Here's an update on an old topic--a blast from the past, if you will.
Afghanistan's Monument of Rubble
A Year Ago, the Taliban Went on the Offensive Against Two Stone Symbols
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 6, 2002; Page C01
BAMIAN, Afghanistan – The giant Buddhas are rubble now, huge piles of rock beneath the cliffside where they stood for 1,500 years.
Thick metal casings from bombs and artillery shells that brought down the Buddhas remain scattered about. In scores of adjoining caves, local families displaced from their villages by recent fighting have moved in where meditating monks once lived.
An Arabic verse from the Koran, painted at the site by the Taliban and al Qaeda militants who demolished the statues, still reads: "With the coming of the right and the true, things that were wrong will be removed and destroyed."
One year after the Taliban destroyed two colossal, centuries-old carvings of Buddha, and several months after the last of the radical Islamic movement's operatives left the area, this former marvel of the ancient Silk Road remains a largely desolate ground zero. There are no repair crews, no guards, nothing to suggest this was a treasure considered by the United Nations as a world historical monument. The Buddhas long dominated the mountain valley below, and now so does their disfigurement.
Some tentative steps have been taken to protect the site, and some international groups have begun a campaign to have the statues rebuilt or restored, an idea that is widely popular in the Bamian valley.
But the proposals have met opposition in Afghanistan and among top international art conservation officials, who doubt the statues can, or should, be rebuilt. They say it won't happen because of the enormous expense, the absence of trained artists to do the work, and the fact that building new Buddha statues in Islamic Afghanistan would be a difficult political sell.
Reflecting that reluctance, Afghan leader Hamid Karzai has told U.N. officials, and also said in an interview, that rebuilding the statues is not a high priority for his government. The eerie silence of the site, and the disfigurement of the Bamian valley, will likely remain for years to come.
But what's beginning to be revealed from the rubble is the disturbing story of precisely how they were destroyed in a high, inaccessible mountain valley by zealots who ignored international pleas to leave them alone. One day, it seemed, the world was learning of the threat to the Buddhas, the next day they were gone.
The statues did not come down so quickly, however. Instead their destruction required a determined, and at times macabre, campaign by the Taliban and, apparently, members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization.
Before they were finished, the attackers had blackened the face of one Buddha with smoke from burning tires; had hoisted barrels of explosives to the shoulders of the biggest statue and detonated them; and had forced local people to join in the destruction of their beloved monuments, even dangling some men on ropes from the statues' heads to plant more dynamite.
The campaign against the world's tallest Buddhas – 185 and 135 feet, respectively – took up to two weeks of daily explosions, local people say. After some of those explosions, they say, men loaded pickup trucks with the best fragments of the Buddhas and carted them off, presumably to antique markets in Pakistan.
Firsthand accounts of the destruction are few because most of the people who live in Bamian today had fled the city before the project began. But Mohammed Hussein, a Hazara guerrilla commander who temporarily joined the Taliban, remembers.
Sipping tea at a smoky restaurant in Bamian, he said he witnessed much of the destruction from the town. He said that many Arabs, Pakistanis and Chechens had come in to lead the destruction and that he knew at least one local Taliban leader who refused to participate.
"There were many Arabs and Pakistanis in Bamian then, and they would say 'Allahu akbar' [God is great] just before the explosions," he said.
He said that several airplane bombs were placed around the Buddhas' heads, that barrels of dynamite were placed at each shoulder, and that local Afghans were pressed into the work of building a sandbag stairway to the larger Buddha's midsection.
Hussein's version of the destruction is generally supported by other Bamians who saw the destruction from the town or from hideouts in the nearby mountains. They also told of burning tires to blacken the face, and of work gangs being rounded up around Bamian.
Another local man, Mohammed Ali, said that a friend told of his own terrifying experience at the site. He said the man, Nik Qadim, was captured by Taliban soldiers and brought to the big Buddha, where he was ordered to climb the stairway carved into the cliff alongside the statues all the way to the head.
There, the man said, he was tied to a rope harness and lowered down the body of the giant statue. He was given a chisel and told to dig several holes and plant some dynamite. Mohammed Ali said that the friend told him he chiseled one hole but then fainted and remembers nothing else. Westerners who visited the site recently heard similar reports.
