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Giant Buddhas Completely Demolished by Taliban
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:06 a.m. ET
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The Taliban religious militia has now completely
demolished two giant statues of Buddha hewn from a cliff face in central
Afghanistan, international aid workers said Sunday, despite desperate pleas
from abroad to spare the third- and fifth-century relics.
The destruction was ordered late last month by the Taliban, hard-line
Muslims who rule most of Afghanistan and say statues are idolatrous.
Despite the international outcry, the Taliban appeared Sunday to have
carried out their plan.
Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil told U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan during a meeting Sunday in neighboring Pakistan that there was
nothing left of the statues, according to an international aid worker who
attended the talks.
The destruction was corroborated by Taliban officials in southern
Afghanistan and by an aid worker who said his information came from Afghan
witnesses in the area.
It has been impossible to verify the reports independently because the
Taliban have refused to allow anyone in the Bamiyan Valley area, where the
statues stood.
On Saturday, the Taliban had said the statues, measuring 170 feet and 120
feet, were 80 percent destroyed.
Abdul Hai Muttmain, a spokesman for the Taliban's reclusive leader, told
The Associated Press that delegations pleading for preservation were too
late: The statues were almost gone.
"Everyone is coming now is too late. We have destroyed 80 percent of the
statues. There is only a small amount left and we will destroy that soon,"
Muttmain said.
Upon his arrival in Pakistan on Saturday, Annan said he would convey the
world's outrage at the destruction. By Sunday, it appeared to be too late.
Relations between the United Nations and the Taliban have never been good,
and they have worsened with fresh sanctions imposed in January to press for
the extradition of suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden. The Taliban have
refused to hand him over.
Now, the outcry to save the two giant Buddhas has spread worldwide.
Predominantly Buddhist nations like Japan and Sri Lanka have made pleas.
The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) sent a
special envoy from Paris, Pierre Lafrance, to try to get the Taliban to
rescind their order.
The Taliban's Radio Shariat on Saturday said there would be no change to
the order. The statues violate the tenets of Islam as laid out in the
Quran, the Muslim holy book, the broadcast said.
Islamic nations also expressed their outrage at the destruction. Egypt sent
its chief Muslim cleric Grand Mufti Nasr Farid Wasel to Afghanistan to
appeal to the Taliban to change their order.
On Sunday, a Taliban official in Pakistan who spoke on condition of
anonymity said the Islamic world had simply waited too long.
-----------------
March 3, 2001
Buddhas of Bamiyan: Keys to Asian History
By HOLLAND COTTER
The archaeological site of Bamiyan, about 100 miles west of Kabul in
Afghanistan, is set in a broad, flat valley flanked by high stone cliffs.
It's a place of open fields and sky, with a long, rich history that
scholars are just beginning to understand.
Some 1,500 years ago, the valley was a busy node on the trade route between
China and India, in a part of Asia where languages and religions —
Buddhism, Hinduism and, later, Islam — coexisted. It was also home to a
great Buddhist monastic center, one that nurtured epoch-changing religious
concepts and produced a fantastic new art, including the world's largest
rock-carved figures of the standing Buddha.
Changes of a violent nature may be under way there now, since the Taliban
decree to demolish pre-Islamic religious images. Bamiyan, with its towering
seventh-century Buddhas — one nearly 175 feet tall, the other 120 feet — is
a prime target, as it has been in the past. (In 1998 a Taliban commander
fired grenades at the smaller figure, destroying its upper half.)
To scholars of Asian art, the destruction of these Buddhas would be
catastrophic. Apart from Bamiyan's rarity as one of the few examples of
monumental Buddhist sculpture, it holds a key to countless questions about
how Buddhism developed internally and shaped or inflected virtually every
culture in Asia.
At this point, basic facts about its art — when it was made, for what
purpose — are matters of debate, though there is no question that it was an
overwhelmingly ambitious undertaking.
The two large Buddhas were cut in deep relief directly from the rock. The
surrounding cliffs were honeycombed with dozens of small caves, dug out
either as monastic residences or for rituals. Many caves, along with the
niches around the Buddhas, were covered with murals, now largely damaged or
missing.
The art is a compendium of ancient styles, from India, Persia and Gandhara,
where Greco-Roman-inspired traditions survived. For years the Buddhas were
dated the fifth century and assumed to be prototypes for rock-cut sculpture
in China, notably in the caves at Dunhuang.
But in 1989 the art historian Deborah Klimburg-Salter persuasively argued a
seventh-century date, nearly two centuries later than Dunhuang. In a
stroke, a neat, linear view of history was complicated and refreshed.
Along with its stylistic dynamism, Bamiyan reflects major shifts in
Buddhism itself. For centuries, the Buddha was revered as a human figure,
but with time he came to be seen as a transcendent being and icon.
The Bamiyan Buddhas catch this transition in action. According to the art
historians Susan and John Huntington, the carvings represent a form of the
Buddha known as Vairocana, in whom the entire universe is encompassed, and
in their stupendous scale, this immensity is made literal.
The sculptures were originally painted and gilded, their heads probably
fitted with masks. The lack of facial features on the sculptures is usually
attributed to vandalism, but Ms. Klimburg- Salter suggests they were made
that way to accommodate masks.
Visible from across the valley, they must have been a visionary sight.
That sight is now retrievable only when pieced together from material
evidence. And evidence, at Bamiyan and elsewhere in Afghanistan, may be
going fast. The fate of thousands of precious objects in the Kabul Museum,
one of the most important collections in Asia, is unknown. Among its
treasures are the priceless Begram ivories, pocket-size carvings that in
art-history terms have a weight as ponderous as the Bamiyan colossi.
Voices of protest are raining down on Afghanistan, though what would
persuade the leaders to relent is impossible to say.
History, maybe: Buddhism and Islam have much in common; both were
on-the-move religions, inclined to adapt and to learn from other cultures.
Or maybe their own faith: "I do not serve what you worship; nor do you
serve what I worship. You have your own religion, and I have mine." This
terse statement of live-and-let-live religious tolerance is from the Koran.
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