INDONESIANS SEEK RETURN OF ARTEFACTS STOLEN BY DUTCH

Sat 22 October 2022:

The Netherlands, Indonesia’s former colonial ruler, has been asked to return eight collections of historical artifacts from its museums, including the bones of “Java Man,” the first known fossils of the Homo erectus species from which humans are thought to have evolved, Reuters reported.

The “looted” artifacts include statues from Java’s ancient Hindu kingdom of Singhasari, personal items belonging to an Indonesian national hero, and the bones excavated in Java in the 19th century by Dutch paleoanthropologist Eugène Dubois, which became known as Java Man.

“The main purpose is to return the items and produce knowledge,” Bonnie Triyana, an historian and a member of the Indonesian team working on the repatriation, told Reuters on Friday.

 “These artefacts are a sign of a much bigger event,” he said.

Indonesia was known as the Dutch East Indies as a Dutch colony between 1800 and 1949 and was an important source of wealth for the Dutch due to the exploitation of natural resources and the trade in spices, precious metals, and minerals.

This week, Dutch news outlets have extensively covered Indonesia’s request.

The completed Dubois collection housed in Naturalis, which consists of approximately 40,000 fossils excavated in Indonesia between 1887 and 1900, was among the artifacts requested by Indonesia, according to the daily newspaper Trouw on Tuesday.

A spokesperson for Naturalis told the newspaper that museum will cooperate, though the question of artefact safety needed to be addressed.

We understand the Indonesia claim. But the question is also: Where can the collection be safely stored, accessed and researched? I think I know the answer,” Trouw quoted the spokesperson as saying.

The Dubois collection and Java Man had been the focus of discussions between Indonesia and the Netherlands since 1954. Indonesia declared its independence in 1945, the NRC news outlet reported

“It is not known when Indonesia will draw up the rest of the list. According to researchers, there are an estimated 300,000 objects in Dutch collections that could be colonial looted art,” NRC reported on Tuesday.