Déjà vu all over again in Afghanistan: Negotiating with the Taliban to save heritage sites

Because the world watches the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and its aftermath, it’s like déjà vu yet again for the nation’s long-suffering peoples. With the Taliban again within the Bamiyan Valley, the UNESCO World Heritage web site the place Mullah Omar sanctioned the destruction of the sixth century Buddhas 20 years in the past, we’ve seen this film earlier than and we all know the way it ends.

However for veteran UNESCO consultant and archaeologist Mounir Bouchenaki, who tried and failed to barter with the Taliban to avoid wasting the Buddhas in 2001, it’s a very poignant reminder that Afghanistan’s heritage — like its captive civilian inhabitants — remains to be in danger.

Bouchenaki, who was assistant director-general for tradition at UNESCO in 2001 and is at present an advisor to UNESCO, the Worldwide Centre for the Examine of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), and the Arab Regional Centre for World Heritage, says, “Clearly, with such a fluid scenario on the bottom, nobody can predict precisely what the Taliban will do about cultural heritage.”

Whereas it’s nonetheless early days, Bouchenaki, who was additionally in control of defending heritage within the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in addition to in Kosovo from 2003-04, notes, “I’m in touch with the director of the Nationwide Museum in Kabul (which was looted and vandalized by the Taliban in 2001), and I do know that in the intervening time the collections are secure and guarded.”

The Nationwide Museum of Afghanistan posted on their Fb web page on Aug. 15 that “Employees, artifacts, and items are secure,” however in addition they famous that “continuation of this chaotic scenario causes an enormous concern concerning the security of the museum’s artifacts.” The assertion urged that “safety forces, the worldwide neighborhood, Taliban, and different influential events” ought to “not let opportunists use this case.”

Director Fahim Rahimi stated in an interview on Aug. 20 that the Taliban had posted guards exterior the museum, however in a current Fb put up added that, “For guaranteeing the protection of the gathering, the museum will stay closed for a number of days.”

A crossroads of civilizations

Regardless of assurances from Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen on Aug. 16 that “Buddhist websites in Afghanistan usually are not in danger, I refute any declare on this regard,” since then, there have been experiences of Taliban looting of a warehouse within the Bamiyan Valley. Along with the empty niches that after held the world’s largest standing statues of the Buddha, the valley accommodates a wealth of different archeological artifacts, together with an entire advanced of caves, monasteries, and shrines, colorfully adorned by the monks who as soon as meditated in them.
 

The realm can be the heartland of the Hazaras, the Shi’a minority persecuted by the Taliban. In accordance with native experiences in Bamiyan, in mid-August Taliban fighters blew up a statue of Abdul Ali Mazari, a Hazara chief they executed in 1995.

Then got here experiences that the Taliban had occupied the Citadel in Herat’s outdated metropolis, which is on the tentative World Heritage record together with different websites just like the Musalla advanced with the mausoleum of the empress consort Gawharshad and the Ghurid-era Friday Mosque. The citadel, which has been occupied over the centuries by many various forces and empires and destroyed and rebuilt a number of instances, was most lately renovated by the Aga Khan Belief for Tradition. One can solely hope that the painstaking restoration won’t be one other casualty of the Taliban takeover.

Two weeks in the past on Aug. 18, UNESCO Director-Normal Audrey Azoulay issued a assertion calling “for the preservation of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage in its variety, in full respect of worldwide legislation, and for taking all crucial precautions to spare and defend cultural heritage from injury and looting.”

She additionally wrote of the nation that was a crossroads for Indian, Chinese language, and European civilizations, “Afghanistan is dwelling to a variety of wealthy and various heritage, which is an integral a part of Afghan historical past and identification, in addition to of significance for humanity as an entire, that have to be safeguarded.

And but, because the U.N. has not acknowledged the brand new Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and as a 3rd of the U.N. workers have now been moved to Kazakhstan, heritage consultants marvel how the UNESCO edict shall be enforced.

