A TWO-DAY conference on bringing back ancient relics to their home countries opened yesterday in Cairo with Egypt's chief archaeologist appealing for affected nations to unite to pressure Western museums to send them back. “We need to co-operate,” Zahi Hawass, the chairman of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told delegates from 15 other countries. “We need to fight together.” The delegates should produce one list of artefacts that should return home, he said. The meeting, held near the Cairo Opera House, attracted delegates from Italy, Greece and China, all of which have pressed from relic restitution. Hawass has been lobbying for the 3,300-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti from Berlin's Neues Museum and the Rosetta Stone from London's British Museum. Among other prominent demands: Greece wants the British Museum to return the Elgin Marbles, sculptures removed from the Parthenon in the early 19th-century; Mexico seeks the feathered headdress of Montezuma, the Aztec ruler deposed by Spanish conquistadors, which is now in Vienna's Museum of Ethnology; Nigerians wants bronzes back from the British Museum. “International rules and treaties are of little use in getting key relics back,” Hawass said in a recent interview. Several international conventions since 1954 have prohibited wartime looting, theft and resale of artefacts. The agreements don't apply to items taken abroad before national or global laws were in force. “Forget the legal issue,” Hawass said. “Important icons should be in their motherland, period.” Hawass, Egypt's top archaeologist, barred France from exploring ancient sites in Egypt last October to get Paris' Louvre Museum to return frescoes removed from Egypt in the 1980s. The Louvre complied because “serious doubts” emerged about “the legality of their exit from Egyptian territory”, France's Culture Ministry said at the time Delegates will also draw up lists of artefacts missing from their countries and displayed in museums abroad, treasures they have been demanding be returned, the SCA said. The conference will also call on the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO to amend a convention that bans export or ownership of stolen antiquities acquired after 1970. The convention deals with the "means of prohibiting and preventing the illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of cultural property", but stipulates there will be no "retroactive" measure for artefacts acquired before the convention was signed in 1970. Last year, Egypt cut off relations with the Louvre Museum until France finally returns stolen steles chipped off a wall painting in the ancient tomb in Luxor's Valley of the Kings. Greece, one of the countries attending the conference, will chair a session devoted to "problems facing the countries in their attempt to retrieve their antiquities", Hawass has said. Athens has been locked in a 30-year antiquities "war" with London to retrieve the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum. Since becoming head of antiquities in 2002, Hawass has helped Egypt reclaim 31,000 relics from abroad. Last year, he insisted that "what has been stolen from us must be returned".
