Taliban Pledges to Protect Afghan Cultural Heritage, But Fears Remain


Taliban officials vow to protect the country Afghanistan National Museum In an interview on Thursday, the director of the museum said of his precious collection and collection of cultural artifacts in Kabul.

Director Mohammad Fahim Rahimi said he met with Taliban officials on Wednesday.

“If there had been war, it could have been a disaster and would have destroyed many things and many monuments in the country,” Rahimi said. “We’re kind of lucky right now because the power shift didn’t cost such death and destruction.”

“We still have great concerns about the safety of our staff and our collection,” he added.

As scenes of chaos continued to unfold from Kabul, where thousands of people continued to gather outside the airport to desperately flee the country, caution seemed appropriate. Cultural preservationists continue to worry that Taliban militants will target Afghanistan’s ancient heritage, as they did when they last controlled the country. searching the museum and famously blasting with artillery and giant dynamite Buddhas of BamiyanGigantic statues carved into a mountainside 1500 years ago.

Considered one of the world’s largest repositories of ancient culture, the museum suffered major damage in the 1990s as the civil war led to the looting and destruction of many of its buildings. After the Taliban was overthrown in 2001, officials at the museum reported that the Taliban seized or destroyed thousands of objects in its collection—largely Buddhist statues and other relics considered un-Islamic or pagan.

“There’s a very real reason to be concerned about Afghan heritage, as the ban on idolatry is so invoked,” said Gil Stein, professor of archeology at the University of Chicago. Public statements are much more moderate, but I don’t know if anyone in the West knows how much of it is showcase.”

“I want them to know that the world is watching and that this is really important,” he added.

And certainly cultural object concerns extend far beyond Kabul to regional museums and sensitive archaeological sites around the country such as Mes Aynak in Logar Province, where the remains of an ancient Buddhist city have revealed many archaeological treasures.

Even where artifacts aren’t immediately threatened by the Taliban’s fundamentalist rejection of pre-Islamic or other arts, experts worry about what will happen to cultural objects and spaces that could be damaged by neglect as sensitive conservation projects are halted or looting becomes more widespread. .

The Taliban sought to present a public image that would dispel such fears by issuing a statement in February pledging to protect the nation’s cultural heritage and ordering its members to prevent looting.

“As Afghanistan is a country full of antiquities and artifacts, and such relics form part of our country’s history, identity and rich culture, everyone has an obligation to preserve, monitor and protect these artifacts in a sound manner,” he said. “All Mujahideen should prevent the excavation of antiquities and protect all historical sites such as old forts, minarets, towers and other similar places,” he continued, “to protect them from damage, destruction and decay.”

Inside meeting Suhail Shaheen, a Taliban spokesman with The Daily Mirror, a Sri Lankan news agency from Doha, said last week, “Buddhist sites in Afghanistan are not at risk; I reject any claim in this regard.”

Some experts hope they have a more sophisticated understanding that the Taliban has truly changed and that anger at any large-scale cultural destruction will harm their international relations.

Cheryl Benard, head of the Alliance for the Restoration of Cultural Heritage, said the Taliban are both a nationalist and religious group and must recognize the importance of the country’s treasures to the Afghan people. “Everyone is in wait and see mode,” he said. “The greatest danger is that some renegades will go on a debacle, but so far they seem surprisingly disciplined.”

Other experts, though apprehensive, take some comfort in the fact that there has been a lot of progress in the documentation of Afghan cultural heritage over the past few years. Cultural heritage expert Bastien Varoutsikos said the organizations have spent years “creating museum collection catalogs, maps of archaeological sites, 3D models of heritage buildings, as well as documenting intangible heritage, recording the movements of potters, equipment of masons.” email.

“All this data creates a record of the current state of Afghan heritage on Day 0,” he said. “Although it is far from complete,” he added, it is better than it was twenty years ago.

Mr. Varoutsikos said the Taliban also seemed to have been affected by the storm of anger that accompanied their extermination of the Buddhas and was probably not interested in such global disdain ever again. “The Taliban understand this very clearly and try to reassure both Afghans and the international community in their communications,” he said.

But many remain skeptical, pointing to similar assurances the Taliban made last time and then ignored.

“The Taliban are currently trying to project the image of ‘we will not touch anything else’, but I think it would be very difficult for them to do so knowing that the group is an ideological movement,” he said. An official with the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies who left Afghanistan but requested anonymity due to concerns about his family’s safety.

Bijan Rouhani, an academic at the University of Oxford specializing in the preservation of heritage sites in conflict zones, said: “I know the Taliban are not one group – they are many different groups and factions – so central power and leaders say they have changed, local groups and warlords under the same flag. We don’t know what the situation is.”

During a meeting with Rahimi outside the National Museum earlier this week, the Taliban said they would not enter the institution where the fighters once suffered so much damage. During the two decades of international occupation of Kabul, millions of dollars were spent renovating the museum, and Interpol and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization helped recover several thousand items that had illegally entered foreign museums or the international antiques market. .

Today, the museum is considered a design jewel as well as an important institution. The items have been restored and the museum includes hand tools and other objects dating to the Stone Age, as well as valuable wood carvings, sculptures and other artifacts from the Bronze, Buddhist, Hindu and Islamic periods.

Rahimi said the museum had drawn up a contingency plan to move around 50,000 treasures from its collections to safe places, but did not put the plan into effect because the Taliban quickly seized it.

In Bamiyan, niches of giant Buddhas stand empty today as a reminder of the Taliban’s contempt for foreign cultures of the past. Just this March, on the 20th anniversary of the destruction of the Buddhas, UNESCO sponsored a day to commemorate structures that feature life-size, full-color 3D projections of statues into rocky cliffside recesses.

Restoration work was underway to stabilize UNESCO, which tags the niches and the valley where the Buddhas once stood. World Heritage site One in two in the country was preparing to open a heritage center that would tell the history of the region, including what the Taliban had done to him.

“There are daily excursions from the Taliban to the region, but we have no information at this time about the devastation that is taking place,” said Ernesto Ottone, deputy director general for the cultural sector at UNESCO.

Bamiyan is the unofficial capital of the Hazaras, an ethnic minority that has been persecuted by the Taliban in the past. After seizing power this time, militants recently blew up a statue in Bamiyan, in a move followed by experts concerned about cultural destruction. Shiite militia leader Abdul Ali MazariKilled by the Taliban in 1995.

For now, experts hope this is an aberration, not an early indication that the group will begin to shred cultural treasures again.

“We must be hopeful that the February declaration declaring its commitment to preserve the cultural heritage will be honored,” Bénédicte de Montlaur, head of the World Monuments Fund, said in a statement. “The whole world will be watching to see how this is played out.”

Alex Marshall contributed to the reporting.



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