Making an attempt to barter with the Taliban

Whereas the U.S. authorities is now in communication with the Taliban, as Bouchenaki wrote in his e book about his expertise in Afghanistan, Patrimoines Mutilés, “In 2001, after Mullah Omar threatened to explode the Buddhas simply earlier than Eid al-Adha (and stated that “all statues and non-Islamic shrines within the completely different areas of the Islamic Emirate have to be damaged” as a result of they had been worshipped by folks of non-Islamic non secular beliefs and had been due to this fact ‘idols.’), there have been no formal channels open for negotiation with the Taliban. We couldn’t journey to satisfy them as we weren’t allowed to satisfy with a authorities not acknowledged by the U.N.”

As an alternative, he explains whereas on a go to to New York from his present bases in Bahrain and Paris, “We despatched a particular envoy to Kandahar.” That particular envoy was none aside from the previous French ambassador to Pakistan, Pierre Lafrance, a talented diplomat and linguist with a powerful information of regional languages, cultures, and politics. Whereas Lafrance was obtained by the Taliban’s minister of tradition in Kandahar, Mullah Omar refused to see him. Lafrance then returned to Paris by way of Saudi Arabia — to see if he may negotiate with contacts there.

“We thought perhaps the Taliban would need U.N. recognition,” explains Bouchenaki, “and that saving the Buddhas could be a solution to facilitate that.”

Sadly, all efforts failed.

With the clock ticking — Mullah Omar’s announcement got here on Feb. 27, 2001, and Eid al-Adha was to start on March 5 that yr — Bouchenaki and his colleagues spent a sleepless week devising a Plan B and C. Below the auspices of then-UNESCO Director-Normal Koïchiro Matsuura, a gathering of ambassadors from the 54 member states of the Group of the Islamic Convention was held and all members adamantly protested the statues’ imminent demise. Even Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — the three nations that formally acknowledged the Taliban authorities — joined the protest, condemning the looming destruction of the Buddhas as “un-Islamic.”

When this effort didn’t persuade the Taliban, one other concept was hatched. A delegation of 12 high-ranking Muslim leaders flew to Kandahar on a aircraft from Qatar on March 1, hoping to intervene. Sadly, Mullah Omar refused to obtain them, says Bouchenaki, accusing them of being “American brokers.”

Gives to switch the statues to India, Japan, and even the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork had been ignored, as had been private pleas from Kofi Annan, the Dalai Lama, Northern Alliance chief Ahmad Shah Massoud (whose son has now re-emerged as a political participant), and even the previous king of Afghanistan. In a uncommon press assertion from his exile in Rome, Mohammed Zahir Shah stated destruction of the Buddhas was “in opposition to the nationwide and historic pursuits of the Afghan folks.”

With lower than 24 hours earlier than Eid al-Adha, Bouchenaki known as the Pakistani minister of social affairs, Attiya Inayatullah, who was on the Govt Board of UNESCO. “I instructed her,” relates Bouchenaki, “‘We’re confronted with a horrible scenario. Pakistan has hyperlinks with the Taliban. Are you able to do one thing? Are you able to inform Mullah Omar that what he’s doing can have severe penalties and can exacerbate tensions with Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and lots of different nations with vital Buddhist populations.’”

Via her intervention, the Pakistani minister of the inside went to Kandahar to plead UNESCO’s case to avoid wasting the statues, however that effort was additionally unsuccessful.

“I felt my coronary heart was breaking”

The subsequent day, March 2, the Taliban started their gradual however brutal destruction of the traditional monuments, initially utilizing dynamite.

Bouchenaki remembers watching the horrific spectacle on Al-Jazeera. “I felt my coronary heart was breaking,” he remembers.

He was personally attacked in editorials within the French press on the time, he recounts, with pundits asking, “Why didn’t you go your self in entrance of the Buddhas and demand their safety?”

