Vandals took 20 days to destroy statues .
Mo
of vandalism and he was brave to say it much braver than Mullah V who
made excuses for Islam which he should know if he reads the Quran were
not true. The half a million people of Bamiyan could have grown rich
catering to Japanese and other tourists but the Taliban would rather
have them beg for food than earn a honest living . Warning of what
will happen to Israel and India when Muslims become a majority there
soon..
Taliban Say Took 20 Days to Destroy Giant Buddhas
By Sayed Salahuddin
Monday March 26 5:17 AM ET
BAMIYAN, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement
needed 20 days to destroy two giant Buddhas hewn into a cliff more
than 1,500 years ago, an official said on Monday.
Reuters correspondents, among the first journalists to visit the site
since the statues were blown up, said the taller statue had been
destroyed and only part of an elbow of the shorter Buddha remained.
Destruction of the statues, towering 53 meters (175 ft) and 38 meters
(120 ft), this month drew international condemnation of the Taliban's
policy toward Afghanistan's rich cultural heritage.
``It took us 20 days to destroy the statues,'' a Taliban official said
near the site. ``It was a hard job to finish them. We had to use
explosive materials.''
It was not clear if the Taliban would spare the elbow, which would be
the only reminder to future visitors of the Buddhas that had dominated
the valley for so many centuries.
Witnesses said the Taliban had also destroyed paintings in nearby
caves once used by monks and inside the deserted Buddhist monasteries
built when the area was a center of Buddhist civilisation before the
arrival of Islam.
Supreme Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar issued a decree last month
ordering the destruction of all statues in the country on grounds they
are un-Islamic pagan idols.
Despite worldwide appeals to save the country's heritage, the radical
movement has methodically destroyed all statues in the 90 percent of
Afghanistan under their control, including the collection of the
national museum in Kabul.
But the destruction of the Buddha statues of Bamiyan in central
Afghanistan, the country's best-known historic treasure, caught
worldwide attention. The Taliban rejected foreign offers to find a way
to save them without violating the Taliban's iconoclastic policy.
``Now Bamiyan is an Islamic province of Afghanistan,'' said the
official in Bamiyan, a town that looked deserted except for a few
Taliban fighters and a handful of residents.
The trip to Bamiyan had been blocked repeatedly, with officials citing
reasons including a bad runway and fighting between the Taliban and
the Northern Alliance opposition by commander Ahmed Shah Masood.
Bamiyan has changed hands frequently in recent weeks and fresh
fighting was reported on Sunday.
Taliban Ban on Idolatry Makes a Country Without Faces
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
March 26, 2001
KABUL, Afghanistan--This is a country without faces.
The postage stamps show landscapes, the currency is engraved with
mosques. Government ministry walls are adorned with Arabic
calligraphy, hotel rooms hung with floral designs.
In the bazaars, there are posters and calendars for sale depicting
Mecca in a hundred different styles, but none showing people. In the
newspapers, stories are accompanied by photos of fruit stands and
Islamic artifacts.
Afghanistan is ruled by an Islamic group, the Taliban, that severely
enforces its strict interpretation of the Islamic ban on human images
and idols, which are viewed as an insult to God. Two weeks ago, the
Taliban shocked the world by demolishing two famous 1,500-year-old
stone statues of Buddha, which it pronounced idolatrous.
The ban on faces starts at the top of the Taliban's religious
hierarchy. Mohammad Omar, its supreme leader, is a reclusive Muslim
cleric who has rarely been seen by his own subjects and is never
photographed. The Prophet Muhammad, Islam's most sacred figure, is
never depicted in any form, although Muslims here say they have read
that he had a "kind and shining face."
A few Taliban officials allow foreign journalists to take their
pictures at news conferences, but all visitors are under orders not to
photograph "any living thing" in the country, and Taliban police
frequently detain those they catch in the act or confiscate their
cameras.
The faces of Afghan women are especially invisible. The Taliban says
that if a man views a strange woman's face, he may be tempted to
impure thoughts or acts; as a consequence, women are forbidden to
leave their homes without wearing a head-to-toe cape called a burqa.
If a woman needs to procure a passport or identity photo, it must be
taken with only her eyes showing.
Men, too, are partly hidden from view, with covered heads and long
beards required for any male past puberty. Men whose beards are deemed
too short may be put in jail until their whiskers grow, and newly
arrived Muslims hide their stubbled chins beneath cloaks.
