by Tim Bonyhady
The most notable exhibit was a third- or fourth-century Bodhisattva, more than a metre high, made of unbaked painted clay, from Tepe Maranjan on the outskirts of Kabul. It had been damaged in 1979 when the Taraki government moved the museum’s collection, but the Soviets had restored it in 1980 to demonstrate their concern for Afghanistan’s culture. Under Najibullah, the Bodhisattva was one of the museum’s icons. When the mujahideen were looting the museum, it survived because it was too big and fragile. Kathy Gannon of Associated Press would later report that, at the opening in August 2000, the Taliban’s deputy prime minister and defence minister slapped the Bodhisattva, appalled by its ‘naked’ torso. More likely, the Bodhisattva’s display in August 2000 was uncontentious, consistent with Carla Grissmann of SPACH’s first-hand reports of everything going well.
In February 2001, a party of Taliban led by Culture Minister Qudratullah Jamal went to the museum and the Ministry of Information set on destruction. At the museum, the men took a sledgehammer to the Bodhisattva, leaving just its crossed legs intact, and they took axes to a group of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wooden ancestor figures and gods carved as grave effigies in Nuristan before it was Islamicised. At the ministry, where more of the museum’s collection was housed, they smashed about 2500 Buddhist objects. A couple of weeks later, Mullah Omah ordered that ‘all statues and non-Islamic shrines be destroyed so no one can worship or respect them in the future’.
Members of the Taliban soon reduced the big female Buddha outside Ghazni to rubble. ‘We confront the idols of non-Muslims,’ the Taliban graffitied it. Despite protests from several senior Taliban including Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil—and from a number of Islamic countries including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia—demolition at Bamiyan started at the beginning of March. It took several days, not only because of the Buddhas’ size but also because their destruction stopped during the Islamic festival of Eid and the demolition crew opted not to blast away indiscriminately. After rocket-launchers, tanks and artillery had little effect, the demolition crew drilled holes into the rock, packed them with explosives and blew up the Buddhas, while their alcoves survived undamaged.
The international treatment of the Taliban was, likely, a factor. The Taliban expected other countries to reward them for banning opium growing. Instead, the United Nations imposed new sanctions because the Taliban refused to give up Osama bin Laden, who had instigated the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam that killed 235 people. The Taliban’s anger grew as Afghanistan suffered its worst drought for thirty years while subject to these sanctions. After a Japanese delegation and the Metropolitan Museum in New York offered to pay for Bamiyan’s Buddhas to be moved outside Afghanistan, Mullah Omar asked rhetorically whether the Taliban should be ‘a breaker of idols or a seller of idols’?
Mullah Omar’s edict of late February stipulated that the destruction be supervised by the Taliban’s Ministries of Information and Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. By many accounts, a Taliban commander in Bamiyan oversaw the giant Buddhas’ demolition. But Osama bin Laden may have influenced Mullah Omar’s decision and members of al-Qaeda may have been involved in the destruction, with some sources suggesting that Arabs, Pakistanis and Chechens took charge when the ‘Afghan Taliban refused to do the job’. Bin Laden himself may have flown to Bamiyan to participate in ‘wrecking one of the statues’, using it for ‘shooting practice’. In a letter found on an al-Qaeda computer after 9/11, bin Laden congratulated Mullah Omar on his ‘success in destroying the dead, deaf and mute false idols’.
As usual, the Taliban wanted an audience At the start of 2000 they had invited CNN and al-Jazeera to open bureaus in Kabul—an opportunity for unprecedented reportage, though the Taliban retained the power to vet all stories. When al-Jazeera accepted, it became the one international television station with a permanent satellite link to Kabul and a reporter, Taysir Alony, based there. The result was two scoops. In January 2001, Alony secured the first footage of bin Laden in two years, at the wedding of one of his sons in Kandahar. It showed bin Laden beaming, full of life, when he had reputedly been suffering from kidney and liver disease. Two months later, the Taliban flew Alony to Bamiyan to record the end of the smaller Buddha—perhaps the first time such iconoclasm had been filmed.
Amir Shah, a Hazara from Bamiyan, also reported on this destruction. In the early 1980s as a teenager taxi driver in Kabul, Shah often got work driving westerners staying at the Intercontinental Hotel. By the early 1990s, he was ‘driver by appointment—and fixer par excellence’ for visiting journalists, photographers and cameramen. In 1997, Associated Press employed Shah as its driver and news assistant. In 1999, having mastered video recorders and still cameras, learned Pashto and improved his English, Shah became the first Afghan reporter at an international news agency, filing stories and taking photographs for Associated Press.
When the Taliban wanted even more coverage of their iconoclasm, Amir Shah was one of the journalists who provided it. First, the Taliban took a small group on a tour of the National Museum where a display of jezail firearms, wooden mortars and pestles and wooden screens, ancient pottery, and a limestone slab with Greek script highlighted the absence of the figures that the Taliban had smashed. Then the Taliban flew the journalists to Bamiyan so they could photograph and film its empty alcoves and a display of spent artillery shells outside the bigger one that demonstrated the force required to destroy its Buddha.
This destruction triggered unprecedented western criticism of the Taliban. Stories—almost certainly baseless—circulated that the Taliban had sent truckloads of fragments of the giant Buddhas from Bamiyan to Peshawar for sale. By other accounts, a few Japanese visitors to Bamiyan tried to purloin fragments but were apprehended by Taliban guards, who had begun protecting the shards. Other reports suggest that the destruction of the Buddhas spurred more foreigners—‘ten times that of the previous month’—to join the Taliban and al-Qaeda. A calendar published in Pakistan with Urdu text celebrated the Buddhas’ demolition.
Once the party led by Qudratullah Jamal left the museum, its staff immediately set about salvaging what they could of the Bodhisattva and the Nuristani figures, demonstrating their commitment to the museum’s collection. As a result, the Taliban’s destruction did not prove absolute, contrary to contemporaneous reports. Following 9/11, restorers put the fragments back together—more successfully with the Nuristani figures than the Bodhisattva—resulting in their renewed exhibition.
The Bactrian gold remained secure, as those familiar with it expected. In late 1996 Najibullah Popal, one of the tawildars or keyholders responsible for the museum’s collection who moved its greatest works to the central bank, told the New York Times that he had been ‘assured by Taliban leaders that the entire collection was still safe, in the vaults, and would remain there’. When rumours spread in 1998 that pieces of the gold were for sale in Pakistan, the Taliban responded that the seals on the trunks holding the gold were intact and they would not be opening them. In mid-2000 the Taliban reiterated the gold was there. After the Taliban fell, Juliette van Krieken, the first secretary of SPACH, confirmed that the trunks were ‘still in the underground vaults’. She explained: ‘For safety reasons, UNESCO intends to keep them there for the time being.’
Most journalists still treated the gold’s fate as a matter of ‘continuing uncertainty’, both before and after 9/11, and some archaeologists fuelled these tales by declaring they were ‘not optimistic’ about the gold’s survival and did not know if it was ‘still hidden away, or stolen, sold, or even melted down’. These stories proliferated partly because, just as no one wanted to credit President Najibullah with saving the gold by having it placed in the vault, no one wanted to acknowledge that the Taliban had chosen to leave it there. The idea of lost or looted treasure was also powerful. This myth-making laid the ground for a ‘rediscovery’ of the gold, said to have come about accidentally when the bank either was looking for more storage for
newly printed notes or was looking for some of its bullion. After the new Afghan government announced the gold’s survival in 2003, it opened the vault in 2004 in conjunction with National Geographic, which was the prime organiser and financial beneficiary when some of the gold went on tour.
A welter of new stories purported to explain the gold’s survival. These stories involved four, five, seven or perhaps even twelve tawildars and seven locks that required opening—or perhaps just one—with possibly all the keys necessary or again just one needed to open it. One version had President Najibullah as a keyholder until he died and his key disappeared. Another had the new government appoint a judge as a keyholder to substitute for those who were missing and dead. The irrelevance of the keys and keyholders in opening the vault did not matter. A blowtorch took just a few minutes. 20,457 of the original 21,618 pieces were there.
Omar Khan Massoudi, who began working at the museum in the late 1970s and became its director in 2001, received most acclaim. He was lauded as pivotal to the placement of the gold in the vault and as a keyholder who checked it was still intact without alerting the Taliban. When the Netherlands honoured Massoudi in 2004, the citation read, ‘When the Kabul Museum was bombed and looted in 1993, he inspired other members of staff to assist him in on-going evasive action to safeguard whatever was possible and to assess and record the damage. Taking extraordinary risks to preserve the most important items, secretly removing some to safe places and disguising others, he was directly responsible for saving a large proportion of what remains of the museums’ unique collections.’
Ameruddin Askerzai of the central bank was lauded too. The London Telegraph credited him with sealing the gold in the vault in 1989, refusing to reveal it to the Taliban despite being imprisoned and tortured for months, and deliberately breaking his key in the lock of the vault so the Taliban could not open it. The Economist told much the same story but gave Askerzai a nom de plume ‘for safety’s sake’. A few years later, when the Afghan government was about to honour him with a medal, the Wall Street Journal hailed Askerzai as ‘a forgotten hero’ who had ‘refused to be photographed or identified by name in accounts of how he thwarted the Taliban’s attempt to loot’ the gold.
Najibullah Popal had been the museum’s public face and voice in the 1990s. He was photographed with its shards when mujahideen began destroying and looting it. After the Hazara Wadhat seized control of the museum, SPACH lauded Popal for pedalling his bicycle through the fighting to discover what had become of its collection. At the end of the Rabbani government’s rule, he oversaw the removal of many of its surviving pieces to the Kabul Hotel. But following the fall of the Taliban, he was ignored, until the Guardian belatedly celebrated him as ‘The Man who helped save Afghanistan’s Treasures from Ravages of War’.
The real surprise involved the Begram ivories. When Nancy Dupree wrote about the museum in 1998, she knew that, apart from the Bactrian gold, the vaults contained ‘twenty boxes full of quality pieces removed from the museum before the mujahideen came to power… their contents still a mystery’. But Dupree had ‘no doubt’ that the Begram ivories had all been looted and were ‘on the international market’. While museum staff found 250 pieces in the museum in 1999, Carla Grissmann continued to believe the rest had been stolen. In fact, most of the remainder, including the best 700 pieces, were in twenty-five cases in the vaults but, because they were not gold, their rediscovery in 2003 excited little interest.
CHAPTER 26
Shocking Footage
Ariana Square, where the Taliban displayed the bodies of Najibullah and his brother, became the Taliban’s prime place in Kabul for hanging their political opponents so their executions would be as visible as possible. When school was out, the Taliban used the nearby soccer field of the Amani boys school to impose public punishments on a small number of civilians. But their favourite punishment ground was the Ghazi Stadium because it was always available, offered a better view and, by implementing the punishments before late afternoon games of soccer, they found it easier to attract crowds. In 1998, when these punishments peaked in Kabul, Saudi Arabia was the only country where there were more.
The Taliban let visiting photographers come as close as they wanted when Najibullah and Shahpur Ahmadzai hung in Ariana Square. Syed Haider Shah, a Pakistani reporter-photographer with Reuters, was first to arrive, having driven from Peshawar the day before so he could witness the Taliban taking Kabul. He photographed Najibullah and Shahpur Ahmadzai when the blood on Najibullah’s face was still fresh and his clothes were sodden. Then Shah rushed back to Peshawar to distribute his images.
Two other Pakistani reporter-photographers, Saaed Khan of Agence France-Presse and B. K. Bangash of Associated Press, were not far behind. When they reached Ariana Square, the blood on the bodies had dried and rigor mortis had set in. Because Khan and Bangash had satellite phones, they could transmit their images immediately without leaving Kabul. As their photographs reached the international press hours before those of Syed Haider Shah, they fuelled an international outcry. One by Bangash was widely published because it included a beaming Taliban embracing one of his fellows in the foreground. The London Observer reproduced it with the caption: ‘Bodies are swinging from poles. Medieval revenge and harsh Islamic justice have arrived in Kabul.’
The Taliban continued to allow photography, or failed to stop it, when they used Ariana Square for other political executions. While several of those killed were followers of Massoud accused of planting bombs around the city, others were members of the Taliban charged with taking payment from Massoud. Some were beaten, then hung from the square’s traffic-control post, much like Najibullah and his brother. Others were hung from cranes, often resulting in slow death by strangulation, a practice probably borrowed from Iran where the hanging in 1997 of the ‘Tehran Vampire’, a serial rapist and murderer, attracted particular attention. In one case, a crane made its way through Kabul’s streets, with a suspended corpse slowly swinging back and forth. Otherwise, the cranes stayed in the square.
The Taliban similarly allowed photography in December 1996 when they first used the Amani school’s soccer field as a punishment ground after confirming the Rabbani government’s conviction of a man for murdering a pregnant woman and her three daughters. The husband of the dead woman fired an automatic rifle from a distance of about twelve metres but failed to kill the murderer. He then shot the man at point-blank range in the field’s penalty box. More than two years later, when the Taliban used this ground again, a young man convicted of premarital sex was left writhing and screaming by a hundred lashes. The young woman was not punished because she was pregnant but, the Taliban announced, they would lash her once the baby was born and place it in an orphanage if the parents did not marry.
The Ghazi Stadium had been a battleground in the war between the mujahideen. When the Taliban took Kabul, it was pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel and its windows mostly broken. As with much of the city, it was also a site of landmines laid by the rival militias and of unexploded munitions. The Taliban began by using it for a parade by athletes, which the Taliban staged not only to celebrate their taking of the city but also to show they were not against sport, despite having initially banned soccer and kite-flying. Before long, with another small grant from the United Nations, the Taliban repaired the stadium and cleared it of the mines and munitions. Kabul’s first mini-marathon, initiated by the Taliban, finished there. A few days later, amputees from around the country—some with prosthetics, others on one leg and a crutch—took part in a soccer tournament staged to increase awareness of landmines.
The stadium’s main use was for football games between the able-bodied, which the Taliban came to allow, subject to many conditions. The players had to wear long-sleeved tops and cover their legs down to below the knees. The spectators could chant or shout only ‘Allahu Akbar!’, ‘Subhan Allah!’ or ‘Alhamdulillah!’, God is Great!, Praise be to God!, Thanks be to God! There was to be no clapping or cheering, which the
Taliban derided and banned as ‘foreign traditions’. Betting was banned too. Play stopped at prayer times. The games involved visiting teams and a long-standing twelve-club local league, consisting of mainly amateur players but including some professionals paid by the Taliban. The play was generally abysmal, Kate Clark of the BBC reported, but attracted crowds ‘most first division teams in the United Kingdom would die for’.
The Taliban arrested and confiscated the film of one foreign crew that had filmed a game at the Ghazi, but on other occasions they allowed news-agency photographers to record wheelchair players, wrestlers and buzkashi played before packed stands and an exhibition game of cricket played before no one. When the Taliban began imposing punishments at the stadium in 1998, they invited foreign journalists but barred them from using cameras and, on the whole, enforced this ban. Radio Sharia usually identified those to be punished and their crimes on Thursday evenings, then the Taliban carried out the punishments on Fridays, Islam’s holy day. A pivotal figure was Kabul’s governor, Mullah Manan Niazi, who announced the purging from government of ‘weak’ Taliban lacking the ‘courage’ to implement punishments: ‘We have a big backlog but the way is now clear. There are twenty-five unpunished cases of murder waiting for the death penalty and twelve cases of theft where the hands are going to be cut off.’