“A crime against culture,” according to UNESCO’s director-general.
Afghanistan
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UNESCO
keeps the pressure on
From the Taleban’s
first threats against part of their country’s heritage, UNESCO either spearheaded
or relayed most of the international initiatives to “reverse this move into absurdity
undertaken by the authorities in Kabul,” in the words of Director-General Koïchiro
Matsuura.
UNESCO’s chief dispatched
a special envoy in an effort to urge the Taleban authorities to reconsider the decision
to destroy their country’s pre-Islamic and Buddhist cultural heritage. He also called
an emergency meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference to discuss joint
action. While mobilizing political and religious leaders, UNESCO
also launched an international petition calling on Afghan officials to halt the destruction
and resume dialogue. The confirmation of the destruction of the Bamiyan statues–depictions
of Buddha that are exceptional for both their size and age–must not soften international
pressure on the Afghan regime.
For more details on the petition and on UNESCO’s special fund: http://www.UNESCO.org/
opi2/afghan-crisis/
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Despite
unanimous indignation, the Taleban destroyed the statues of Bamiyan. The international
community now has the responsibility to save what it still can
On February 26, 2001,
Mullah Omar, the Taleban’s self-proclaimed emir, ordered the destruction of all figurative
monuments and art works on Afghan soil. This unprecedented step touched off a unanimous
international reaction.
Why such an outcry? Why has it fallen on deaf ears? If the Taleban regime had helped
to ease the plight of Afghanistan’s people in one area or another, I think their
iconoclastic wrath would not have sparked such an uproar. Of course, the cultural
vandalism has mobilized public opinion. But in this specific case, worldwide indignation
was fueled by concern about all the hardships imposed on the Afghan people before
crystallizing over the issue of heritage.
Since the Taleban’s 1996 seizure of power in Kabul, the regime’s unfathomable scorn
for the Afghan people has taken many shapes. First, discrimination against the Shiite
minority. Then requiring women to wear netted chadors and outlawing school for girls
upwards of eight years old. Hundreds of thousands drought-stricken farmers have been
forced to leave their land and homes, while poppies are grown in the eastern and
southern parts of the country. One single feature sets the destruction of the heritage
apart from such other acts of violence: this time, the message is addressed to the
international community, and it has been heard.
Investing
statues with fearful powers
In
1989, a few weeks after Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan, a group of Hezb-i-Islami
fighters ransacked the Buddhist monastery of Hadda in the eastern part of the country
and destroyed its outstanding art works without sparking any international reaction.
These same fighters, who have since joined the Taleban, laid the groundwork for further
destruction based on ideological motives.
Mullah Omar’s edict gives a formal underpinning to these acts. It demonstrates more
than a theoretical scorn for the culture of other communities, especially Buddhist
culture: the Taleban’s rejection is so radical that they want to wipe it out because
they still invest the statues with magical, malevolent and fearful powers.
The earliest depictions of the Buddha occurred in present-day Afghanistan. And since
the artists of the first-to fifth-century Gandhara civilization were influenced by
Hellenistic sculpture, they gave him the face of Apollo. Japan, Sri Lanka, China,
Burma, South Korea and Thailand view Afghanistan as the Athens of Buddhism.
Later, during the 15th century, Herat, in western Afghanistan, was the Florence of
Muslim painting. Several centuries earlier, advocates and adversaries argued over
whether Islam permitted the depiction of human figures. The caliphate of Damascus
settled the dispute, forbidding the depiction of God, but authorizing the portrayal
of princes and their power.
The miniatures and illuminated manuscripts that flourished at the court of Herat
were heirs to that tradition and determined the canons of the genre, which spread
from Istanbul to Agra in the 18th century. Most of these masterpieces were taken
to Persia after the kingdom’s annexation in 1510, while others accompanied Kabul’s
Timuride princes, cousins of the Herat court, when they conquered India and set up
the Moghol dynasty there. The latest figurative illuminated manuscripts kept in a
library north of Kabul were burned after 1996. Moving this heritage outside its area
of origin sometimes has positive effects!
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In
times of war and instability, the cultural heritage of these countries was exposed
to severe destruction and robbery. We can only conclude that peace and stability
are the fundamental factors for preserving and protecting heritage.
Kassaye
Begashaw, head of the Ethiopian Centre for Research and Conservation of Cultural
Heritage
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Making
inventories of plundered collections
In
the 20th century, all Muslim countries, without exception, like all other states,
adopted the principle that preserving and enhancing archaeological heritage is vital
for building a modern nation and represents a base for cultural identity. As all
the European powers did after Pompei’s discovery in the 18th century, they turned
their backs on the holy terror that works of a foreign religious tradition had inspired
until then. The archaeological past had to be preserved as a basis for knowledge,
independent of the religious charge it had originally carried.
In 1919, an independent Afghanistan invited archaeologists–first French, then Italian,
Russian, Japanese, American and, more recently, British and Indian–to undertake excavations,
and to train Afghan counterparts in return for agreements on distributing the finds.
In 1979, the war put an end to these exchanges. Yet it was not until after the Soviet
withdrawal that the threat to heritage reached an alarming intensity, as I can attest.
In autumn 1994, I walked into a Kabul museum at the same time as General Massoud’s
troops. For two years, a faction independent of the central government had controlled
the quarter. The building had been damaged by rocket fire and the collections plundered
out of sheer greed. Massoud agreed to place a cordon of troops around the museum
and guarantee its protection. Within 24 hours, Carla Grissmann, a member of Spach
(Society for the Protection of the Afghan Cultural Heritage, based in Peshawar),
started an inventory of the remaining collections.
The same year, Afghan archaeologists told me they were worried. They said that the
Rabbani and Massoud government in Kabul would soon fall, and that when Islamic extremists
entered the capital, they might destroy the collections. This emergency situation
prompted Najibullah Popal, the museum’s curator, to suggest creating a temporary
storehouse in a distant country. I consulted with diplomatic representations and
organizations for the protection of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage. Unfortunately,
none of them took action.
Foreign
invitations
Since
then, several projects in the same vein have seen the light of day. Paul Bucherer-Dietschi,
a Swiss collector of Afghan manuscripts, says that the Taleban as well as Rabbani
asked him to house what was left of Afghanistan’s heritage in his museum in Bubendorf
(Basel canton). After Mullah Omar’s fatwâ, the Metropolitan Museum of New York
offered to house the pieces that had been spared. If the move is still possible,
and whatever the destination chosen, it should occur under the supervision of a supranational
authority. UNESCO would be the most
legitimate choice.
During the 1937 siege of Madrid, Spain’s republican government asked Switzerland
to give the Prado collections asylum. They were not returned to Spain until after
the Second World War. The circumstances in Afghanistan are different, but the intensity
of the crisis is comparable. That is why the notion that cultural heritage belongs
to all humanity must replace the idea of national cultural heritage. Otherwise, we
must accept that Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic and Muslim art will vanish. |
