This could be monumental

Elias Wondimu has heard that Italian leaders want North America’s museums to hand back dozens of artifacts that came from Italian soil, and he’s not ready to argue about that.

In fact, says Wondimu, a 32-year-old Ethiopian expat, Hollywood resident and publisher of history books, he’d rather be talking about peacemaking and good government than cultural tugs of war. But if there’s going to be a global debate over Italy and cultural patrimony, he has three words to contribute:

“Obelisk of Axum.”

The Obelisk of Axum is an elaborately inscribed stone monolith, 78 feet from base to tip, that spent most of the 20th century in the middle of a busy Roman piazza. In the eyes of many an Ethiopian, it’s 180 tons of evidence that 20th century Italy snapped up treasures in Ethiopia, then resisted their return for half a century with the same lawless zeal that Italian leaders accuse U.S. museums of displaying.

In early 2005, after nearly 60 years of promises deferred, Italian leaders delivered the obelisk back to its homeland, where it awaits reconstruction.

“We were very, very happy to return the obelisk,” said a spokeswoman at the Italian Embassy in Washington, citing “our important and excellent relationship with Ethiopia.” Some scholars have hailed the event as a crucial international precedent.

But many Ethiopians contend that Italy is still holding other stolen treasures from the 1930s, including pages from Ethiopia’s national archives and Ethiopia’s first airplane, now apparently held by an Italian aviation museum outside Rome.

“It’s quite ironic for me to see them try to reclaim what they’ve lost while they are keeping others from reclaiming stolen property,” Wondimu said.

The Italian spokeswoman declined to comment on the other contested items. In holding the obelisk over the years, Italian officials have cited many factors, including Ethiopia’s political instability and the logistical challenges of returning such a massive object.

In many respects, the case of the prodigal obelisk is a bit of singular history. But it’s also a potent reminder that the more time you spend counting up claims of archeological injustice, the harder it gets to separate victims from villains.

“It is easier to ask for something that belongs to you than to return what belongs to someone else,” says Richard Pankhurst, a professor at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University, who has been calling upon Italy to return items for more than 20 years.

“This not an easy issue for the world to resolve,” says Ronald Olson, the Los Angeles attorney hired by the Getty Trust to help make peace between the Getty and the Italian and Greek governments. “How many times have you visited the British Museum?”

For decades, Greek officials have been demanding that the British Museum return the Elgin Marbles, a series of sculptures taken from Greece in the 19th century.

In North America, arguments over museum pieces have flared for nearly as long. The center of controversy now is the J. Paul Getty Museum and dozens of objects it bought or was given in the 1990s. Getty leaders and former antiquities curator Marion True say they never bought anything they knew had been illegally collected. Italian prosecutors, now trying True and dealer Robert E. Hecht Jr. in Rome, say they’ll produce evidence showing that they did know.

One key to that case is an Italian law, passed under fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in 1939, that bans export of objects excavated since that year. But in Los Angeles, on the stretch of Fairfax Avenue known as Little Ethiopia, it’s other deeds of Mussolini in the 1930s that many Ethiopians prefer to talk about.

“Ah, that war,” said Alem Abebe, behind the counter of the Safari Ethiopian Store, when asked about Italy’s 1935 invasion and later withdrawal. “You hear about it all the time, how they beat the Italians. The Italians came, they bombed, they gassed.... But in the end, the Ethiopians won.”

Next door at Nile Services, owner Meshesha Biru, 55, knows all about the obelisk -- he has a master’s degree in international relations -- and is eager to see what comes next. “Once you whet your appetite, you go for all the things that have been taken by force,” Biru said.

“It’s a calculated amnesia,” said Wondimu, marveling at Italy’s posture as he tucked into a traditional Ethiopian dinner at Meals by Genet.

When Mussolini’s troops invaded Ethiopia, their leader wanted to pick up a few tons of souvenirs, just as Roman emperors did on their adventures into Egypt and Mesopotamia in days of old. So in 1937, when Italian troops came across the monolith in the city of Axum (or Aksum), they brought it back to Italy. Then they put it up in the Piazza di Porta Capena, not far from the Colosseum, where it stood as a reminder of Italian colonial ambition, just across the street from the Ministry for Italian Africa.

