"The faces of the giant Buddha statues are gilded, and jewels shine from their eyes," wrote the 7th-century Chinese travel writer Huang Cang, who stopped in Bamiyan, on the famous Silk Road, to admire the magnificent statues carved nearly two millennia ago in the high rocks about 200 kilometers northwest of the Afghan capital of Kabul. For centuries, these statues, part of the world's cultural heritage and the largest Buddha statues in the world, have drawn sighs of delight from travelers, merchants, soldiers, pilgrims, and in modern times, tourists who visited Bamiyan. From now on, however, you can only admire these unique smiling colossi in books and monographs. Sighs of delight were replaced by sighs of despair when Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar ordered the statues to be destroyed with dynamite, depriving the world of one of its most valuable cultural monuments, arguing that the Buddhas were not "according to the will of Allah".
Taliban leaders remained unrelenting in the protests and pleas to spare the statues that came from almost every world government and organization. Even the representatives of UNESCO failed to take advantage of the short-lived respite of the Islamic fundamentalists, who last week temporarily suspended the destruction to devote themselves to the great Islamic holiday of sacrifice, and to prevent the Taliban leaders from further destruction.
MAINLY I SIDE: The Taliban leaders remained implacable even before the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, who began his diplomatic tour with a visit to Pakistan, in order to try to mediate in the Indian-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir. Annan handed the Taliban's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Wakil Ahmed Mutawakil, an offer from the famous New York Metropolitan Museum to transfer these and all other Buddha statues, of which there are dozens in the country, to the New York museum. "We talked about the statues, but I left the meeting discouraged," Annan said. Minister Mutawakil responded to Annan's demands that he "understands that destroying the statues will not improve the image that the Taliban enjoys in the world," but that "foreign relations are secondary to religious interests."
And the valuable collection of the National Museum in Kabul was totally scattered. In the past few years, the museum collection was looted by the Taliban authorities, and many valuables were either sold in Pakistan or simply destroyed. The Taliban proudly announce that around 60 smaller Buddha statues from the Museum were destroyed already at the beginning of February. The Secretary General, it seems, has nothing more to save than artworks from Afghanistan.
The head of the Indian team of conservators Rakaldas Sengputa, who spent nine years restoring the statues in Bamiyan in the 1970s, does not hide his despair. "The statues are unique in the world. But the vault is also unusually valuable, with a wonderful iconography that is actually a mixture of Greek and Indian.
Imagine a sculptor who spends nine painstaking years creating a work, and then is told that his statue has been destroyed. That's how I feel," says Sengputa, who remembers that when his team arrived in Bamiyan, he had to spend the night in a local prison because there was no hotel.
"The prison was remodeled, and it became the 'Bamiyan' hotel," says the conservator who once had to remove the consequences of the destruction caused by the Mongol leader Genghis Khan during his campaign.
It seems that the large stone statues caused a much faster reaction and attention from the world than the refugee crisis in Afghanistan, in which hundreds of people, including several dozen children, have already died. Drought, which has reigned in Afghanistan for the third year in a row, poverty caused by a decade-long civil war, international sanctions and occasional battles between the Taliban and opponents of their regime, caused a real humanitarian disaster at the end of January, which led hundreds of thousands of people to flee. Many froze to death on the way due to exhaustion and lack of warm clothing. It was only when the number of victims increased significantly that international humanitarian organizations managed to draw the world's attention to the problem and seriously devote themselves to saving the most vulnerable.
DYING OD HUNGRY: Representatives of international humanitarian organizations claim that about a million people could soon die of hunger in Afghanistan. Considering the tough attitude of the Taliban leaders and the humiliation that the Secretary General of the world organization recently experienced, the prospects for the situation to improve are very small. The announcement by the Japanese government, the largest donor of aid to Afghanistan, that it will suspend aid due to protests over the destruction of statues contributes to this.
The problem with Afghanistan is that there is no mechanism of world diplomacy that could reach the Taliban leaders who within five years managed to put under their control a whopping 90 percent of the territory of Afghanistan. The Taliban rule in the world is now recognized by only three countries, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Emirates. But even the governments of these countries, along with more than 50 other Islamic countries, have pledged to save the ancient statues. In the world today, there are few countries that could be described as "apostate" from the point of view of international relations to the extent that it is Taliban Afghanistan, and the hopes that something could change in this sense are very slim.
Since 1996, when the Taliban (or in translation "disciples of God") began to establish power in the country in a flash, Afghanistan has moved away from the norms that apply in the rest of the world at the speed of light. The Taliban have imposed a fundamentalist reign of terror in the country, believing that they are the only ones who interpret the holy book of the Koran in the correct way. They mostly studied Islam in exile in Pakistan, which inspired them to call themselves "disciples of God" the Taliban. Many, however, believe that these students are mostly illiterate and that it is rather a matter of Islamic "lack of education". It is also believed that today's Taliban leaders acquired knowledge of military skills with a crash course on Islam, and that their teachers were high-ranking officials of the Pakistani intelligence service, which to some extent can explain their rapid rise. In the country, only they are allowed to interpret and implement Sharia law, which, according to the Taliban's interpretation, prohibits television and all the aids of the modern world, among other things. According to the same interpretation, women are forbidden to get an education, and they are also denied medical care.
Namely, women in hospitals must be strictly separated from men, and only female doctors and nurses may take care of them, and they may not be examined by a male doctor, even in the most urgent cases. As they are deprived of education, there are not even trained female doctors in Afghanistan, and these women are condemned to cope with even the most serious operations and illnesses alone, or to rely on folk medicine or unprofessional care. While the men are at war, the women have to work, and their workplaces are usually opium plantations, because Afghanistan is the world's leading producer of opium. It goes without saying that the Taliban have complete control over the cultivation of plants from which opium is obtained, and the trade in opiates represents a rare and almost unique Afghan connection with the world.
Afghanistan is also a training base for Islamic terrorists, and due to suspicions that it harbors the most wanted terrorist in the world, the Saudi multimillionaire Osama bin Laden, the Taliban regime has come under international sanctions.
TALIBAN WITHOUT COMPETITION: The world organization has tried in vain since 1996, when the Taliban, in the form of a kind of religious proletariat, came to power, not only to suppress the cultivation of opium plants, but also to do something about human and women's rights. But just as the world is horrified by the Taliban custom of punishing a thief by cutting off his hand, or burying a woman who violates Sharia law alive, as ordered by the infamous Ministry for the Suppression of Vice and the Preservation of Virtue, the Taliban cannot understand why anyone it interferes with the way they will organize their own country.
Apart from the almost non-existence of any links between the Taliban and the rest of the world, the lack of opposition in the country is also a difficulty. There is almost no military or political force in Afghanistan that could threaten the Taliban regime. After so many years of war, the educated and skilled left the country, which left a poor and largely illiterate population. So what could threaten the Taliban regime? It certainly could not be the difficult economic conditions in the country, because Afghanistan has been living in misery for decades. There is no way to destabilize the country from the outside either, because in Afghanistan itself there is no relevant force that, reinforced from abroad, could provide serious armed resistance and start a mass rebellion. The only headache for the Taliban is the Northern Military Alliance (NMA), which is a coalition made up of three Shiite parties. The NMA controls that paltry ten percent of the territory, which prevents the Taliban from boasting that the land is theirs to the last inch. But, as this alliance spends more time in mutual quarrels and disagreements between factions and commanders than in war with the Taliban, no one can stand in the way of the "disciples of God" for now.
