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Krishnan Anjan Jeevarani presented some of her family’s favorite foods on a banana leaf on a beach in Mullipakkal, Sri Lanka. She placed a samosa, lollipops and a large bottle of Pepsi next to flowers and incense sticks in front of a framed photo.

On May 18, Jeevarani was one of the tens of thousands of Tamils who gathered in Mullivaikkal to commemorate the 16-year anniversary of the brutal civil war that erupted between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a separatist group fighting for a Tamil homeland.

This year, Tamils lit candles in memory of their loved ones and observed a moment of silence in addition to previous anniversaries. Dressed in black, people paid their respects before a memorial fire and ate kanji, the gruel consumed by civilians when they were trapped in Mullivaikkal amid acute food shortages.

The new government, led by leftist Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who was elected president in September, has sparked hopes for justice and answers for the Tamil community. This year’s commemorations were the first to take place.

The Tamil community alleges that a genocide of civilians took place during the war’s final stages, estimating that nearly 170, 000 people were killed by government forces. The figure is 40, 000, according to estimates from the UN.

The Marxist party Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which led violent uprisings against the Sri Lankan government in the 1970s and 1980s, has stressed “national unity” and its goal to eradicate racism. He made several promises to Tamil voters before the elections last year, including the withdrawal from military-occupied territory in Tamil heartlands and the release of political prisoners.

However, those commitments are now being tested eight months after his election, and many Tamils in the Tamil community claim that their so far have been mixed, with some successes but also disappointments.

No ‘ climate of fear ‘ but no ‘ real change ‘ either

When Sri Lankan forces shelled the tents where they were sheltering near Mullivaikkal in March 2009, Jeevarani lost several members of her family, including her parents, her sister, and her three-year-old daughter.

She said, “We had already prepared and eaten, and we were content.” “When the shell fell it was like we had woken up from a dream. The house was destroyed.

Jeevarani, now 36, moved through Mullivaikkal while shelling her way to a bunker where all of her family members were buried. In May 2009, she and the surviving members of her family entered army-controlled territory.

Most Sri Lankan Tamils say their memorials have largely been unobstructed despite reports of police obstructing one event in the eastern region of the nation after 16 years, as she and other Sri Lankan Tamils commemorated their lost loved ones.

This was a contrast from previous years of state crackdowns on such commemorative events.

According to former presidents Mahinda and Gotabaya Rajapaksa, brothers who jointly ruled Sri Lanka for 13 out of 17 years between 2005 and 2022, “there isn’t that climate of fear that existed during the two Rajapaksa regimes,” said Ambika Satkunanathan, a human rights lawyer and former commissioner of the National Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka.

The Sri Lankan army carried out the final bloody assaults in 2009, amid allegations of human rights violations, under the leadership of Mahinda Rajapaksa.

“But has anything changed substantively]under Dissanayake]? Not yet, Satkunanathan asserted.

The government’s continued use of Sri Lanka’s contentious Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and a gazette announcing land seizing in Mullivaikkal, according to Satkunanathan, as problematic examples of manifesto promises being overturned in a clear lack of transparency.

Despite making pre-election promises, Dissnayake’s government earlier this month criticized Tamil claims of genocide as “a false narrative.” Dissanayake also served as the chief guest at a “War Heroes” celebration honoring the Sri Lankan military on May 19, the day after the Tamil commemorations, and the Ministry of Defense announced the promotion of a number of military and navy personnel. In his speech, Dissanayake stated that “grief knows no ethnicity”, suggesting a reconciliatory stance, while also paying tribute to the “fallen heroes” of the army who “we forever honour in our hearts”.

We “walked over corpses,” the statement read.

In 2009, Mullivaikkal casualties were so severe that “we even had to walk over dead bodies,” said retired 60-year-old principal Kathiravelu Sooriyakumari.

She said government forces had used white phosphorus during the civil war, a claim Sri Lankan authorities have repeatedly denied. Many legal scholars interpret international law to prohibit the use of white phosphorus, an incendiary chemical that can cause bone-to-skin burns in densely populated areas, despite not being specifically prohibited.

Sooriyakumari’s husband, Rasenthiram, died during an attack near Mullivaikkal while trying to protect others.