In what could possibly be likened to a extra tragic model of “The Monuments Males” — albeit one directed by the French with a sadder, much less Hollywood ending — the destruction was carried out in phases. After dynamiting the statues, the Taliban moved on to anti-aircraft weapons and artillery, which brought about important injury however didn’t destroy them fully. On the time, Taliban Data Minister Qudratullah Jamal complained, “This work of destruction just isn’t so simple as folks would possibly assume. You may’t knock down the statues by shelling as each are carved right into a cliff; they’re firmly connected to the mountain.”

“It was precedent setting within the Muslim world,” notes Bouchenaki of the demise of the Buddhas, which survived even the Mongol invasion, “to have such an act of obliteration.”

Through the barbaric assaults on World Heritage Websites, which escalated to putting anti-tank mines on the backside of the niches, in addition to rockets directed on the face of the Buddhas, Mullah Omar stated, “What are you complaining about? We’re solely waging battle on stones.”

Afghanistan at present

However now, after 40 years of battle, it’s a battle on Afghanistan’s younger folks and educated lessons that type the fractured nation’s intangible heritage that issues Bouchenaki. They’re fleeing of their 1000’s and he’s nervous about what the resultant “mind drain” would possibly imply for the way forward for the nation.

And whereas the work of Bouchenaki and different heritage consultants over the previous twenty years has left Afghanistan in a a lot stronger place when it comes to preservation points, he says that “unlawful excavations and looting (an ongoing situation even after the U.S. invasion in 2001) pose a higher risk than the Taliban.” And so, he says, does the instability and chaos left within the wake of the U.S. withdrawal, lately exploited by ISIS’s native affiliate, Islamic State-Khorasan Province.

Bouchenaki notes an vital distinction between the Taliban, who “throughout their regime had been extra concerned in destruction than trafficking of artifacts,” and ISIS in Iraq and Syria, who “had their very own wing to take care of cultural heritage” — and sometimes ended up promoting what they didn’t blow up on the black market. However within the present safety vacuum, he says, “something may occur.”

Added to those safety points are ongoing preservation points, reminiscent of soil erosion threatening the Minaret of Jam (on UNESCO’s endangered heritage record), whose environs additionally embrace a twelfth century Jewish cemetery that speaks — in distinction to Talibani fundamentalism — to Afghanistan’s pluralist previous. And years of corruption and mismanagement have led to neglect of many heritage websites.

Nonetheless, Bouchenaki says, “I hope that perhaps the younger technology is completely different. I hope that now we’ve a greater understanding of preserving each Islamic and non-Islamic heritage, as a part of our international patrimony.”

He additionally hopes that world leaders, whom he notes have been up to now considerably silent on the matter, will prioritize heritage preservation.

In the meantime, within the Bamiyan Valley, the place the remnants of colourful murals rim the sides of the niches as soon as stuffed by the Buddhas, the artwork works’ synthesis of Buddhist and Indian Gupta kinds in addition to Sasanian, Byzantine, and Turkic influences converse to Afghanistan’s wealthy Silk Highway legacy. The empty niches, which have change into ruined monuments to the excesses of extremism themselves, often include projected holograms of the obliterated Buddhas — each their absence and their phantom presence haunting the nation’s future.
 

Satirically, it was the destruction of the Buddhas that prompted additional excavations, revealing 50 extra caves together with 12 with wall work. Within the rubble of the statues, a staff of worldwide scientists additionally found the interpretation of the primary part of the unique Sanskrit Pratityasamutpada Sutra. Translated by the seventh century Chinese language monk, Xuanzang, it articulates one of many core tenets of Buddhism: “All issues are transient.”

Whereas such subtleties might have been misplaced on the Taliban twenty years in the past, one can solely hope that the world neighborhood will maintain their newest iteration to account.

Hadani Ditmars is the creator of Dancing within the No-Fly Zone: A Girl’s Journey Via Iraq, a previous editor at New Internationalist, and has been reporting from the Center East on tradition, society, and politics for twenty years. Her e book in progress, Between Two Rivers, is a political travelogue of historical and sacred websites in Iraq. The views expressed on this piece are her personal.

Predominant photograph copyright by UNESCO underneath Inventive Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO