Cultural losses of the war

An unsung casualty of the Afghan civil war has been the country's cultural heritage, writes David Tresilian, 80 per cent of the Kabul Museum's treasures having now been either looted or destroyed
The destruction by Taliban forces in March this year of the two giant statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan drew world attention to threats to Afghanistan's cultural heritage. However, losses quite as serious as that represented by the destruction of these 1,500- year-old statues have also been sustained elsewhere in the country, particularly during the period of civil war between 1992 and 1995 when rival mujahidin factions fought for control of the capital, Kabul.
On the frontline between rival groups, the National Museum at Darulaman a few kilometres to the south of Kabul took the brunt of the fighting, the museum building being reduced to ruins. More significantly, its priceless collection of central and southwest Asian art, one of the most important in the world, was either looted or destroyed in the process.
Recent media reports have indicated that, beginning earlier this year and continuing in waves over several months, Taliban forces moved in to the museum in order to destroy Buddhist statues and other works deemed idolatrous in their version of Islam. Yet, the Taliban soldiers, who took control of the capital in 1996 after it had already been largely destroyed, would have found only a very few objects left to destroy.
By 1995, an estimated 70 -- 80 per cent of the Museum's collections had already been looted by mujahidin fighters, acting apparently on instructions from art-dealers in neighbouring Pakistan.
Writing in September 1995, the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid reported that 2,500-year-old heads of the Indian god Shiva, once on display in the museum, were for sale in Peshawar for $7,000, that second century AD Indian ivories could be had in Islamabad for $35,000, and that 12 such ivories had recently been sold in London to a Tokyo collector for $600,000.
Founded in the 1920s, and holding collections built up particularly as a result of French archaeological excavations carried out in Afghanistan in the decades that followed, the now-ruined museum once contained objects testifying to the country's successive Greek, Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim cultures, most famously from the Bagram and Tille-Tepe hoards discovered in the 1930s and 1980s, respectively.
These collections testified to Afghanistan's historical importance at the crossroads of central Asia and to the variety of civilisations that have been based in the country. An expedition led by Alexander the Great to Afghanistan in the fourth century BC led to the establishment of the Graeco- Bactrian civilisation centred around the city of Bactria (now Balkh) and along the Oxus River (now Amu Darya) in the north of the country. Later, Hindu and Buddhist culture spread from India to the south as a result of the Silk Roads trading routes that crossed the country from the second century BC on. The Buddhist period in particular, which lasted until the arrival of Islam in the region in the seventh century AD, saw the building of hundreds of monasteries in Afghanistan, as well as the construction of the famous Bamiyan Buddhas in the fourth century AD.
The city of Bagram, to the north of Kabul, was once the seat of a flourishing Graeco-Buddhist civilisation that allied the figurative traditions of Greek sculpture with the spiritual content of Buddhism. According to the Afghan archaeologist Zemaryalai Tarzi, in so doing the Afghan Buddhist monks developed delicate sculpture and painting unlike anything to be found elsewhere.
"Up until this period, the Buddha was only represented by symbols ... here, for the first time, influenced by Greek art, Buddha assumed a human form" in the shape of the numerous Bodhisattvas once on display in the Kabul Museum and now either dispersed or smashed by the Taliban. The Bagram Hoard, a collection of 1,800 pieces of lacquerwork, bronzes, ivories, glassware and statues brought to Afghanistan in the second Century AD and once housed in the museum was dispersed on the international art market by the mujahidin.
It is now believed that the vast majority of the museum's collections, containing ivories, statues, paintings, coins, gold, pottery, armaments and dress from the region's pre-historic period to the Bactrian, Kushan and Gandharan civilisations and through to the Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim periods, is now in private collections in Europe, the United States and Japan. Among the items also lost is the museum's coin collection, which contained 40,000 gold and silver coins struck from the eighth Century BC on and representing civilisations from Rome to China. Not a single coin now remains.
While the destruction or dispersal of the museum's collections has destroyed a major expression of Afghanistan's history and of that of the region as a whole, not everything has, however, been lost. According to Christian Manhart, programme specialist for Asia at UNESCO in Paris and responsible for the organisation's cultural-heritage activities in southwest Asia, important parts of the collections may still remain intact, thanks to prompt action taken by the organisation and by others in the early 1990s when threats to the museum were at their height.
Following the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989, the Najibullah government ordered the removal of significant portions of the museum's collections, fearing their safety in the increasingly unstable climate. Objects were taken to the cellars of various government buildings in Kabul, and the Tilla-Tepe hoard, the famous "Bactrian Gold" discovered by Russian archaeologists in 1978 and containing 21,000 gold objects dating from 100 BC to 100 AD, was locked in vaults in the basement of the presidential palace.
Though the palace itself has been largely destroyed, and the mujahidin tried on more than one occasion to dynamite the vaults, efforts to loot the gold have apparently failed, testimony, Manhart suggests, to the workmanship of the German company that built the vaults in the 1960s.
"We think the gold is still there, though we cannot be certain," he said. "The latest report from Kabul showed only that the entrance to the vaults was blocked with rubble, and we have been unable to gain further information."
Similarly, Manhart said that UNESCO, acting with the Society for the Preservation of the Afghan Cultural Heritage (SPACH) and using funds donated for the purpose by several European governments, was able to move portions of the now severely looted, but still substantially intact, collections to the Kabul Hotel in the centre of the city away from the exposed Darulaman site. It is believed that this material, together with other material preserved in the basements of various government buildings in Kabul, is still intact.
UNESCO, Manhart said, is also acting in other ways to recover material dispersed through looting. Under the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, the 1970 Convention on the Means of Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property and the 1972 Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, which set out principles for protecting national cultural assets, the organisation is able to alert Interpol, as well as national police forces, to the circulation of stolen cultural property.
The Afghanistan Museum in Exile in Bubendorf, Switzerland holds objects retrieved in this way, as does the Musée Guimet in Paris and the British Museum in London. UNESCO, acting under the 1970 Convention, can authorise such institutions to hold stolen objects, which it has done in this case awaiting such time as the situation in Afghanistan returns to normal.
Finally, regarding the recent destruction of Buddhist artefacts by Taliban forces, Manhart said that UNESCO plans to send a mission to Kabul early next year in order to assess the damage and to get a better idea of what has been conserved, either in the museum premises or elsewhere. It is important that any surviving fragments not be swept up and disposed of in the uncertain situation now reigning in the country, since it may be possible to reconstruct the original statues from such fragments, he said.
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