Taliban loots even as it destroys

Taliban loots even as it destroys
REUTERS

PARIS, MARCH 2: The Taliban militia’s destruction of Buddhist statues in Afghanistan is masking a parallel looting operation sacking the country of priceless artwork, a representative of the Afghan Opposition said on Friday.Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban movement announced on Thursday that it had started to fire mortars and cannon at the huge Buddhas carved into a cliff at Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, despite international protests.

The Opposition alliance led by ousted President Burhanuddin Rabbani believes many other pre-Islamic artefacts small Buddha statues and other figures are being smuggled abroad.

“The destruction is underway and a certain number of statueshave already been destroyed, but simultaneously we know that the traffic of stolen art works has gathered pace in recent weeks,” said Mehrabodin Masstan, Rabbani’s representative in France.

He said stolen Afghan antiquities had turned up regularly at salesrooms in London, New York and Japan in recent years and said the pace would now pick up.

Masstan said he had spoken earlier on Friday by telephone with the famed Opposition commander Ahmed Shah Masood, whose forces held the mountain town of Bamiyan site of the two towering Buddha statues that the Taliban said it has begun to shell until the fundamentalist Islamic group recaptured it last month.

“He told me he thought it was strange the world was suddenly so concerned about these statues when it has ignored the plight of the Afghan people under the Taliban for years,” Masstan said.

While the art world would breathe a sigh of relief if atleast some of Afghanistan’s rich cultural heritage escapes the Taliban wrath, Masstan said the result was that his country would be Left with nothing. “We are losing our past,” he said. “This is yet one moretragedy for our country.”

In other countries, antiquities are registered and stolenartefacts can be traced and recovered via Interpol. But Afghanistan has not registered its art and is not amember of Interpol. If someone tries to sell a stolen Afghan antiquity, auctioneers will not find it on a database as a stolen object and the sale will go ahead.

Afghanistan’s early Buddhist culture, which flourished fromancient times until Arab invaders brought Islam in the seventh century, flourished under the influences of Persian, Turkic and Indian cultures along the fabled Silk Route.The 329 BC invasion led by Alexander the Great Left behindGreek influences that made it the only ancient fusion of European and Asian culture.

KABUL MUSEUM HEAVILY LOOTED

Kabul Museum used to house a priceless collection of thisart, much of it brought there from Bamiyan, but it has been heavily looted since the Taliban seized the capital in 1996.

Masstan said it had opened briefly last year but closed downagain in January. Kabulis could not get anywhere near the building now, he added.

Masstan said sources in Afghanistan had told him over thepast 24 hours that the Taliban had packed explosives around the two Buddha statues in Bamiyan.“They plan to dynamite them after Friday prayers,” he said.

The mullahs of the ruling Taliban movement, which controlsmore than 90 percent of Afghanistan, are determined to create an Islamic state according to their own austere interpretation of the religion.