Perhaps because adult faces are so muffled, those of Kabul's children
seem especially sharp. They peer from every alley and workshop and
garbage heap. They thrust into car windows, begging for coins. They
glance up from grimy tasks, streaked with dust. Often, the children's
faces are as wizened as old men's.
The Taliban's prohibition of human photography has a high sentimental
cost. Couples marry without wedding portraits -- unless they can
afford to cross the border into Pakistan for the ceremony. Parents die
without leaving their children any likeness to remember them by.
Family snapshots may be confiscated by customs officials at the Kabul
airport, especially if they depict men and women together.
There are a few camera shops in Kabul, but most ID pictures are taken
by sidewalk vendors with ancient wooden box cameras, who put their
hands under a dark cape, swish tiny pieces of paper in film developer
and dry the blurry result in strips of newspaper.
"We are not allowed to photograph women, and with men we can only show
above the chest," said a veteran sidewalk cameraman. "I don't have as
much business as I did once, but this is what is ordered by our sharia
[Islamic] law."
At one camera shop, decorated with blowups of floral vases and alpine
scenes, the proprietor said the religious police -- a powerful,
autonomous force in Afghanistan -- could enter the premises at any
time. If they find any photos of people larger than a passport head
shot, he said, "they tear them into little pieces."
In a nearby pharmacy, several customers sipped tea and talked about
the ban on human images. "When I was young, I didn't know that taking
a picture was making an idol. But now I know," said the pharmacist.
"Yes, you can be born and die without a photograph, but you will go to
paradise."
An elderly man who had once studied abroad shook his head sadly. "This
is not my idea, it is the government's idea," he said. "It is not
normal." The ban on pictures of women, he added, is "a very small
problem, compared to the problems of living. Women cannot work, they
cannot go to school. Those are the real problems."
A turbaned member of the Taliban militia entered the shop and joined
the conversation. "If I say I don't take pictures now but I once did,
someone will think I was a communist," he said with a laugh.
Afghanistan was governed by a communist party and then occupied by the
Soviet Union in the 1980s.
Beneath its sober, faceless veneer, of course, Kabul is full of
photographs. Treasured family portraits are hidden in metal trunks.
Shopkeepers hide postcards of Afghan women in traditional costumes
behind shelves of books. Others offer special prices for prohibited
photos of the destroyed Buddhas.
One antique dealer explained cautiously that he was not allowed to
sell any antiquity that contained a human image, but after a cup of
tea he brought out a hidden packet of prized postcards: portraits of
traditional Afghan kings in their military and tribal regalia.
Around the corner was an ice-cream cart, decorated with a painting of
a little girl holding up an ice-cream cone. The girl's face had been
painstakingly scratched off.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Taliban wipe out heritage that survived centuries
By Jack Redden
KABUL, March 26 (Reuters) - In the long history of Afghanistan, the
Taliban will go down as the Islamic iconoclasts who inflicted cultural
destruction that exceeded the onslaught of even infamous conquerors
like Genghis Khan. Using artillery and explosives, the Islamic
movement that is determined to destroy all images of animate objects
on grounds they are pagan idols took 20 days to turn two gigantic
statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan into rubble.
The Buddhas, Afghanistan's most famous historic treasures, were nearly
2,000 years old.
Far from being ashamed of an act that drew worldwide condemnation, the
Taliban arranged a plane to take reporters to the valley of Bamiyan on
Monday to show that they had carried out their vow to obliterate the
pre-Islamic monuments.
It was a brutal end for monuments that had survived nearly 13
centuries of Islamic rule with only minor damage -- and an end to a
scene that appeared on Afghan postage stamps, its calendars and every
photo book.
"Bamiyan is a small town lying at the very heart of the Hindu Kush in
a beautiful valley containing one of man's most remarkable
achievements -- the Colossal Buddhas of Bamiyan," wrote a guide book
published before Afghanistan plunged into its two decades of war that
led to the Taliban taking power.
The author of the study, Nancy Dupree, has spent most of her life
helping Afghanistan and this year joined in the outrage over the
destruction of the country's heritage. Many smaller statues unearthed
at Bamiyan had been moved to the National Museum in Kabul, which the
Taliban opened to journalists last Thursday to show none survived.
RICH HISTORY
But the giant Buddhas were the most famous, the centrepiece of a
spectacular scene across the fertile valley from what was once the
citadel guarding the region.
While they had always astounded visitors, the sight was nothing
compared to the era when this was a centre of Buddhism. In the second
century, Kanishka became king of the Kushan federation and built a
rich empire stretching from the Ganges Valley to the Gobi Desert.
