Taliban spurn Islamic scholars
Arrogant zealots rebuff the pleas of the 55-nation Organization of Islamic Conference not to destroy Afghanistan's pre-Islamic heritage
March 12, 2001

Afghanistan's Taliban rulers on March 12 rejected the arguments of leading Islamic scholars and protests from around the world and said they were obliterating the last traces of the country's ancient Buddhist statues.

A delegation from the 55-nation Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) flew out of the southern Afghan town of Kandahar after two days of talks with the Taliban failed to produce any result, a Pakistan-based Afghan news service said.

The Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) quoted a Taliban spokesman, Mullah Abdul Hayee Mutmaen, as saying in Kandahar that the Afghan ulama, or scholars, had rejected the call by the OIC's Islamic scholars to halt the campaign to destroy all the country's statues on the grounds they are un-Islamic.

In Paris the head of the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO confirmed that two towering statues of Buddha, carved into sandstone cliffs near the central town of Bamiyan more than 1,500 years ago, had been destroyed, and condemned the action as "a crime against culture."

"It is abominable to witness the cold and calculated destruction of cultural properties which were the heritage of the Afghan people and indeed of the whole of humanity," said UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura in a statement.

It took the Taliban, which is based in Kandahar and pursues an austere view of Islam, several days to demolish the statues, 53 meters (175 feet) and 38 meters high and carved at a time when Afghanistan was a center of Buddhist culture.

The OIC delegation, led by Qatar Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Ahmed Bin Abdullah Zaid Al Mahmoud, included Egypt's top cleric, the Mufti Nasr Farid Wassel, and other widely respected Muslim clerics and scholars.

Mutmaen said the OIC scholars could give no religious justification for preserving the statues and had argued only that the time was not right for such a course of action.

"The Afghan ulama replied that for us the present time is right and suitable," AIP quoted Mutmaen as saying. It said the Afghan ulama had insisted that Islam orders the destruction of all idols.

Earlier on March 12, Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil repeated what he had told UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on March 11 - that all movable statutes had been destroyed since the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, issued an order for their destruction on February 26.

Annan said on March 11, after meeting Muttawakil in Islamabad, that the Taliban's destruction of the statues was "lamentable."

Taliban Information and Culture Minister Qudratullah Jamal told Reuters earlier that it had not been easy to demolish the two giant Buddha statues at Bamiyan.

"The destruction work is not as easy as people would think. You can't knock down the statues by dynamite or shelling as both of them have been carved in a cliff. They are firmly attached to the mountain," Jamal said.

The Bamiyan statues were among the best known of the thousands of Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, and word of their impending destruction triggered worldwide alarm. Many others have already been smashed during looting of Afghan museums.

Western countries saw the destruction as an assault on the world's cultural heritage, while countries with large Buddhist populations saw the statue smashing as religious bigotry.

Annan said the destruction of Afghanistan's heritage could make it more difficult to raise aid for the impoverished country, but urged potential donors to remember that assistance is not aimed at the rulers.

Hundreds of thousands of Afghans have been uprooted by war in the past year and hundreds have died of cold and malnutrition this winter.

Source: Sayed Salahuddin, Reuters, Kabul, March 12, 2001