The Case for the Return of the Parthenon Marbles Restated

 

 

Since Melina Mercouri confronted the director of the British Museum in the early 1980s demanding return of the Parthenon Marbles – the sculptures looted by Lord Elgin’s men over 200 years ago – successive Greek Governments have paid lip service to the issue of return.

It has been left to a sustained international campaign of Philhellenes around the world, including Australia, to mount the case for reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures.

Parthenon Sculptures come to Adelaide

 

The Foundation of Hellenic Studies in Adelaide, South Australia has now stepped up to the mark and staged a series of events that have raised the profile of the campaign for return, coincidentally with the release of a landmark legal opinion that breathes new hope into the campaign.

 

In late March 2016 the Foundation unveiled a dramatic exhibition of fourteen exact replicas of sculptures from the sacred rock.  The Acropolis Sculptures Retrospective had arrived in the city of churches, offering visitors a virtual guided tour of the Acropolis and the tragic pillaging carried out by Lord Elgin and his men.   

Then, on 6 May 2016 at a gala dinner held at the Adelaide Festival Centre attended by over 400 guests, the prominent Australian barrister, Geoffrey Robertson QC, in a keynote speech delivered a devastating critique of the continued retention of the sculptures in the British Museum.

Geoffrey Robertson went to the core of the issue: the sculptures were not taken legitimately by Elgin as supporters of the British Museum claim; they were stolen.  Robertson, an accomplished criminal law counsel, confessed “I could not have defended Lord Elgin”. 

In 1780 the French had sought to take moulds and the Ottoman authorities in Athens gave a limited permission but on strict terms not to remove any sculptures.  Robertson pointedly asked how it was that Elgin managed to that that very thing 20 years later since he was, after all, an “under-bright but over-ambitious Tory”.  Elgin was fortunate to have in his camp the Rev Leigh Hunt.  Elgin had applied for permission to draw and mould but Hunt paid bribes and persuaded the Turkish Military Governor of Athens to allow Elgin’s workers to remove parts of the structure.  Elgin was thrilled and authorised the payment of greater bribes.  The desecration of the Parthenon had begun.

It was an act of astonishing vandalism, according to Robertson.  Back in England, the issue of the sculptures was debated in Parliament in 1816 and Lord Elgin was heavily criticised because he had taken advantage of his diplomatic status and indeed profited from his ambassadorship.

Robertson dealt with a number of arguments that defenders of the British Museum raise from time to time.  For example, it is asserted that “no Elgin; no marbles” on the basis that Elgin’s intentions were to save and preserve the sculptures upon seeing their condition in situ.  But he arrived in Athens after most of the marbles had been ripped off the temple.  It was not an act of necessity.  Without Elgin, the marbles would still be on the Parthenon.

The sculptures are central to Greece’s identity.  As Melina Mercouri declared, they are the “essence of Greekness”.  Robertson explained how his colleague, Amal Clooney, had gone behind the historical corridor and ascertained that - contrary to a widely-held view that Mercouri’s demand in 1982 was the first time Greece had requested the sculptures’ return – the first claim was made back in 1833, one year after independence had been gained from the Ottoman Turks.

In 1836 the King of Greece sent a letter to the Greek delegation in London referring to the “glory of Greece” and that the sculptures’ removal was disputed in the name of human rights.  The British Foreign Office agreed in 1940 and advised the UK Government accordingly.  Only during the period between 1967-1974 when the junta was in power (run by “philistine fascists’) that no demand for return was made.

So what has happened since then?

The standard response by a revolving door of Greek Culture Ministers over the last 30 years has been that the Parthenon Sculptures must be returned and for a long time it was felt that the opening of the New Acropolis Museum – which finally occurred in 2009 – would mark the pivotal moment when the marbles in the British Museum would be reunited with their Athenian siblings under the bright Attic sky. 

But Greece did not bargain for the clever historical revisionism of the British Museum which steadily re-invented itself as the museum of the enlightenment – a universal museum supposedly embodying the collective memory of mankind – where (so the narrative goes) the Parthenon Sculptures truly belong in London. 

Over that period Greece and Britain have also met on countless times under the aegis of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its Restitution in case of Illicit Appropriation but have failed to make any progress as the British Ministry of Culture has continuously stonewalled efforts to hold any meaningful dialogue.  For over 30 years the committee has met and encouraged both parties to continue to negotiate, but to no avail.  This came to a farcical head in early 2015 when the British Government formally declined a UNESCO offer of mediation, restating a by now familiar line that the Elgin collection was legally acquired and there is no point in having any discussions until the Greeks acknowledge the British Museum’s legal ownership of the sculptures.

