Colossal emptiness, colossal loss

Colossal emptiness, colossal loss
Luke Harding

As we came in to land on a makeshift stony plateau on the outskirts of Bamiyan yesterday, it hit us: a vast cliff face pockmarked with hundreds of caves and two giant, empty recesses. When we climbed into the fleet of Taliban Toyota pick up trucks and raced across the dust whipped plain, the full scale of the destruction became clear. There was nothing left of Afghanistan’s colossal Buddhas. The serene human forms had been sheared away as if by a giant scalpel, leaving only two enormous piles of rubble, and the swallows flitting among the innumerable crevices.

The Taliban had been busy. For four days earlier this month, they set about the two ancient statues using dynamite, tanks and rockets. The smaller Buddha, 38m (124ft) high, was comparatively easy to wreck. Two massive explosions destroyed most of the body; a couple of shells did the rest. But the larger Buddha, 55m (175ft) high, was as one Taliban commander told me ‘‘very difficult’’.

They began by blowing away the already damaged legs and chin. Next to go were the arms. But the torso was trickier. The stairway cut deep into the cliff next to the Buddha was not close enough to allow soldiers to place more explosives. They had to dangle off ropes and swing between the luxuriant folds of the Buddha’s robe. It took 25 explosions to finish him off, by which time the local commanders had run out of dynamite.

We picked over the debris, watched by about 100 black turbaned Taliban soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs and old Soviet machine guns. There were a few gigantic boulders and a pile of rubble: otherwise, nearly 2,000 years of history had vanished. Driving further along the cliff, past dozens of secret chambers and prayer rooms once used by yellow-robed monks, we reached the spot where the second Buddha had stood. Some of the statue’s right arm had survived but the rest had been pulverised. The ground was littered with twisted metal empty mortar cases and the remains of shells.

Ducking, I climbed up the ancient staircase which had led to the Buddha’s head. On a first floor chamber, traces of the original fresco that once illuminated the whole complex have survived on the ceiling. There were flashes of lapis lazuli and dark sienna. But inside it was the same depressing story: another iconoclastic hand had lopped off the faces of a row of exquisite Buddha reliefs.

The damage could have been centuries old or new. But one thing became eminently clear: two and a half weeks ago the Taliban carried out the greatest act of vandalism since the cultural revolution swept away Tibet’s monasteries. But then Afghanistan is in the grip of a revolution of its own. In the Islamic state women are forbidden to work: men are punished for not growing beards; and reproduction of the human form is outlawed, along with lesser evils such as kite-flying. Since the Taliban’s conquest of Kabul four years ago, a heated internal debate has raged over what to do with the country’s Buddhist relics, left behind by the pleasure-loving dynasties that flourished before the arrival of Islam 1,100 years ago.

The Taliban’s leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, took a pragmatic view until the United Nations imposed a fresh round of sanctions in January. ...

Excerpted from ‘Debris of the past’, by Luke Harding, ‘The Guardian’, March 27.