Making A Difference

Talibs Target Buddha

Despite denials, the world's tallest Buddha may be in peril

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Talibs Target Buddha
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CALL it historical cleansing. The target this time might be the world's tallest Buddha statue—the 55-metre colossus at Bamiyan, central Afghanistan. Threats by senior Taliban frontline commander Mulla Abdul Waheed a few weeks ago to demolish the structure have outraged the international community. A recent retraction by the Taliban supreme council in Kabul, which ascribes the threat to "anti-Taliban propaganda", has done little to assuage the fears of Buddhists, historians, archaeologists and diplomats. Who, they ask, is in charge? "The Taliban are headquartered at Kandahar, not Kabul, so you have a variety of perceptions," says Prof Moegiadi, UNESCO director at Delhi. "There are inconsistencies from one place to another. It all depends on the local leaders." UNESCO plans to send Moegiadi and people from its Paris headquarters to try and "talk" to the Kabul leadership.

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Carved by Buddhists from sandstone cliffs in the third or fourth century AD, the larger Buddha, and a smaller one to the east, at 38 metres, were erected during the Kushanera. An inclement climate, coupled with bloody battles over the ages, have taken their toll. With the rise of Islam, their status as pilgrimage sites diminished, but they remained a powerful lure for tourists and researchers till the civil strife of the late '70s.

Mongol warlord Genghis Khan is said to have set fire to the wood-and-plaster faces and hands. Aurangzeb too had fired cannonballs into the legs of the taller statue. But modern artillery could certainly finish the job. "This would just be very, very sad," says R. Sengupta, chief civil engineer of the team sent in 1969 by Indira Gandhi to restore the statues. The team spent about nine years at the site repairing cracks caused by earthquakes and stabilising the structure, parts of which are about to disintegrate. "We retrieved bullets, mended holes...no one else dared." There was also the "anti-Indian lobby—Pakistan and their friends" who said that "Hindustani people are only interested in Hindu and Buddhist structures, not Islamic ones". To "counter the propaganda", Sengupta and his team promptly set to work to restore a mosque in Balkh.

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Brigitte Neubcher, of the Islamabad-based Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage, wants to bring back preservationists to "one of the country's most spectacular sights" provided the Taliban do not carry out their threat. "I don't think they can afford any more bad publicity," she said. The iconoclastic Islamic militia has already banned kite-flying (which might disturb people at prayer), photography, office jobs for women, and other small freedoms that people enjoyed till recently.

But the Hazaras, a Shia minority from central Afghanistan, who were enslaved and relocated to other parts of the country by Pashtun king Abdur Rahman, are determined to keep the Taliban out of Bamiyan. When Najibullah's Soviet-backed regime fell in 1992, Hazara groups like the Hizbe-i-Wahdat were among the Mujahideen factions fighting for Kabul. But since September '96, when the Taliban militia entered Kabul, the Shias were pushed back to their traditional redoubts. They continue to put up a stiff fight with Iranian stockpiles. Asked about Iran's views, deputy chief of mission at the Iranian embassy in New Delhi, Nasser Saghafi-Ameri, said: "It is not acceptable to destroy the statues...the feeling is, it is not the right thing to do." Sri Lanka also called a meeting of the heads of Buddhist and Islamic missions in Colombo to alert them of the situation.

Despite the fact that both Islamic and non-Islamic countries have spoken out against this threat, Buddhists feel that not enough is being done. "Once the statues are damaged, no one will be able to recreate them...this is a very rare Buddhist treasure," says Bhikshu Satyapala, a monk and head of the department of Buddhist Studies at the University of Delhi. "The world community needs to do more than just protest...power should be exercised at the highest levels. The matter should also be raised at the upcoming SAARC conference." Whatever the outcome, the recent show of hostility to one of the world's most priceless cultural heritages by the Islamic militia has once again reinforced the feeling in the rest of world that Afghanistan has entered one of its darkest periods in history.

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