In October 2014 at the invitation of the then Samaras-led government Robertson, together with lawyers Professor Norman Palmer and Amal Clooney came to Athens in a flurry of publicity but with a simple message: litigate or perish.  The lawyers were asked to draft an extensive legal opinion providing Greece with a number of legal options to pursue the return of the sculptures.  That advice was eventually completed and delivered to the SYRIZA Government which came to power in early 2015 but successive Culture Ministers in that government have deemed litigation as a risky exercise not worth taking.  Although there have been attempts to pull back from this negotiating precipice, the damage was done.  The British sense that the Greeks lack confidence in their own legal and moral case for return and respond accordingly.

To add insult to injury, in 2013 and again in 2015 two major bilateral meetings took place between different British Foreign Secretaries and their Greek counterparts to discuss the present state of Anglo-Hellenic relations.  In the lengthy communiques that followed both meetings there was not one word mentioned about the Parthenon Sculptures.  How can cultural diplomacy (in any guise) work if the issue is not even on the agenda?

Geoffrey Robertson lays down the case for return

But the momentum is slowly but surely shifting.  Back in Adelaide, Geoffrey Robertson did not disappoint as he clinically demolished the tired and often insulting arguments of the British Museum and its supporters.  Referring to the Parthenon and its sculptures as the “keys to our ancient history” Robertson also took aim at “lacklustre culture ministers” and the mindset that cultural diplomacy that has failed Greece in the past will somehow prevail in the future.   The British Government will not engage with Greek requests for return.  This position is simply untenable. 

Since 1833 Greece has made formal demands for return culminating in the request for mediation through UNESCO but the British have consistently rejected such approaches; they will send the sculptures to Russia (a reference to the controversial loan of the River God Ilissos sculpture in late 2014 to the Hermitage) but never to Greece.

The British Museum Act has effectively locked up all legal remedies by the strict prohibition on deaccessioning and so Greece has to look to international legal remedies through either the European Court of Human Rights or the International Court of Justice.  As Geoffrey Robertson declared: “without litigation the Parthenon Marbles will remain in the Duveen Gallery forever”.

According to Robertson, national cultural symbols which are important to a nation’s self-identity are deserving of protection under international law which is evolving and which recognizes the sovereign right to claim unique cultural property of great historical significance taken in the past.

The full power and beauty and architectural context of the sculptures can only be appreciated if they are reunited with the surviving sculptures in Athens.   In London, the sculptures are anachronistically displayed under artificial light in the Duveen Gallery.  They give the impression of an old newsreel.  The “unique wonder of the marbles” refutes the so-called slippery slide excuses by the museum.  The Parthenon is unprecedented in human history.  It is a “wonder of the world to be appreciated in the most natural way possible”.

As for the British Museum’s claims that it is a 'world museum’, a 'something for everyone’ pluralistic museum, Robertson pointed out that in the case of the sculptures the museum has jumbled artefacts from all over the world in a display that has no coherence.  In the British Museum the marbles are simply “titbits in a cultural smorgasbord” whereas in the New Acropolis Museum they would literally come to light.

But the British Museum is prepared to go to extremes to justify its position.  It claims, for example, that in the British Museum the visitor cannot only look at 5th century Athens but also compare what followed.  The curator of the museum’s Greek and Roman exhibitions, Ian Jenkins, has actually referred to an Assyrian panel showing the torture of prisoners and points out that the Greeks avoided depicting such cruelty.  Similarly, the classical horsemen preparing for the cavalcade on the Parthenon marbled frieze are compared to a photograph an English fox hunt.  The iconic heifer “lowing at the skies” (as Keats wrote in Ode to a Grecian Urn) is reduced to a photograph image of African Masai youth attempting to restrain a bolting cow.   The attempted linkage is just illogical.

 

 

 

And then there is the British Museum’s descent into historical revisionism. 

The Australian writer, Donald Horne in The Great Museum, noted the trend which developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to establish a museum of antiquities.  In addition to art museums the new European desire to order the universe saw the evolution of historical museums such as the British Museum stocked with the loot of empire to affirm the “legitimacy of imperial domination”.   The Parthenon Sculptures continue to bear testimony to that imperialist mindset.

Robertson also quoted from the American scholar Joan Connelly’s seminal work, The Parthenon Enigma:

 

The wholeness of the Parthenon demands our respect and warrants every effort to reunify it … Let us, for a moment, consider the state of the central figures of the west pediment.  Poseidon’s shoulders are held in London while his pectoral and abdominal muscles remain in Athens … This deliberate and sustained dismemberment of what are some of the most sublime images ever carved by humankind brings shame on those who work to uphold this state of affairs.

