The director of the National Museum of Afghanistan Omara Khan Masoudi shows an artifact believed to have been touched by Alexander the Great

KABUL.-Some 1,400 Afghan ethnographic and archaeological objects, preserved since 1999 at the Afghanistan Museum-in-Exile (Bubendorf, Switzerland) under the aegis of UNESCO, were handed over to the National Museum in Kabul on 16 March. The operation, organized by the Afghan Ministry of Information and Culture, is financed by Switzerland’s National Commission to UNESCO, the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and the German Ministry of Defense, which is responsible for the transport.

“Repatriating this collection that we have preserved for six years in the Afghanistan Museum-in-Exile in Bubendorf, Switzerland, means giving back to Afghanistan a part of its memory. The country needs this to reconstruct its identity,” said Koïchiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO. Lire la suite http://www.artdaily.com/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=19654