Author: Vasantha Arora, Washington
Publication: India Abroad
Date: March 20, 2001
The US has dismissed as "inaccurate
and self-serving" the Taliban militia's explanation that it blew up two
giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan in a pique after a foreign delegation
offered money to help preserve these ancient artifacts.
"We definitely don't buy this explanation,"
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Monday after US officials
had a "working-level" meeting with Taliban representative Sayed Rahmatullah
Hashimi.
Earlier, Hashimi in an interview
to The New York Times had said the Taliban made its decision in a rage
after the delegation offered money for the statues while a million Afghans
faced starvation. "When your children are dying, you don't care about a
piece of art," he added.
Hashimi was in the US on a mission
to improve ties and ease the Taliban's isolation, the report said. The
focus of his visit, he was quoted as saying, would be to find a way out
of the impasse surrounding Saudi renegade Osama Bin Laden whose presence
in Afghanistan has prompted international sanctions.
Still, the newspaper said Hashimi
expressed no remorse over the demolition of the two giant Buddhas, carved
from a cliff in central Afghanistan and considered one of the world's artistic
treasures.
An adviser to Taliban leader Mullah
Muhammad Omar, Hashimi gave for the first time the Taliban's version of
events - how a council of religious scholars ordered the statues destroyed
in a fit of indignation.
The destruction, according to his
account, was prompted last month when a visiting delegation of mostly European
envoys and a representative of Unesco offered money to protect the giant
Buddhas at Bamiyan, where the Taliban was engaged in fighting an opposition
alliance.
The daily, however, quoted "other
reports" which said the religious leaders were debating the move for months,
and ultimately decided the statues were idolatrous and should be obliterated.
At the time the foreign delegation visited, UN relief officials were warning
that a long drought and a harsh winter were confronting up to a million
Afghans with starvation.
Hashimi said when the visitors offered
money to repair and maintain the statues, the Taliban's religious leaders
were outraged. "The scholars told them that instead of spending money on
statues, why didn't they help our children who are dying of malnutrition?
They rejected that, saying, 'This money is only for statues.'"
"The scholars were so angry, they
said, 'If you are destroying our future with economic sanctions, you can't
care about our heritage.' And so they decided that these statues must be
destroyed," he added.
The Taliban's Supreme Court confirmed
the edict. "If we had wanted to destroy those statues, we could have done
it three years ago," Hashimi said. "So why didn't we? In our religion,
if anything is harmless, we just leave it. If money is going to statues
while children are dying of malnutrition next door, then that makes it
harmful, and we destroy it."
"What do you expect from a country
when you just ostracize them and isolate them and send in cruise missiles
and their children are dying?" he said, referring to the sanctions and
American attacks against Laden's base in Afghanistan after the bombing
of two American embassies in Africa in 1998.
"It is a kind of resentment that
is growing in Afghanistan." At the same time, he said the Taliban would
not destroy statues actually being worshiped, and would not touch the Hindu
temples still left in Afghanistan.
