Turkey’s Ministry of Culture has started applying pressure to major museums to return what they say are looted antiquities from Ankara. They are refusing to lend artifacts to these U.S. and U.K. museums, pending repatriation of the Ankara artifacts.
The British Museum is feeling the heat, as Turkey has refused to send 35 artifacts for the major exhibition, “Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam.” They have imposed similar refusals on the Met in New York and on the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Turkey explains that when one enters the Met, the Roman sarcophagus on the left was smuggled out of Turkey at the end of the 19th century by a US official. They also cite to a Byzantine chalice used by Christ which was taken by the French.
Turkey’s claims are not premised on a legal basis; that is to say, they could not simply file a lawsuit to seek return of the objects, because too much time has passed. Instead, they are focusing on the moral correctness of former colonial powers retaining artifacts which they took by sheer force in earlier centuries.
Cultural Property & Archaeology Law 
Cristiano de Monaco
September 6, 2012
duplicate post deleted
wgsant
September 6, 2012
Kim;
One might wonder if the new found Turkish interest in cultural ethics will prompt them to return all of the Greek cultural objects seized from dispossessed Greeks by Kemal Ataturk or Armenian cultural objects seized from dispossessed Armenians? And what about the magnificent objects in the Archaeological Museum at Istanbul that were relocated from the Levant by Ottoman Sultans? Why is the acquisition by force palatable in one hand and not in the other? The Turks will not give up their “acquired” treasures any more than the British or the French (or Americans) will. So, why do they rattle sabres over an issue where there is no moral supremacy nor legal foundation? This whole argument used by retentionist regimes that were not even on the scene when a “cultural object” was created, is in my view hypocritical. It even seems irrational from the perspective of UNESCO 1970 that ostensibly focuses on patrimony as a cultural theme, not an instrument of governmental control.
Kimberly Alderman
September 6, 2012
As an attorney, I always have a harder time wrapping my head around the policy arguments. I tend to look at it more as, what legal tools does someone have to effectuate their desired goal? And I’m not seeing it for most of these colonial repatriation claims…