To the west, the Roman Empire was at its height. To the east the Han
dynasty ruled China. To the south lay the riches of India. In the
middle, Kanishka's empire sat astride the trade routes, with Silk
Route caravans passing over the Hindu Kush mountains through Bamiyan.
It was in the glorious era inaugurated by Kanishka, who was a patron
of Buddhism, that the colossal statues were carved into cliffs
overlooking Bamiyan. The smaller of the statues, towering 38 metres
(125 feet), may date from the third century, the giant statue that
rose 53 metres (175 feet) a bit later.
At the time the valley resonated with Buddhist activity. The statues
were painted and yellow-robed monks lived in the caves that dot the
cliff face. Stupas and monasteries were scattered across the
landscape.
Witnesses said on Monday the Taliban had methodically obliterated the
paintings devout Buddhist monks had made in the caves.
CITY OF NOISE
The Buddhist kingdom was resilient. Huns from Central Asia swept over
Afghanistan in the fifth century, initially destroying Buddhist sites.
But a subsequent Hun ruler of Bamiyan became a Buddhist and led a
revival that produced some of the most famous art to emerge from the
valley -- all anathema to the Taliban.
The valley submitted to early Islamic invaders in the eighth century,
but quickly reverted to the old religion. That drew another Islamic
invasion a century later, ending forever the Buddhist religion in
Afghanistan.
The valley, still profiting from trade, continued to thrive under
Islam. But prosperity ended abruptly -- and permanently -- in 1221.
Genghis Khan's armies, having already destroyed much of Central Asia,
stormed into the valley.
The resistance from the citadel in Bamiyan was so strong -- they
killed the conqueror's favourite grandson -- that he set out to kill
every living thing when he triumphed. To this day, the site of the
citadel is known as Shahr-I-Gholghola, the city of noise, because of
the shouts of the victims.
But, although he is said to have defaced the large Buddha, the giant
statues survived. Countless visitors, gunmen and individual
iconoclasts inflicted pockmarks and graffiti over the centuries, but
the damage was relatively minor.
In 1998 that changed. The Taliban captured Bamiyan and within a year
the head of the smaller statue had been destroyed. Assurances from the
Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar that he would protect Afghan
heritage failed to allay fears.
Then at the end of last month, Omar issued a decree calling for the
destruction of all statues. With the minister of defence overseeing
the operation, holes were bored into the statues and filled with
explosives.
To shouts of Allahu Akbar, God is Greatest, the Taliban totally
destroyed with modern explosives the Afghan heritage that had survived
centuries of previous invaders.
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Ulema Council calls for help to Afghan people
The News: Jang
March 26, 2001
RAWALPINDI: Religious leaders held the United Nations responsible for
the possible death of children in Afghanistan due to drought and
stressed the Ummah to help the Afghan people. A two-session meeting of
the Ulema Council, which held in Madrassah Taleem-ul-Quran here,
concluded with the call to the Muslims to help the Afghan brothers hit
by the drought. The speakers of the sessions, representing various
religious parties, include Maulana Abdul Ghafoor Haidri, Mufti
Nizamuddin Shamzi, Qari Saeed-ur-Rahman, Mufti Muhammad Jamil Khan,
Maulana Muhammad Sharif Hazarvi and others verified the destruction of
the Bamiyan statues decreeing that it was necessary for the Muslims to
destroy idols. They urged the Ummah to help their Afghan brethren in
shape of necessities of life by reducing their own expenses. They
appealed to the traders and industrialists to help the Afghan people
in getting employment by setting up industries in Afghanistan. They
demanded of the government to set all the leaders and workers of
religious parties free at once.
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Sanctions affects repatriation of Afghan refugees: Taliban envoy
Islamabad, March 26, IRNA -- Taliban envoy in Pakistan, Mulla Abdul
Salam Zaeef on Monday said the U.N. sancitons had affected the
repatriation and rehabilitation of Afghan refugees. In an interview
with Islamabad-based SANA news agency, he said the overseas Afghans
and donors had dropped their plan regarding the reptriation and
rehabilitation after the imposition of fresh U.N. sanctions. Fresh
U.N. sanctions put travel embargo on Taliban officials and freeze
their foreign bank accounts. Mullah Salam said that the sanctions had
also disappointed those foreign countries-based Afghans who wanted to
return to their country and take part in its reconstruction. He said
the Afghan currency also lost its value after these sanctions.
AHM/422/AH/RR End ::irna 19:21
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