The reassembled replica of Poseidon, with both London and Athens components, was on view outside in the exhibition.  To any reasonable viewer, this state of affairs is simply untenable.

 

Poseidon’s shoulders are held in London (far right) while his pectoral and abdominal muscles remain in Athens

The legal opinion

Within 48 hours of Geoffrey Robertson’s speech, the Guardian newspaper in London published the actual written legal opinion which had apparently been leaked to it.  And that advice demonstrates that Greece would have, at the very least, an arguable case to bring before the International Court of Justice in its own right or through UNESCO seeking an advisory opinion from the court, invoking the emerging principles of customary international law that recognise the inextricable link between a country’s cultural identity and rare artefacts of great significance that were illegally or dubiously removed in the past.

Interestingly, in a separate interview with the Guardian, the current Culture Minister, Aristidis Baltas, has ventured that Greece is hoping to forge alliances to bring pressure to bear upon the British Museum through the United Nations but again appeared to hesitate about legal action apart from stating that Greece would go to court “if all the nations of the world say ‘the marbles should be returned’”. 

 

 

 

Elly Symons, Vice President of Australians for the Return of the Parthenon Sculptures, with Geoffrey Robertson QC. 

The Australian committee supports the proposed litigation strategy.

 

Robertson, lamenting the Greek Government’s determination to go down the doomed and futile diplomatic route, alluded to what he called the “Navarino syndrome” and the apparent deep well of gratitude to the British.  And yet, as he observed,  the English love litigation and they always comply with a judgment.  Greece could seek an advisory opinion from the ICJ.  If Greece were to lose on a technicality, it does not follow that it would have lost the whole campaign.  It can be brought again.  Customary law may not have evolved as much as Greece would like, but it can try again when it has evolved.

To the claim that it will take a long time Geoffrey Robertson asked rhetorically: “how long is never?”  He added:

 “The Marbles will never return to Greece unless there is litigation in Strasbourg or the Hague.  We are at risk of damage to the campaign.  By failing to take legal action we are perceived to be lacking confidence.”

According to Robertson, now is an opportune time for states to reclaim wrongfully taken cultural property in the wake of the barbarous activities of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, highlighted by the barbarous cultural vandalism of the ancient site of Palmyra.  The ICJ can enunciate the legal norm regarding the right to protect cultural property for unlawfully removed cultural property no matter how long ago the spoliation took place. 

Robertson received a standing ovation from the crowd.  In concluding the night, organiser Harry Patsouris urged everyone to “keep the passion going”.

Back to UNESCO

 

On 29-30 September 2016 the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee is again meeting in Paris.  Although the agenda has not as yet been released, the UNESCO committee’s website states that the 20th session of the Committee aims to examine the follow-up to the recommendations promoting bilateral negotiations which were adopted at the 19th session in October 2014. 

And what was that recommendation?

Noting that the Parthenon Sculptures had been the subject of a case pending before the Committee since 1984, the Committee recalled that in July 2013 the Director General of UNESCO had met with Mr Panos Panagiotopoulos, Minister of Culture of the Hellenic Republic, and during their discussion, Panagiotopoulos had expressed his hopes “that UNESCO could use its good offices with the authorities of the United Kingdom as a facilitator in the matter of the Parthenon sculptures”. 

Panagiotopoulos was four culture ministers ago in the space of less than three years.  Another reason why the British do not take the Greek side seriously. 

As we have seen,  the UK government - with the British Museum in tow - rejected mediation in March 2015 and in so doing rejected any UNESCO-authored diplomatic initiatives or indeed any proper and meaningful engagement with the Greeks.

In the intervening period, consecutive Culture Ministers in the Tsipras Government have simply restated that Greece will continue to pursue all diplomatic and political options open to it, including mediation.  As Robertson caustically but accurately describes it, the British are simply laughing at the Greeks over their constant indecision and prevarication.

So what needs to be done?

The time has come for the Greek State to finally assert itself and to formally claim back the Parthenon Marbles.

Greece should take advantage of the upcoming meeting of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee in September 2016 to prosecute its claim.  Mediation has been rejected by the British.  Diplomacy has not worked.  The Greek representatives, armed with the legal opinion drafted by the Robertson team, need to say that enough is enough and unless the British side is prepared to sit down for genuine bilateral negotiations (which is unlikely given their past utterances, then Greece will in the first instance petition UNESCO to seek an advisory opinion from the ICJ.

As the advice itself concludes, a universal benefit will flow from the renewal and re-integration of Greece’s pre-eminent monument, both as an artefact of unparalleled beauty in itself and as an eloquent symbol of human progress towards civilisation and democracy.

The Parthenon was conceived as a unity and the sculptures were designed as an integral part of the temple.  The time for their reunification has arrived.