Cambodia welcomes the Metropolitan Museum’s repatriation of statues looted over decades of turmoil

Associated Press

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — Cambodia’s culture minister says the return to Cambodia this week of 14 sculptures that had been looted from the country during a period of war and unrest is like welcoming home the souls of ancestors. The items repatriated from the collection New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art were made between the 9th and 14th centuries in the Angkorian period and reflect the Hindu and Buddhist religious systems prevailing at that time. A statement from Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts said what it described as a ’historic homecoming of national treasures” followed several years of negotiations between Cambodia’s art restitution team, U.S. federal prosecutors in New York, investigators from the U.S. Dept of Homeland Security and the Metropolitan Museum.