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Paris, March 5 (No.2001-33) - Pierre Lafrance, UNESCO’s special envoy to Afghanistan, has left Kandahar, the main residence of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, for Islamabad (Pakistan), but will return to Afghanistan after the Id al-Adha holiday. After talks with, among others, the Taliban Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mullah Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, Mr Lafrance indicated that there was still hope that the Buddha statues at Bamiyan might be saved.

“All doors are not closed. Contacts are continuing and new consultations are taking place among theologians in Afghanistan,” Mr Lafrance declared, confirming, however, that the Taliban have destroyed small statues in the museums of the towns of Ghazni, Jalalabad and Herat. UNESCO’s special envoy will be returning to Kandahar on Wednesday or Thursday and will pursue his efforts from Islamabad until then.

UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura, meanwhile, is continuing his efforts to mobilize all communities, particularly the political and religious communities, which might be able to influence the Taliban. Already on Friday, the Group of Arab UNESCO Member States issued a communiqué calling for “an international mobilization with concrete actions, to end this unprecedented undertaking which affects invaluable universal heritage treasures.”

Other voices have been raised against the Taliban’s decision to destroy pre-Islamic statues. Two important Islamic religious authorities have, moreover, already expressed points of view contrary to that of the Afghan Taliban. The religious leader of Doha (Qatar), Sheikh Yusuf Kardawi declared: “The statues made by the ancients before Islam are part of a historic heritage. When the Muslims entered Afghanistan, in the first century of the Hegira [the Moslem era], the statues were already there and they did not destroy them. I advise our brethren of the Taliban movement to reconsider their decision in view of its danger and negative impact.”

Sabri Abdel-Raouf, the Head of the Department of Islamic Studies at the University of Al-Azhar (Cairo, Egypt) said: “Statues made to be worshiped can be destroyed as being opposed to Islam, but statues which are not worshiped are not forbidden.”

UNESCO has announced the creation of a special bank account for the cultural heritage of Afghanistan. It will be used for emergency funding of any measure that may allow for the safeguarding of Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic heritage and, in the long term, for the preservation of the country’s heritage, both pre-Islamic and Islamic. UNESCO has also launched an international petition for the Afghan heritage.

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For more information regarding the petition and developments concerning the issue: www.unesco.org/opi2/afghan-crisis/