Thousands of Sudanese artefacts stolen from national museum
Thousands of valuable artefacts have vanished from Sudan’s museums since the war broke out in 2023, reports Al-Monitor via AFP on August 31st.
At Sudan’s National Museum in Khartoum, a black granite statue of Kush Pharoh Taharqa stands alone, towering over a courtyard crowded with fragments of shattered glass and crumbling stone.
The paramilitary group Rapid Supply Forces (RSF) captured Khartoum, the nation’s capital, in April 2023. During this time, Sudan’s National Museum was looted and precious artefacts – many dating back thousands of years to the Kingdom of Kush – have been lost.
Sudan’s military recaptured Khartoum in March, declaring the city “completely free” of the RSF in May, allowing Sudan’s antiquities officials to return to their now ruined museum for the first time.
During its better days, Sudan’s national museum housed over half a million artefacts which stretched across 7,000 years into Africa’s past. The former antiquities director Hatim al-Nour says the artefacts “shaped the deep history of Sudanese identity.”
The worst loss, the officials say, is the complete ransacking of the museum’s famed “gold room”, which housed solid-gold ceremonial objects, figurines and jewellery.
Ikhlas Abdel Latif, director of museums at the Sudanese antiquities authority, has said, “everything in that room was stolen.”
Latif also told reporters that the artefacts were transported out of the city and to the RSF’s stronghold in Darfur. After this, the antiquities were smuggled across the Sudanese border.
Officials guess that many of the valuable antiquities stolen from the museum have been smuggled across the Sudanese border into the neighboring countries of Egypt, Chad and South Sudan, but most have not been traced.
In September last year, UNESCO warned museums, collectors and auction houses across the globe to “refrain from acquiring or taking part in the import, export or transfer of ownership of cultural property from Sudan.”
Specialists from UNESCO have also confirmed to reporters that they are helping to trace the missing artefacts. However, they have had little luck so far – believing many are being kept behind closed doors in private smuggling circles.
The RSF have been accused by army-aligned government officials as the committers of a “war crime” by lotting and destroying artefacts, a charge the RSF denies.
It is not the first time the RSF have been accused of war crimes. In June, the United Nations special advisor on the prevention of genocide warned that the RSF “continue to conduct ethnically motivated attacks”, making the risk of genocide occurring in the Darfur region “very high.”
It appears Sudan’s rich cultural history may be another tragic victim of the RSF.
Al-Monitor via AFP, Maghrebi.org
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