Researchers believe the two Buddha statues were created between the 5th and 7th centuries, when Bamian was a way station on the Silk Road. They represented the flowering of a widespread Buddhist culture that was particularly refined artistically in the region that later became Afghanistan.
The statues were surrounded by a maze of stairways cut through the stone cliffs and elegantly painted rooms for meditation – all part of a monastery that probably housed several thousand monks at its peak. But very little of the art is left, destroyed by the Taliban and by years of looting.
The Buddhas had experienced other insults over the centuries, though nothing on last year's scale. Genghis Khan is believed to have ordered attacks on the Buddhas in the 13th century, and the Mogul king Aurangzeb had parts of the legs and feet destroyed in the 17th century. The Afghan mujaheddin fighting the Soviets in the 1980s stored large caches of ammunition in the caves at the feet of the statues. The Taliban had also taken aim earlier, firing with tanks at the remains of the face and the groin of the small Buddha in 1999.
But the final assault required outside prodding and assistance. "We're quite sure that the decision to blow up the statues was taken under pressure from the Taliban's Arab friends," said Robert Kluijver, a civil affairs officer with the U.N. Special Mission to Afghanistan in Kabul. "None of the Afghans were concerned about the statues because they didn't see them as Buddhist, they saw them as Afghan."
Notes from a meeting between Taliban officials and a group of Islamic militants traveling to Kabul just before the destruction were found after the city fell and support that conclusion.
"The Taliban authorities agreed the destruction of [the statues] is an Islamic act that would make the Islamic world happy," the notes read. Appeals to save the statues should be rejected because they are "only a piece of rock."
Ironically, the audacity to destroy that "piece of rock" has become essential to Bamian's story.
"Unfortunately, the destruction is now an added part of the importance of Bamian," said Jim Williams, a U.N. cultural adviser in Kabul, who is working with the Afghan government on the statues and other lost cultural treasures.
Despite the destruction, he said, Bamian can be listed on the U.N. Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) register of world heritage sites. But if efforts are made to rebuild the statues, that would change, he said, because the site would no longer be historically authentic.
"Great artistic achievements like Bamian come out of a particular culture and time, and it is ridiculous to think that can be re-created," said Kluijver, a longtime member of a private group working to preserve Afghan culture. He and others fear that any rebuilding of the statues would result in a Disney-like reproduction.
This is very unwelcome news to people around Bamian. They are mostly from the Hazara minority – Shiite Muslims who the Taliban considered heretics – and feel the attack on the statues was also directed against them, their history and their economic future. The largest statue was affectionately called Sal Sal, or "every day," while the smaller one was believed, incorrectly, to be female and was called Shah Mama, or "mother of kings."
"Our people never worshiped the statues, but they greatly appreciated them because they were such a large and constant part of our history," said Mohammed Karin Khalili, the most influential leader in the Hazara region. "Rebuilding the statues should be the first priority of the government in our area."
Their position is supported by the one international expert who has recently returned to Bamian, Paul Bucherer of the Afghanistan Museum in Exile in Switzerland. Working on contract with UNESCO, he recently led a small team that covered some of the larger pieces of fallen rock with plastic to protect them from the snow and ice.
"I am absolutely sure it is possible to get funding to rebuild the statues and that it is possible to do it in a way that addresses the concerns about reconstruction at an ancient site," he said. "But it is up to Afghans to decide what to do at Bamian."
Something has to be done. Large cracks have opened in the archway above where the Buddhas' heads were, cracks that eventually could cause the cliff to collapse. The stairways that run alongside the statues' remains are also damaged and unstable.
But the crumbled remains are nonetheless extremely important and officials say they could become a major international monument – even if they are not rebuilt. They would be dedicated, however, not so much to art but to the memory of its destruction, a kind of cultural and historical Hiroshima high in the Afghan mountains.
And maybe, too, a monument to the endurance of human creativity.
At the bigger Buddha's site, the graceful curve of the neck remains visible in the rock, and a small part of the statue's huge robe is unharmed. There are two especially large craters where the shoulders used to be – where men from Bamian say the two barrels of dynamite were exploded – and some of the nearby rock appears ready to collapse. But almost defying gravity, it stays attached.
At the smaller Buddha, there is an even greater presence that remains, a kind of rock shadow of the statue that was there. Especially in the afternoon sun the outline is unmistakable and, for a short time, makes its final destruction seem impossible – or at least incomplete.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company |