“He was directing everyone there,” he said. A shell struck a tree before coming right up to him, killing him, she said, and when he had sent everyone, he had already died. Although his internal organs were coming out, “he raised his head and looked around at all of us, to see we were safe”.

Her son was only seven months old. She claimed that “he has never seen the face of his father.”

The war left many households like Sooriyakumari’s without breadwinners. Following Sri Lanka’s economic crisis in 2022 and the resulting rise in living costs, they have a growing food shortage.

Will anyone come in and check on us if we are starving? said 63-year-old Manoharan Kalimuthu, whose son died in Mullivaikkal after leaving a bunker to relieve himself and being hit by a shell. “If the [children who died in the final stages of the war] had been here, they would have looked after us,” he said.

Kalimuthu asserted that she did not believe the new government would uphold Tamils’ rights, stating that “we can only believe it when we see it.”

No accountability, exactly.

Additionally, Sooriyakumari added that she didn’t anticipate that the new administration would change anything.

“There’s been a lot of talk but no action. How can we believe that there are no solid foundations? she told Al Jazeera. “So many Sinhalese people these days have understood our pain and suffering and are supporting us … but the government is against us”.

She claimed that she and the rest of the Tamil population were “scared of the JVP before” and that Dissanayake’s JVP party and its history of violence were at odds with her. When the army resurrected the Tamil separatist movement, the party had backed Rajapaksa’s government.

Satkunanathan said the JVP’s track record showed “they supported the Rajapaksas, they were pro-war, they were anti-devolution, anti-international community, were all anti-UN, all of which they viewed as conspiring against Sri Lanka”.

She acknowledged that the party was attempting to “emphasize that its action is not rhetorical, but it is trying to demonstrate that it has “evolved to a more progressive position.”

Although Dissanayake’s government has announced plans to establish a truth and reconciliation commission, it has rejected a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution on accountability for war crimes, much like previous governments. Dissanayake stated that he would not pursue charges against those who committed war crimes prior to the presidential election.

They have not moved at all, according to Satkunathan, citing the government’s refusal to cooperate with the UN-initiated Sri Lanka Accountability Project (SLAP), which was established to gather evidence for potential war crimes. “I would love them to prove me wrong”.

The government’s position on the Thirteenth Amendment to the Sri Lankan Constitution, which gives devolved powers to areas with a majority of Tamils in the north and east, has also been repeatedly changed. Dissanayake stated his support for it in meetings with Tamil political parties prior to the presidential election, but the government has not laid out a concrete strategy, with the JVP’s general secretary denying it as unnecessary.

“We need answers,” the phrase means.

“Six months since coming into office, there’s no indication of the new government’s plan or intention to address the most urgent grievances of the Tamils affected by the war”, Thyagi Ruwanpathirana, South Asia researcher at Amnesty International, said. “And those in the North and the East prioritize the truth about the forcibly disappeared.”

Some people, like Krishnapillai Sothilakshmi, a 48-year-old man, still harbor optimism. Sothilakshmi’s husband Senthivel was forcibly disappeared in 2008. She asserted that she had faith in the new administration to provide answers.

According to a 2017 report from Amnesty International, between 60 and 100 000 people have disappeared in Sri Lanka since the late 1980s. Although Sri Lanka established an Office of Missing Persons (OMP) in 2017, there has been no clear progress since.

We require solutions. Do they still exist? We want to know”, Sothilakshmi said.

It’s too late for Jeevarani, who is weeping on the beach as she examines a photo of her three-year-old daughter Nila, to hold any hope. She is unable to pinpoint the precise location where her family was buried because palm trees are growing over her family’s grave.

Bangkok, Thailand – Local looters picked up the ruins of an ancient temple in northeast Thailand over the course of several years.

Possibly hundreds of centuries-old statues that were long buried beneath the soft, verdant grounds around the temple were stolen.

The Prakhon Chai hoard, which is collectively known as the Prakhon Chai hoard, is housed in museums and collections throughout the United States, Europe, and Australia, and is still in existence.

In a matter of weeks, though, the first of those statues will begin their journey home to Thailand.

The Asian Art Museum’s acquisitions committee recommended that four bronze statues from the hoard, which had been in the museum’s collection since the late 1960s, be released last year.

