Experts warned that South Sudan has no alternative to oil.

“Once that evidence was presented and they heard it, their feeling was the appropriate place for these would be back in Thailand,” Mintz said of the museum’s staff and acquisition committee.‘Pull back the curtain’

The San Francisco Asian Art Museum went a step further when it finally resolved to return the four statues to Thailand.It also staged a special exhibit around the pieces to highlight the very questions the experience had raised regarding the theft of antiquities.The exhibition – Moving Objects: Learning from Local and Global Communities – ran in San Francisco from November to March.

“One of our goals was to try to indicate to the visiting public to the museum how important it is to look historically at where works of art have come from,” Mintz said.“To pull back the curtain a bit, to say, these things do exist within American collections and now is the time to address challenges that emerge from past collecting practice,” he said.

Mintz says Homeland Security has asked the Asian Art Museum to look into the provenance of at least another 10 pieces in its collection that likely came from Thailand.

Tess Davis, of the Antiquities Coalition campaign group, said the exhibition was a very unusual, and welcome, move for a museum in the process of giving up looted artefacts.The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which runs both the state as well as the central government, has drastically escalated security operations, killing at least 201 Maoist rebels, also known as Naxals, this year.

At least 27 rebels were killed on Wednesday, including the leader of the Maoists. In the past 16 months, more than 400 alleged Maoist rebels have been killed in Chhattisgarh state, home to a sizable population of Adivasis (meaning original inhabitants or Indigenous people).But activists are alarmed: They say many of those killed are innocent Adivasis. And campaigners and opposition leaders are urging the government to cease fire and hold talks with Maoist rebels to find a solution to the decades-old issue.

More than 11,000 civilians and security forces have been killed in clashes involving Maoist fighters between 2000 and 2024, according to official figures. Security forces have killed at least 6,160 Maoist fighters during the same period, according to police and Maoist figures.So, will the government’s hardline approach help bring peace, or will it further alienate the Adivasis, who are already one of the most marginalised groups in the country?