Questions about Turkey's "Art War" with the Rest of the World

Turkey is today pursuing an aggressive retentionist policy towards antquities of which it claims absolute ownership and wants "returned" from the museums that preserve and display them:  Matthias Schulz 'Art War': Turkey Battles to Repatriate Antiquities Speigel July 20, 2012. The government wants to stock the galleries of a 25,000-square-meter (270,000-square-foot) "Museum of the Civilizations" in the Turkish capital Ankara with items from our museums. Their new museum ("the biggest museum in the world") will be opened in 2023 so as to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic. There could not be a clearer assertion of the relationship between retentive antiquities policies and nationalism. Yet:

the Turks themselves can claim little credit for their archeological treasures. Their ancestors, the Seljuks, only arrived from the steppes of Central Asia in the 11th century. Christian Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, fell in 1453. Before then, however, Hittites, Greeks, Romans and Byzantines had built enormous palaces, monasteries and amphitheaters in the region. Whether it was Homer, Thales or King Midas -- they all lived on the other side of the Dardanelles. When the new Muslim masters took over, the region's illustrious past faded into obscurity. The water-pipe-smoking caliphs were more concerned with pursuing their own interests.  

Modern Turkey is embracing the heritage of the ancient lands that it now occupies and appropriating it for itself. A powerful antiquities bureaucracy has grown up in recent years. But their effectiveness in protecting that heritage is doubtful in the face of corruption:

a well-organized local mafia has continued to wreak havoc in Turkey. For example, in the early 1960s, among the remains of the ancient city of Boubon in southwestern Turkey, thieves discovered a Roman temple filled with more than 30 life-size bronze imperial statues. It would have been a global sensation -- but the public never saw the statues. Instead, unbeknownst to the authorities, they all vanished into the voracious pipelines of the global antiquities trade. 

Or perhaps the authorities knew all about it, it is presumably not easy to move 30 life size bronze statues around without being seen. In any case, how much of a moral right do the Turks have to repatriation of artefacts when they have objects removed from other countries in their museums?

Critics are openly airing their displeasure with Turkey's behavior online. Instead of lodging complaints, they argue, Turkey ought to return the Obelisk of Theodosius, which stands in Istanbul, to Egypt. Indeed, the Ottomans themselves weren't squeamish when it came to appropriating cultural goods. They stole artifacts in Mecca and allowed a private British citizen to pry away the frieze from the Parthenon in Athens -- in return for a lot of money. During the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974, the occupiers emptied out entire museums. "The Turks are too determined to depict themselves as victims of cultural oppression to accept that foreign museums and archaeologists have also played a part in saving their treasures," the Economist wrote in May. For example, when the German archeologist Carl Humann entered the majestic ruins of Pergamon in 1864, he saw large numbers of lime kilns in use. Workers were smashing ancient marble columns and throwing the pieces into the fire. After reaching a deal with the Ottoman government, he then brought the Pergamon Altar back to Berlin to be the centerpiece of a museum of the same name. But Turkey has long called for its repatriation.

Turkey’s aggressive measures against large international museums has raised controversy in the art world. It has returned the focus of repatriation again to the question: Who Owns Antiquity?