World outcry falls on Taliban's deaf ears

World outcry falls on Taliban's deaf ears
AGENCIES

KABUL, MARCH 2: Contemptuously brushing aside growing international outcry, Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia began attacking the 2,000-year-old Buddha statues in central Bamiyan province, officials and Opposition sources said here today.

``They have started attacking the Buddhas with guns, rockets and tank shells -- with whatever arms they are carrying,'' a militia source said declining to be named. ``People are firing at them out of their own sentiments.''

According to the Afghan Islamic Press news agency, monitored in Islamabad, the Taliban has also gathered explosives around the two statues in order to blow them up.

The two giant stone Buddhas have watched over the restive plains of Afghanistan as the silent guardians of the country's pre-Islamic history. Painstakingly hewn out of a cliff face by Buddhist monks between the 2nd and 5th centuries AD -- Islam was established in Afghanistan only in the 11th century -- their faces have long since disappeared, destroyed by iconoclasts and the elements.

When they were built, Afghanistan was one of the most cosmopolitan regions in the world, a stop along the fabled Silk Route and a melting pot of merchants, travellers and artists from China and India, central Asia and the Roman empire.

Fanatical Taliban soldiers say they are complying with a decree issued on Monday by their Supreme leader Mulla Mohammad Omar who has claimed that the decision is in line with a fatwa from local Islamic clerics designed to prevent the worshipping of ``false idols.''

Minister of Information and Culture Qudratullah Jamal said that historic statues in the Kabul museum and elsewhere in the provinces of Ghazni, Herat, Jalalabad and Kandahar were also being destroyed.

Opposition official Mohammad Bahram, speaking from the western mountains of Bamiyan controlled by anti-Taliban groups, confirmed the attack on the Buddhas.

``The abandoned relics are not our pride,'' the official Bakhtar news agency quoted Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil as telling UN special envoy for Afghanistan Francesc Vendrell who arrived in Kabul with the appeal on Thursday.

Nepal, the birthplace of the Lord Buddha, and Buddhist countries like Thailand and Sri Lanka expressed alarm at the Taliban's focus on eradicating reminders of the centuries before Islam when Afghanistan was a centre of Buddhist learning and pilgrimage.

``We condemn the reprehensible act of the Taliban and call upon the international community to join hands to preserve and safeguard the Buddhist monuments," Nepal Foreign Ministry spokesman Gyan Chandra Acharya said.

The European Union expressed shock and urged the Taliban leaders to think again. Pakistan, one of Taliban's few foreign supporters, joined the international chorus. ``Pakistan attaches great importance to and supports the preservation of the world's historical, cultural and religious heritage,'' the foreign ministry said.

Meanwhile, UN envoy Vendrell, after meeting Taliban's Foreign Minister Wakil Mohammad Muttawakil, returned to Islamabad and said he did not receive any assurances from the Taliban officials despite his warning that the militia's move would provoke international outrage.