Grappling
with a no-win situation in Iraq, the US government
and the rest of North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) need a resurgent Taliban movement in
Afghanistan as much as they need a hole in the
head.
In this context, recent items in the
New York Times and the publication of a document
on heritage preservation by the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) [1] put increased focus on the issue of
re-establishing
the
Bamiyan Buddha statues, which were destroyed by
the Taliban in March 2001. As with the Iraq
situation, a harrowing failure to address the
economics of the situation before delivering other
policy objectives renders the task impossible
before the first foundation stone is laid.
Cultures exist only so long as the
economies needed to support them function. The
destruction of an economy always produces with it
the destruction of the culture. In that context,
the plundering of valuable art pieces appears more
as background noise than any indication of a
separate problem.
In April 2003, as US
forces entered Baghdad, chaos resulting from the
disbanding of the Iraqi army and the Ba'ath Party
allowed the introduction of perverse incentives.
Faced with a loss of jobs, money and prestige,
police quickly became poachers. Unscrupulous art
dealers around the world smacked their lips at the
prospect of getting their grubby hands on
Mesopotamian antiques, many of which have since
not been sighted, let alone recovered.
Much as failing economies lead to lost
cultures, successful economies help to reverse the
trend. In both Russia and China, newly minted
millionaires and billionaires have spent much time
in auction houses, recovering antiques taken away
in the past. Most of the Faberge eggs and Ming
vases lost during tumultuous times have since been
redeposited in those countries, thanks to the
efforts of indigenous wealthy.
In much the
same way, the recovery of Afghanistan's heritage
is a matter for future generations of Afghans to
achieve, rather than a subject matter for
multilateral agencies to thrust solutions upon. I
do not doubt that these agencies have a role to
play, only that their presence and actions cannot
be overestimated.
Why Bamiyan was
destroyed Addressing the question of the
Bamiyan Buddha statues requires a trek through
history.
The most recent history is easy
enough - the Taliban, apparently acting on the
instructions of their Wahhabi sponsors in Saudi
Arabia, destroyed the statues in March 2001 as a
way of cleansing the land from the acts of
infidels. In so doing, they merely repeated the
history of Christian and Islamic conquests around
the world, where military victories usually led to
the destruction of local landmarks. The main
objective of such plunder, other than the pure
monetary gains to be accrued from the destruction
of temples et al, was to remove any signs of any
older culture existing. This allowed a rewriting
of history, suggesting that the invaders had
"brought" civilization to the area.
It is
a conceit of Abrahamic religions to insist on the
primacy of civilization, starting as it did with
the rejection of Egypt's pagan culture by Moses.
That the Egyptians had built an astounding
civilization well before the Hittite invasions
became a sundry matter, studied only for its
decline. Similar fates soon befell other Asian
civilizations, with the Chinese succumbing last.
Even so, the decline of such civilizations had
begun well before the invasion - for example,
Buddhism thrived in India after it was adopted by
the Emperor Ashok. It challenged the primacy of
the Hindu system, but failed to provide an
alternative economic framework. Indeed, by
rejecting certain tasks as demeaning, Buddhism had
the perverse effect of rendering a "lower" caste
status to laborers and farmers in Hindu society.
As it migrated north toward China and the
rest of Asia, the Buddhist religion initially was
the mainstay of the masses, but slowly was
absorbed by the trading community. Thus the center
of Bamiyan as a Buddhist city evolved naturally
from its position on the Silk Road. Invasions that
weakened the city and transferred ownership of
trading routes to Arabs, Turks and then Mongols
logically led to the hollowing out of the society.
Thus as Islamic invaders razed the libraries of
Taxila and Genghis Khan first destroyed the city
of Bamiyan (but left the statues standing), only
the last rites to Buddhism needed to be performed.
The local angle The issue of
plunder occupies greater importance when the
support of local communities becomes evident. In
most cases, transfer of power becomes the
catalyst.
The experience in Indochina, for
example, showed that as communists took power,
their attention was preoccupied by the means of
production. This left symbolic structures such as
temples at the mercy of unscrupulous officials,
who could
