Sledgehammers leave Afghanistan without a past

29 Nov, 2001 10:24 PM5 mins to read

PETER POPHAM laments the destruction that has left Afghanistan a cultural orphan.

KABUL - The doors of the world's saddest museum swung open yesterday when journalists were allowed for the first time to see the desecration wrought by the Taleban in the National Museum of Afghanistan.

It was in their final, iconoclastic phase following the blowing up of the giant standing Buddhas at Bamiyan in March that senior Taleban officials, including two ministers, visited Kabul's famous museum.

They arrived with a team of men carrying sledgehammers, and then stood around in transports of delight as Afghanistan's cultural history was reduced to rubble.

After three days they moved to the Ministry of Culture, and over the next three months meted out the same treatment to the priceless antiquities stored in the building's basement.

The justification for this: according to the Taleban's uniquely rigid and reductive interpretation of Islam, all depiction of the human form is taboo.

Hence their notorious bans on photography, television and the use of cameras; hence also their attempt to erase all evidence of one of the world's most fascinating schools of classical sculpture.

After only five years in power, the Taleban are melting into history. But they are taking with them into the dark practically everything that linked the country to its remote past.

Their crowning achievement was to make Afghanistan a cultural orphan in the world with the eradication of everything that could remind Afghans of their country's pre-Islamic past.

Mir Ghulam Navi, a curator in the Restoration Department, remembers the day in April when they arrived.

"It was a big surprise," he said. "They turned up in a large group, the Minister of Culture and the Minister of Finance and a delegation from [Taleban Supreme Leader] Mullah Mohammad Omar.

"They said, 'We want to see the museum'. They came with 10 men with hammers and began smashing the sculptures of human forms.

"We couldn't stop them - they said they would kill us if we tried. It was miserable to watch it."

Another curator, Mir Haider Mutihar, who is now acting Deputy Minister of Culture under the Northern Alliance's interim administration, led us down into the museum's underground store.

The clanging metal door swung open, revealing a horror show inside: more than 2000 sculptures, carvings and pottery pieces dating to antiquity had been smashed and dumped into large piles of rubble.

Sandstone statues of ancient kings, stone panels featuring elephants and paintings of 20th-century Afghan royalty were systematically destroyed during the assault on Afghanistan's cultural heritage.

A pile of haphazardly broken bits of rock lying on the floor are all that remain of a limestone statue of a figure, dating from the second century AD, tentatively identified as King Kanishka.

It was found with many other treasures around 40 years ago by French archaeologists excavating at a place called Surkh Kotal, 230km north of Kabul, the site of an ancient temple.

"It was exhibited in the hall of the museum," said Mutihar. "They smashed it there and we later brought the fragments into the basement.

"It was one of the first things they broke. The Minister of Culture and the Finance Minister and their bodyguards were watching. They were very happy."

Nearby was all that remains of a seated Bodhisattva, discovered in the ruins of a fourth-century AD Buddhist monastery at Tepe Maranjan in Kabul: just the legs folded in the lotus position, beautifully draped.

The semi-naked torso, the folded hands, the face with its ineffable expression of serenity, all have been reduced to dust.

Gone, too, though the rubble is elsewhere, probably in the bowels of the Ministry of Culture, are the carvings that give Afghanistan a unique place in the history of sculpture.

It was the "cockpit of Asia" where Buddhist teaching from India met iconographic traditions from Greece and Persia and produced, in the seventh century AD, a school of Buddhist sculpture that travelled along the Silk Road all the way to China and Japan.

All of that is gone now, except whatever may be found in museums abroad and in books.

Above the museum's entrance, Afghanistan's interim rulers have hung a banner that reads: "A nation stays alive when its culture stays alive".

If peace prevails in Afghanistan, it can be expected that a campaign to restore the museum will be launched.

It will be a huge undertaking. As the Taleban retreated from Kabul on November 13, they found time to call into the museum one last time and vandalise some more, this time completely at random.

The museum was unscathed after Afghan guerrilla groups drove out Soviet forces in 1992. But it was near front-line positions as a civil war emerged between rival factions - who are now back as members of the Northern Alliance.

Various commanders who controlled the area carried out huge looting campaigns.

When museum workers launched a salvage operation in 1995, some 70,000 of the more than 100,000 artefacts were missing. Many looted items had moved swiftly to Pakistan and then on to Europe.

When the Taleban turned their attention to the Ministry of Culture this year, they pried open wooden crates and steel cases to demolish the art that had been salvaged in 1995 from the looted museum.

The artefacts had been placed in the ministry storeroom in the belief they would be safe there.

"They spent three months smashing objects in the ministry," said Mutihar. "They told me to hold up each piece for them so they could see whether it represented human form.

"It was as if they were killing my own children."

- INDEPENDENT

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