives." ATSIC Chairman, Geoff Clark, and the Minister for 
Indigenous Affairs, Philip Ruddock, also spoke at the welcoming 
ceremony. "Some of our ancestors have come home and the healing of 
our communities can begin," Mr Clark said.  

"Once it was thought acceptable to send my people's remains as 
'specimens' to the other side of the world to museums and medical 
organisations for so-called scientific research. "These practices 
were not just insensitive but barbaric, and, not before time, 
overseas and Australian institutions are now starting to make 
amends." The remains received in Canberra are principally of the 
Yorta Yorta (Victoria-New South Wales) and Ngarrindjeri (South 
Australia) peoples. Their repatriation was arranged by Brisbane 
organisation the Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research 
Action (FAIRA) which received a grant from ATSIC. FAIRA 
representative Mr Bob Weatherall accompanied two traditional 
custodians, Mr Major Sumner (Ngarrindjeri) and Mr Henry Atkinson 
(Yorta Yorta) on the journey back to Australia. "I congratulate the 
custodians who have fulfilled their obligations to their ancestors," 
Mr Clark said. "The remains will be kept at the National Museum of 
Australia until their final journey home to their communities of 
origin." Commissioner Dillon, Chair of the Board's Culture, Rights 
and Justice Committee, has for many years been an active advocate of 
repatriation. He said he was hopeful this return would be followed by 
many more. "ATSIC is now working with the Commonwealth and other 
agencies to take advantage of changing attitudes overseas," the 
Commissioner said. "In July 2000 our Prime Minister signed a 
communiqué with the British Prime Minister committing their two 
governments to cooperation on repatriation.  

"A working group reviewing current museum legislation is expected to 
report to the UK Parliament next month. We hope this report will 
recommend the necessary changes to legislation to allow our ancestors 
to be released from public collecting institutions. "In anticipation 
of this, the Ministerial Council for Aboriginal and Torres Strait 
Islander Affairs has supported the holding of a national workshop to 
develop cooperative arrangements between agencies and communities 
involved in repatriation," the Commissioner said. Commissioner Dillon 
also thanked the Minister for "his presence and sensitive words at 
this welcoming home ceremony today". "Mr Ruddock understands the 
importance of repatriation for my community.  

"However, it is not always recognised that Aboriginal and Torres 
Strait Islander communities want to stay in control of the 
repatriation of their ancestors. "Communities don't always need to 
have the process completed quickly, but in a manner which allows the 
custodians to make the important decisions about how their ancestors 
will be returned to their country. "We remain injured and incomplete 
while our ancestors are locked up in museum cupboards or basements 
far away. Sensitive repatriation will go a long way towards healing 
the hurts of the past and will assist our people to heal themselves." 
 


Source: www.atsic.gov.au
 
_____________________________________

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