National Museum of Sudan Reportedly Looted Amid Civil War

The National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum has reportedly been looted by members of the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF) amid an ongoing civil war in the country. 

On Sunday, the SBC, Sudan’s national broadcaster, reported that the museum was targeted by “a large-scale looting and smuggling operation” and that some pieces from its collection had been trafficked outside the nation’s southern border. 

“Satellite images have confirmed that trucks loaded with items left the museum early this year, heading toward the border with South Sudan,” the report added, as quoted in Middle East Eye. The institution did not state which artifacts were stolen, but the SBC, citing “informed sources,” said that trucks had been spotted transporting exhibitions from the premises. The artifacts have allegedly been spotted for sale online.

The RSF has previously denied accusations of looting, saying at the onset of the conflict in April 2023 that it was fulfilling its mission to safeguard cultural property in the Sudanese capital city. That statement has been disputed by the Middle East Eye, which in June 2023 shared footage of RSF fighters raiding the M Bolheim Bioarchaeology Laboratory in Khartoum, where human remains dating to ancient Nubia (2500 BCE to 1500 BCE) were exhibited.

Sudan’s cultural heritage has faced repeated assault since the power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) erupted into civil war. In the ensuing months, the conflict has spiraled beyond soldiers to nearly 25 million Sudanese civilians who currently face mass displacement and famine. On April 26, Sara Abdalla Khidir Saeed, director of the Sudan Natural History Museum, wrote in a publicly shared letter that local museums “are now without guard or censorship to protect them from looting and vandalism.”

That July, the nonprofit Heritage for Peace stated that numerous cultural archives have been lost, including those maintained by the Mohamed Omer Bashir Centre for Sudanese Studies at Omdurman Ahlia University and the Abdul Karim Mirghani Center, which was in the process of digitizing its material history of local labor movements.

The Performing Arts Theatre in el Geneina was also burned down, and both the Sultan Bahruddin Museum and the National History Museum in Khartoum reported the loss of their collections to bombing. Sudan’s National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums (NCAM) and the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, meanwhile, have proposed preservation strategies, such as evacuating artifacts, though such efforts continue to be impeded by fighting.

“While there is a lot of awareness about cultural heritage and the need to protect it in times of crisis, one of our biggest challenges is that culture is still not mainstreamed into the language of humanitarian aid,” ICCROM’s Aparna Tandon told the Associated Press in 2023. 

ARTnews has reached out to the National Museum of Sudan for comment.