San Francisco city’s Asian Art Commission, which manages the museum, then approved the proposal on April 22, officially setting the pieces free.

They are scheduled to return to Thailand in about a month or two after being suspected of spiriting the statues out of the country six decades later by the late British antiquities dealer Douglas Latchford.

“We are the righteous owners”, Disapong Netlomwong, senior curator for the Office of National Museums at Thailand’s Fine Arts Department, told Al Jazeera.

Disapong, who also serves on Thailand’s Committee for the Repatriation of Stolen Artefacts, said, “It is something our ancestors… have made, and it should be displayed here to show the civilisation and the beliefs of the people.”

The imminent return of the statues is the latest victory in Thailand’s quest to reclaim its pilfered heritage.

Their return exemplifies the efforts of nations all over the world to retrieve items from their own stolen histories that are still in the exhibit cases and the vaults of some of the best museums in the West.

From Thai temples to Athens’ Acropolis

Latchford, a high-profile Asian art dealer who came to settle in Bangkok and lived there until his death in 2020 at 88 years of age, is believed to have earned a fortune from auction houses, private collectors and museums around the world who acquired his smuggled ancient artefacts from Thailand and neighbouring Cambodia.

Nawapan Kriangsak, Latchford’s daughter, agreed in 2021 to give Cambodia access to her late father’s private collection, which included more than 100 artefacts, valued at more than $ 50 million.

Though never convicted during his lifetime, Latchford was charged with falsifying shipping records, wire fraud and a host of other crimes related to antiquities smuggling by a US federal grand jury in 2019.

Before the trial for the man’s death was possible, he passed away the following year.

In 2023 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York agreed to return 16 pieces tied to Latchford’s smuggling network to Cambodia and Thailand.

San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum has also previously returned pieces to Thailand – two intricately carved stone lintels taken from a pair of temples dating back to the 10th and 11th centuries, in 2021.

Greece has had a good time with the British Museum in London, whereas Thailand and Cambodia have recently done fairly well in efforts to reclaim their looted heritage from US museum collections.

Perhaps no case of looted antiquities has grabbed more news headlines than that of the so-called “Elgin Marbles”.

The 2, 500-year-old friezes, also known as the Parthenon Marbles, were stolen from Athens’ famous Acropolis in the early 1800s by Lord Elgin’s agents, Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which at the time ruled Greece.

Elgin claimed he took the marbles with the permission of the Ottomans and then sold them in 1816 to the British Museum in London, where they remain.

The non-governmental Hellenic Institute of Cultural Diplomacy claims that Greece has requested the return of the items since 1832 when it first declared its independence and that it first submitted an official request to the museum in 1983.

“Despite all these efforts, the British government has not deviated from its positions over the years, legally considering the Parthenon marbles to belong to Britain. According to the institute, they have even passed laws to stop the return of cultural objects.

Colonialism is still pervasive and pervasive.

Tess Davis, executive director of the Antiquities Coalition, a Washington-based nonprofit campaigning against the illicit trade of ancient art and artefacts, said that “colonialism is still alive and well in parts of the art world”.

Some institutions make the mistaken assumption that they are better carers, owners, and custodians of these cultural objects, Davis said.

But Davis, who has worked on Cambodia’s repatriation claims with US museums, says the “custodians” defence has long been debunked.

Before there was a market demand for these antiquities, leading to their looting and trafficking, “these were cared for by [their] communities for centuries, in some cases for millennia,” she said. “We still see resistance today.

Brad Gordon, a lawyer representing the Cambodian government in its ongoing repatriation of stolen artefacts, has heard museums make all sorts of claims to defend retaining pieces that should be returned to their rightful homelands.

Some museums make excuses, including claims that they are unsure where the pieces came from, that disputed items were bought before domestic laws forbid their repatriation, or that the pieces’ ancestors deserve a wider audience than they would in their home country.

Still, none of those arguments should keep a stolen piece from coming home, Gordon said.

The artefact should be returned, he said, “if we believe the object is stolen and the country of origin wishes for it to come home.”

Old attitudes have started breaking down though, and more looted artefacts are starting to find their way back to their origins.

“I hope more museums follow the example of the Asian Art Museum, and there is definitely a growing trend toward doing the right thing in this area.” We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go”, Davis said.

