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U.N. Pleads With Taliban Not to Destroy Buddha Statues

U.N. Pleads With Taliban Not to Destroy Buddha Statues

Author:
Publication: The New York Times
Date: March 3, 2001
 
The United Nations led an 11th hour drive to save two towering statues of Buddha today as the Afghan government assembled explosives at the sites to obliterate them, diplomats feared.

Even the Unesco chief acknowledged that the rescue effort might be hopelessly late. The official, Koichiro Matsuura, said the threat was a mindless aggression to a part of the conscience, history and identity of humankind." But he ruefully concluded, "We are witnesses once again to our won inefficacy."

Pakistan and other Muslim nation joined the campaign to persuade the religious leaders of Afghanistan, the Taliban, to change their mind. Nonetheless, government troops assembled the explosives to demolish the ancient statues, along with all other statues throughout the country, considering them idolatrous, diplomats said.

Some may have already been destroyed.

The director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Philippe de Montebello, told the United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan, that the museum was willing to pay for a team to remove portable statues from Afghanistan, said Manoel de Almeida e Silva, a United Nations spokesman. Mr. Annan's envoy to Afghanistan pressed the Taliban to accept the offer, but so far there was no response, he said.

Pakistan, the Taliban's closest ally, pleaded with them to spare the statues and rescind the destruction order. "Respect for other religions and for their beliefs is enjoined upon Muslims," Foreign Minster Abdul Sattar said in a statement.

The two Buddhas, 175 and 120 feet tall, are believed to date to the seventh century. They are hewn out of the side of a mountain in Bamiyan, about 100 miles west of Kabul, and it would require heavy explosives to destroy them. The bigger statue is thought to be the world's tallest standing Buddha.

It was not known how many of the thousands of other, smaller Buddhist statues in Afghanistan have been destroyed since Thursday.

"The Buddhas in Bamiyan were not touched today, but preparations are being made," Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, said.

The Unesco envoy, Pierre La-france, a former French ambassador to Pakistan, headed to Islamabad in hopes of negotiating with the Taliban.

"Words fail me to describe adequately my feelings of consternation and powerlessness as I see the reports of the irreversible damage that is being done to Afghanistan's exceptional cultural heritage," said Mr. Matsuura, director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

The Taliban, who rule about 95 percent of Afghanistan, espouse a strict brand of Islam that forces women to wear the all-encompassing burqa and bars them from working outside the home, and which demands that men wear beards and pray in the mosque.

The Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, issued an edict Monday ordering the destruction of all statues, declaring. "These idols have been gods of the infidels."

The Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage issued a plea Friday for a change of heart, saying it could create international goodwill for the Taliban.

"If they reverse their decision, it could be seen as a positive sign for future discussions with the Taliban authorities," said the society's chairman, Dimitri Loundras, Greece's ambassador to Pakistan.

He said the decision to destroy Afghanistan's pre-Islamic heritage many have been a response to the isolation felt by the Taliban since United Nations sanctions were imposed on the nation in January for failing to surrender Saudi Militant Osama Bin Laden.

Afghanistan is facing its worst drought in 30 years and a civil war. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled to United Nations camp at the nation's borders, where many have died of cold and starvation.

Robert Kluyver, a member of the Italian-financed preservation society, said the smaller Buddha at Bamiyan had been badly damaged by rocket fire a few years ago. Mr. Kluyver said the larger Buddha was intact when he last visited between March and November 2000, although its head was stained black because tires had been placed around it and burnt.

Nations other than Pakistan also complained. "Unfortunately, the Taliban's destruction of the statues has cast doubt on the comprehensive views offered by Islamic ideology in the world," Iran's Foreign Ministry said, blaming "the rigid-minded Taliban."

In Egypt, the chief Muslim cleric, Grand Mufti Nasr Farid Wasel, said keeping the statues is not forbidden by Islam. Ancient statues are "just a recording of history and don't have any negative impact on Muslims' beliefs," he told the London-based Arabic daily Al Hayat.

Mr. De Montebello, of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, said his offer to move those statues that could be removed was made on behalf of his museum, but he hoped other museums would join in.

But the size of the Bamiyan statues, he said, posed a problem. "It's a huge task," he said, adding it would take an international effort like the Unesco-led project that moved pharaonic temples in the 1960's when Egypt completed the Aswan Dam.
 


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