Man against stone

By Nyier Abdou
The Taliban, the extremist Islamist movement that controls over 90 per cent of Afghanistan, has been the target of plenty of international criticism since taking power in September 1996, but this week the former hard-line student movement proved it has further surprises in store.
The humanitarian crisis due to the ongoing Afghan civil war has been compounded in the last year by severe weather and the worst drought in almost 40 years. An estimated half a million refugees are left with nothing but hope for international aid, but it has taken children dying by the hundreds in squalid camps to tug the hearts of an international community loath to dally in the affairs of a state so defiant and war-torn.
Taliban interpretation of Islamic law has barred women from education and banned all television, video and satellites, but no edict has brought so swift and uniform a condemnation as the 26 February order by Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Mohamed Omar to destroy all statues in the country -- particularly Buddhist monuments from the country's pre-Islamic era. Most notable are the two suddenly famous, colossal statues of the Buddha in the province of Bamiyan, some 150 kilometres northwest of Kabul.
Located along the legendary Silk Road, the Bamiyan valley was an important Buddhist centre from the second to the ninth century. Numerous monasteries were carved into the same cliff where the enormous Buddhas were crafted, probably in the seventh century. The Great Buddha of Bamiyan, a staggering 55 metres tall, is considered to be the largest standing statue of the Buddha. Its companion, already damaged in 1998 by Taliban forces, rises to 38 metres. Long a site of pilgrimage and previously one of Afghanistan's most prominent tourist attractions, the Bamiyan Buddhas may no longer exist.
A meeting of the leadership's ulama (religious scholars) declared the statues offensive to Islam -- a strict interpretation of the Islamic law against graven images of the human figure. Though the Qur'an preaches religious tolerance, an unrepentant Qadratullah Jamal, Taliban minister of information and culture, announced last Friday that destruction of the statues had vigorously begun. By Saturday, Jamal reported that the Bamiyan Buddhas were being dismantled and that numerous artefacts had been destroyed in Kabul, Herat and elsewhere in the country. "They were easy to break apart and did not take much time," he bragged. Foreign journalists have not been allowed into any of the sites and there are no local reports to confirm that the statues have actually been destroyed.
Mullah Omar's announcement last Monday set off a flurry of diplomatic initiatives spearheaded by the Paris-based United Nations cultural watchdog UNESCO. Within days, the Great Buddha had become an emblem, in the eyes of Western authorities, for all that is cruel and unjust about the Taliban regime. The UN recently imposed new sanctions against Afghanistan following the Taliban's refusal to turn over Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden. The campaign against the statues has been interpreted as a retaliatory act -- an attempt to strike the international community in a soft spot.
The move has in any case been successful in stoking the passions of the world's cultural authorities, with UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura calling a desperate meeting of ambassadors from the 54 member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) last Thursday. Matsuura noted that all OIC states -- even Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the only three countries that officially recognise the Taliban government -- adamantly backed his call to spare the monuments. Strangely enough, though Matsuura has done everything short of strapping himself to the Great Buddha, the Bamiyan site is not among the approximately 700 "world heritage sites" listed by UNESCO.
The Taliban cling to a clumsy misreading of Buddhist beliefs, claiming that the statues are worshipped by pilgrims and therefore promote idolatry. But they are hard-pressed to find an Islamic institution that will back them up. Egypt's mufti, the nation's second-highest religious authority, defended the preservation of historic sites. Even Pakistan, the Taliban's closest ally, has repeatedly expressed its disapproval.
Afghanistan has been continually branded an international pariah at the expense of its citizens, of whom an estimated three million are starving. Donor countries could not even manage to airlift some blankets into refugee camps despite the repeated pleas of aid organisations, but the fate of the Buddhist statues has put Afghanistan back onto the international scene. While European diplomats speak of the tragedy and loss to humanity that the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas will represent, there is an even greater need to consider the tragic loss of life that continues to plague Afghanistan, with or without its monuments.
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