Sudan’s priceless archeological heritage is being stripped from museums, with looters loading statuettes and fragments of ancient palaces onto trucks, smuggling them out of the war-torn country, and selling them online.
More than a year of war between rival generals has killed tens of thousands of people, forced millions more to flee their homes, and left the country’s prized antiquities at the mercy of pillagers.
On Thursday, UNESCO, the UN’s cultural body, said the “threat to culture appears to have reached an unprecedented level, with reports of looting of museums, heritage and archaeological sites and private collections.”
Photo: AFP
In the capital Khartoum, where fighting broke out in April last year between the army and paramilitary forces, the recently renovated Sudan National Museum has had prized artifacts stolen, archeologists and officials said.
The museum houses prehistoric artifacts from the Paleolithic era and items from the famed site of Kerma in northern Sudan, as well as Pharaonic and Nubian pieces.
First opened in 1971, the museum was founded in part to house objects rescued from an area due to be flooded by the construction of Egypt’s massive Aswan dam.
Now, its artifacts are under threat from war.
“The Sudan National Museum has been the subject of major looting,” said Ikhlas Abdel Latif, head of museums at the National Antiquities Authority.
“Archeological objects stored there have been taken in big lorries and transferred to the west and to border areas, particularly near South Sudan,” she said.
The extent of the looting is hard to determine because the museum is in an area controlled by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Officials and experts have accused the RSF of looting the site. Contacted by AFP, a spokesman for the force did not comment.
In May, the RSF said it was being “vigilant” in “protecting and preserving the antiquities of the Sudanese people.”
Throughout history, fighters have used plunder to fund their war efforts.
UNESCO said it was calling on “the public and the art market... in the region and worldwide to refrain” from trading in Sudanese items.
The agency also said it was planning training in the Egyptian capital Cairo for law enforcement and the judiciary from Sudan’s neighbors.
“Because of the war, the museum and the artifacts are not being monitored,” said Hassan Hussein, a researcher and former director of the National Antiquities Authority.
The army, led by Sudan’s de facto ruler Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, is locked in conflict with the RSF, which is led by his former deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
The Island of Meroe, a UNESCO World Heritage site that is home to the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Kush and dozens of its pyramids, is also under threat.
Artifacts and exhibition accessories have been stolen from the museum in Nyala, the South Darfur state capital, Abdel Latif said.
In Omdurman, just across the River Nile from Khartoum, part of the Khalifa House museum was also destroyed, she said.
Last week, the Association of Friends of Sudanese Museums condemned “in the strongest terms” the looting that is taking place across the country.
Experts voiced alarm after finding looted artifacts for sale online.
On the auction site eBay, a user offered items presented as Egyptian antiquities looted from Sudan, Sudanese media said.
A Sudanese archeologist, speaking anonymously for security reasons, said that pottery, gold objects and paintings listed for sale appeared to have come from the National Museum in Khartoum — although at least one statuette was an imitation.
He said he feared for the larger statues, which “must be handled by specialists in a precise manner” and could be damaged if looters were to lay hands on them.
The issue is set to be discussed at an upcoming conference in Germany, which Hussein is to attend.
“The current state of the collections is a concern for anyone who cares about humanity’s heritage,” he said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS