01/09/2002

EDITORIAL NUMBER=0-09634

SAVING AFGHANISTAN’S CULTURE

Now that Afghanistan has been liberated, the Taleban legacy of terror, intolerance, and destruction has been exposed. Among many abuses, the Taleban did everything possible to destroy Afghanistan’s cultural heritage.

Cultural expression under the Taleban was tightly controlled. But heroic tales of resistance are emerging. As the Washington Post recently reported, Mohammad Yousof Asefi, a physician and artist, saved many important works of art in Afghanistan’s National Gallery. The Taleban had ordered that all images of living creatures should be destroyed because, in the Taleban view, they were "un-Islamic." Working in secret, Mr. Asefi used watercolors to cover up more than eighty oil paintings that included images of living things.

If he had been discovered, Mr. Asefi could have been beaten, whipped, jailed or even executed -- as many were -- for defying the Taleban’s version of Islamic law. But, as he said, "I don't think I was so brave. I thought it was my duty to try to save these paintings. I could not be responsible for letting our history and culture be destroyed."

The Washington Post also tells of Afghan Films, the government-run studio and archives that housed at least one-thousand newsreels, documentaries, and feature films before Taleban religious police threw the films into a bonfire last spring. What the Taleban did not know was that the studio’s eight remaining employees had hidden as many films as they could. They stuffed them in broken cameras, behind sound equipment, in the corners of abandoned storerooms. They even destroyed the building’s electrical system so there would be no lights to help the Taleban conduct their search. One employee echoed Mr. Asefi’s comment when he said, "It's not brave, it's our job."

Unfortunately, despite these and many other efforts, much was lost in Afghanistan -- thousands of paintings, films, photographs, drawings, books, musical recordings, relics, and archaeological sites. Armed with hammers and axes, the Taleban systematically demolished thousands of sculptures, carvings, and pottery pieces dating to antiquity. Two giant Buddha statues, chiseled into a cliff more than one-thousand-five-hundred years ago in the central Bamiyan Valley, were blown up.

But now the terrorist Taleban and al-Qaida have themselves been destroyed – - and the long-suffering Afghan people can begin the important task of taking back their cultural heritage.