Afghan vandalism

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WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 28 2001

Afghan vandalism

An intolerable Taleban outrage against cultural history

After 22 years of Soviet invasion and even more savage civil war, Afghanistan is a brutalised, disintegrated wreck of a country. Its prospects could hardly be more wretched. Now a chapter in its cultural history is also to be erased.

The Taleban leader, Mohammed Omar, has endorsed a decree for the destruction of all Buddhist statues, including the two towering Buddhas carved into a cliff face at Bamiyan in the Hindu Kush, nearly 2,000 years old. Even Taleban had placed these serene images under special protection.

This decree presages a cultural catastrophe of worldwide significance. Afghanistan has a brilliant and complex artistic inheritance, deriving from its position straddling the crossroads of the ancient Silk Routes. The arts of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, Persia, India and China met there and mingled; along trails trod by Alexander, Arab merchants and Chinese caravans, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam left their artistic imprints.

Little remains above ground of the architectural splendours of the flourishing Kushan empire; but the 1,800 treasures of the Bagram collection alone made the Kabul museum a feast. Today it is pillaged and locked, its windows blown out.

But all across this wild land, stone and bronze statues, carved ivories and glassware and minarets tiled in lapis lazuli had survived the hordes of Tamburlaine and Genghis Khan and modern armies that succeeded them up to and including the Russians, who respected and protected these fragments shored against Afghanistan’s ruin.

International protest must be forceful and sustained. Although a regime that is blind to all the Koran’s teachings of tolerance may seem unlikely to be swayed, this decree is a policy reversal. The worst looting of the Kabul museum predated Taleban; and until recently the regime, which improbably has ambitions to revive a tourist industry, described the prevention of further damage to the Afghan heritage as its “top priority” and had appealed for international help with conservation.

This insane order was announced on the same day that a diplomatic delegation, in Kabul to see what could be done to trace objects looted from the museum, was told by the Afghan Foreign Ministry to expect a new decree on cultural preservation. Since this indicates internal divisions on the subject, second thoughts are not inconceivable. But if protest fails, then whatever salvage is possible, however unorthodox the methods, must be attempted.

Smuggling in cultural property should never normally be countenanced; but if the alternative is a heap of rubble, it must be better to save what can be saved even if private collectors, not museums, benefit.

Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.

-- Swissrose (cellier3@mindspring.com), March 01, 2001


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