Islamabad: Bamiyan’s cultural centre should are completed last month, showcasing the remarkable heritage of a site that Afghanistan’s Taliban desecrated 20 years ago by dynamiting ancient statues of Buddha.
But the red carpet celebrations will need to wait. After the Taliban swept triumphantly into the capital Kabul, everything was placed on hold.
“Everything is suspended,” said Philippe Delanghe, from UNESCO, the UN’s cultural agency, who said they’re awaiting the choices of the new regime.
Afghanistan once stood on the legendary Silk Road trade route, a crossroads of ancient civilisations.
Now within the hands of the hardline Islamist Taliban, there are fears its heritage is in danger .
In March 2001, the Taliban spent weeks using dynamite and artillery to magnify two giant 1,500-year old statues of Buddha, carved into a cliff at Bamiyan, some 175 kilometres (78 miles) west of Kabul.
Many consider the wanton destruction to be among the world’s worst cultural crimes.
It was an act that brought the Islamist’s radical ideology to global attention, just a couple of months before Al-Qaeda — who the Taliban hosted in Afghanistan — administered the devastating 9/11 attacks on America.
“We judge by history, and 20 years ago there have been terrible results,” Ernesto Ottone, UNESCO’s assistant director general for culture, told AFP.
Crossroads of civilisations
In February, the Taliban said that Afghanistan’s relics were a part of the country’s “history, identity and rich culture” which “all have an obligation to robustly protect, monitor and preserve these artefacts”.
Among Afghanistan’s top sites are the Buddhist shrines at Mes Aynak, and therefore the 12th-century Minaret of Jam, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
But since seizing power, the Taliban have said nothing more.
There are worrying signs. In mid-August, residents in Bamiyan accused the Taliban of berating a statue honouring a Hazara leader — an ethnos persecuted by the Islamists — who that they had killed within the 1990s.
AFP couldn’t confirm the reports, but social media images seemed to show a decapitated statue.
Philippe Marquis, director of the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan (DAFA), told AFP he remains cautious about what is going to happen.
“We haven’t any declarations saying: ‘We are getting to destroy everything or erase everything from the non-Islamic past'”, he said.
Since 2016, it’s become a crime to destroy cultural heritage sites.
‘Great concern’
Many are worried for the National Museum in Kabul, which survived being ransacked both during the 1992-1996 war that followed the Soviet military withdrawal, also as under the Taliban’s first regime, from 1996-2001.
Some feared the prospect of mass looting, as happened following conflict in Iraq and Syria, where extremist fighters raised funds by selling ancient artefacts on the black market.
However, the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul was achieved with barely an attempt being fired, and therefore the museum appears to possess emerged unscathed.
Only a 3rd of the thousands of priceless objects in Kabul’s museum are catalogued.
Kabul museum director Mohammad Fahim Rahimi told the ny Times last month the Taliban had promised their protection.
But he added he still has “great concern for the security of our staff and our collection”.
‘Smashed into pieces’
International funding for cultural protection has also been suspended, and it’s not clear when it might resume.
“We are holding our breath,” Marquis said. “But I hope that soon we’ll be ready to breathe a touch lighter.”
Many Afghans who were working to guard cultural heritage have fled abroad, or are doggo and too scared to talk out.
Those who do have warned that the Taliban promises of protection are empty rhetoric to win international support.
“As illiterate extremists, they’re proud to destroy non-Muslim monuments,” said Mustafa, a former UNESCO employee at Bamiyan, now a refugee in Germany.
An official who worked for the Bamiyan government said Taliban fighters smashed instruments and art objects belonging to the culture department after seizing the province in early August.
“I had no guarantee that they weren’t getting to accuse me… of idolatry and switch their guns on me and kill me.”