VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

The Ministry of Education and Culture's director general of culture, Hilmar Farid, in Jakarta, Thursday (Jan 2, 2019) observed an artefact that has returned to Indonesia from the Museum Nusantara in Delft, Netherlands (ANTARA)

Jakarta - Some 1,500 of Indonesia's pre-dated artefacts have been repatriated for the first time ever from Museum Nusantara in the Netherlands, a high-ranking official said in Jakarta, Thursday, citing collections that arrived on December 23, 2019.

"The collections earlier had been displayed at Museum Nusantara or Museum Prisenhof in the Netherlands," the Ministry of Education and Culture's Director General of Culture, Hilmar Farid said.

During the Dutch colony's occupation of Indonesia, thousands of the country's historic artefacts were seized for both museum and personal collections. Most of the artefacts were found in Delft, a city where most bureaucrats of the Dutch Indies took their degrees.

Before the repatriation, the Indonesian government had been negotiating with the Government of the Netherlands since 2015, Farid explained.

"We expect more of Indonesia's heritage items to return home in the future. We thank the National Museum of Indonesia as it has assisted the four-year repatriation process," he explained.

Not all artefacts were repatriated to Indonesia, according to the director general. "During the negotiation, we had selected which artefacts we need for National Museum's collections," he added.  (ANTARA)