The Netherlands Has Returned 288 Stolen Artifacts to Indonesia

The Dutch government has sent 288 artifacts stolen from Indonesia during the archipelago’s colonial era, among them weapons, coins, jewelry and textiles, back to their home country.

“These objects should never have been here,” says Eppo Bruins, the Dutch minister of education, culture and science, per Dutch News. “There was looting and pillaging going on in the colonial period and other types of involuntary loss of cultural objects. It is a matter of material justice to return them.”

The September 20 ceremony at the World Museum in Amsterdam marked the second time that the Netherlands has returned stolen artifacts to its former colonies since 2020, when the independent Colonial Collections Committee issued a report advising the country to do so. The first repatriation took place in July 2023, when the Dutch government returned 478 objects to Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

According to a statement, the trove of newly returned artifacts includes four Hindu-Buddhist sculptures. One of the works, a likeness of the god Ganesha, was shipped to the Netherlands from East Java in 1843 on the orders of a colonial administrator. The other three, depicting the gods Bhairava, Nandi and Brahma, were taken from Singasari, a late 13th-century temple complex in East Java, in the mid-19th century.

But the bulk of the repatriated items came to the Netherlands in the aftermath of a 1906 war in southern Bali, in which the Dutch military attacked the kingdoms of Badung and Tabanan.

“Around 1,000 Balinese were killed, while the Dutch lost four men,” writes the Art Newspaper’s Catherine Hickley. “A week later, in the kingdom of Tabanan, the Dutch army attacked the palace and arrested the king, who together with the crown prince, [died by] suicide that night.”

An advisory report issued by the Colonial Collections Committee divides the objects into several categories: “official loot” like the belongings of deposed Balinese kings, confiscated coins and weapons, and artifacts from the personal holdings of a Dutch artist who purchased or otherwise acquired items linked to the 1906 conflict. The Indonesian government officially requested the return of these culturally significant objects, collectively known as the Puputan Badung Collection, last September.

Per the statement, the committee is currently preparing recommendations for additional repatriation requests from Nigeria, Sri Lanka, India and Indonesia. While some critics of repatriation have raised concerns over how poorer countries will care for their returned artifacts, Marieke van Bommel, director general of the National Museum of World Cultures, tells the New York Times’ Lynsey Chutel that “the thief cannot tell the rightful owners what to do with their property.”

Julia Binswanger | READ MORE

Julia Binswanger is a freelance arts and culture reporter based in Chicago. Her work has been featured in WBEZ, Chicago magazine, Rebellious magazine and PC magazine.