Much of the progress, Davis believes, is down to growing media coverage of stolen antiquities and public awareness of the problem in the West, which has placed mounting pressure on museums to do the right thing.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, a well-known US comedy show, gave the subject its own episode in 2022. As Oliver said, if you go to Greece and visit the Acropolis you might notice “some odd details”, such as sections missing from sculptures – which are now in Britain.

“Frankly out of ten, it’s in the British Museum,” Oliver quips. “Officially, if you’re ever looking for a missing artefact, it’s in there.”

Gordon also believes a generational shift in thinking is at play among those who once trafficked in the cultural heritage of other countries.

When their parents return the artefacts, he said, “for example, the children of many collectors do this once they are aware of the facts about how they were taken from the country of origin.”

Proof of the past

The San Francisco Museum’s four bronze statues date from the 7th and 9th centuries and are scheduled to arrive in Thailand soon.

Thai archaeologist Tanongsak Hanwong said that period places them squarely in the Dvaravati civilisation, which dominated northeast Thailand, before the height of the Khmer empire that would build the towering spires of Angkor Wat in present-day Cambodia and come to conquer much of the surrounding region centuries later.

Bodhisattva, one of the slender, mottled Buddhas who follow Buddhists on the path to nirvana, are depicted in three of the slim, mottled figures, one of whom is nearly a metre tall (3. 2 feet). The other is the Buddha himself, who is draped in a wide, flowing robe.

Tanongsak, who brought the four pieces in the San Francisco collection to the attention of Thailand’s stolen artefacts repatriation committee in 2017, said they and the rest of the Prakhon Chai hoard are priceless proof of Thailand’s Buddhist roots at a time when much of the region was still Hindu.

It means we don’t have any evidence of the Buddhist history of that time at all, he said, which is strange because there are no Prakhon Chai bronzes on display anywhere in Thailand, in the national museum, or any local museums, either.

The Fine Arts Department first inquired about the statues’ illegal provenance in a letter to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco in 2019, but it only became clear that it would get them returned once the US Department of Homeland Security intervened on behalf of Thailand.

Robert Mintz, the museum’s chief curator, said staff could find no evidence that the statues had been trafficked in their own records.

Once Homeland Security provided proof, with the assistance of Thai researchers, they were persuaded that they had been looted and smuggled out of Thailand and of Latchford’s involvement.

“Once that evidence was presented and they heard it, their feeling was the appropriate place for these would be back in Thailand”, Mintz said of the museum’s staff and acquisition committee.

“Clear the curtain,” you say?

The San Francisco Asian Art Museum went a step further when it finally resolved to return the four statues to Thailand.

Additionally, it placed a special exhibit around the pieces to highlight the specific queries raised by the incident regarding the theft of antiquities.

The exhibition – Moving Objects: Learning from Local and Global Communities – ran in San Francisco from November to March.

According to Mintz, “one of our goals was to try to show the museum’s visitors how significant it is to examine where works of art have been historically,”

“To pull back the curtain a bit, to say, these things do exist within American collections and now is the time to address challenges that emerge from past collecting practice”, he said.

According to Mintz, Homeland Security has requested that the Asian Art Museum investigate the likely origin of at least another ten pieces from Thailand.

Tess Davis, of the Antiquities Coalition campaign group, said the exhibition was a very unusual, and welcome, move for a museum in the process of giving up looted artefacts.

Disapong and Tanongsak claim that the Asian Art Museum’s recognition of Thailand’s legitimate claim to the statues could also aid in the return of the remaining Prakhon Chai hoard, which includes 14 more well-known pieces from other US museums and at least a dozen scattered throughout Europe and Australia.

“It is indeed a good example, because once we can show the world that the Prakhon Chai bronzes were all exported from Thailand illegally, then probably, hopefully some other museums will see that all the Prakhon Chai bronzes they have must be returned to Thailand as well”, Tanongsak said.

Thailand is looking to repatriate a number of other artifacts from international collections besides the Prakhon Chai hoard, he said.

Davis said the repatriation of stolen antiquities is still being treated by too many with collections as an obstacle when it should be seen, as the Asian Art Museum has, as an opportunity.

Davis remarked, “It’s a chance to educate the public.”