In 1941, Italy withdrew from Ethiopia. In 1945, Mussolini was assassinated. In 1947, as part of a peace treaty, Italy’s postwar government agreed to return the monument and “all works of art, religious objects, archives and objects of historical value belonging to Ethiopia.” In 1956 the Italians promised again. And again in 1997. Yet in Rome the obelisk remained.

In Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, the complaints continued, often overshadowed by other troubles.

Though Ethiopia prides itself as the only sub-Saharan African country never colonized by a European power, the country’s domestic and border politics are unstable. Apart from the notorious famine it suffered in the 1980s, it remains one of the world’s poorest nations. Its relations with neighboring Eritrea remain touchy following a border war in the 1990s, and the hotly contested elections in May, just the third in the country’s history, were followed by a government crackdown that has left at least 82 dissenters dead.

Nevertheless, many inside and outside Ethiopia suspected broader cultural politics behind Italy’s long hold on the obelisk. Rino Serri, then Italian undersecretary for foreign affairs, acknowledged in 1996 that “perhaps certain circles in Italy and abroad are afraid that a precedent will be set.”

Then in 2002, lightning struck.

Amid a Roman storm, a bolt from the sky struck the obelisk, which had no lightning rod attached, breaking off several feet of granite in chunks. This substantially undercut the argument that the Italians could better care for the artifact than the Ethiopians could. In a series of three delicate operations in November and December 2003, workers took down a 40-ton segment from the top of the monument, then a 71-ton segment, then the final 77-ton segment.

Later the same year, when global leaders gathered in Rome for a summit on hunger in a United Nations building across from the monument, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi seized the moment and excoriated Italian leaders for putting up “one excuse after another” as Ethiopians pined for their treasure and the Italian capital’s smog ate away at the stonework.

“This,” Zenawi said, “is nothing short of an outrage.”

In late 2004, the Italian government got down to business: As part of a series of agreements that included a major loan package to underwrite an Ethiopian hydroelectric project, Italy agreed once more to send the obelisk back.

In April 2005, a Russian-made Antonov-124 cargo plane -- one of the few aircraft in the world able to handle such a heavy cargo -- carried the first segment back to Ethiopia, landing at Aksum shortly before dawn. Italian officials have estimated that the obelisk’s relocation cost $7 million or more.

Ethiopian officials, who first hoped to have the obelisk up by September, have the three pieces in storage and are still discussing how they might be re-erected without disturbing the many ruins still buried in the area.

The next task, Pankhurst says, is getting back the Tsehai, a plane built for Emperor Haile Selassie, which some say could be the first plane built in Africa.

“Its non-return is an example of the Italian Government’s long refusal to treat Ethiopia justly,” Pankhurst wrote in a recent e-mail. “We will get the plane back: I am confident of that!”

Meanwhile, there appears to be consensus in Little Ethiopia on how the Getty should handle its own Italian troubles. If those contested items were stolen from Italy under the terms of that 1939 law, said Biru, “I don’t care how much the Getty paid, they have to give them back.... The original owners are the people who need to keep them.”

“You can’t have it both ways,” added Fikre Mariam, 52, standing by. “You give me mine, and you take yours.”

Just as this conversation might seem to be drawing to a close, however, further word comes from Africa, and a further hint at the hand-wringing now in progress in museums and culture ministries around the world.

Late last year, Eritrea’s national museum chief told reporters that his country too would soon begin a campaign to regain lost artifacts. Some from Italy, yes. But the rest, said National Museum chief Lebsekal Yosief, were taken out by the government of Ethiopia in the 1960s, 30 years before the war in which Eritrea won independence from Ethiopia.

Those items should be displayed in the Eritrean capital of Asmara, says Yosief, not in Addis Ababa.

At word of this, Elias Wondimu sighed.

“It’s a very tricky situation,” he said.