[Reader-list] Bamiyan

[S. Jabbar]

New Bamiyan Buddha find amid destruction

Nov 8, 2008

BAMIYAN, Afghanistan (AFP) ‹ "We got him!" screamed Afghan archaeologist
Anwar Khan Fayez as he leapt from the pit beneath the towering sandstone
cliffs, where the Bamiyan Buddhas once stood.

Seven years after Taliban militants blew up the two 1,500-year-old statues
in a fit of Islamist zealotry, a French-Afghan team in September uncovered a
new, 19-metre (62-foot) "Sleeping Buddha" buried in the earth.

The news that a third Buddha escaped the Taliban's wrath has caused
excitement in this scenic valley, where the caverns that housed the ruined
statues are an eerie reminder of Afghanistan's past and present woes.

"It was a happy moment for all of us when the first signs appeared. Our
years-long efforts had somehow paid off," Fayez told AFP.

The team, led by France-based archaeologist Zemaryalai Tarzi, made the find
while hunting for a lost 300-metre reclining Buddha mentioned in an account
by seventh-century Chinese monk Xuan Zang.

The Afghan-born Tarzi began mapping the site nearly 30 years ago but decades
of conflict and the rise of the 1996-2001 Taliban regime put the search on
hold.

Then in March 2001 came the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, until then
the world's largest standing Buddha statues.

Hewn into the cliffs in the sixth century by Buddhist pilgrims on the famed
Silk Route, the statues had survived attacks by several Muslim emperors down
the ages, while even Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan had spared them.

But with the backing of Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda movement, Taliban leader
Mullah Mohammad Omar declared that they were idols that were against Islamic
law.

Defying international appeals, the Taliban spent a month using first
anti-aircraft guns and then dynamite to obliterate them.

Saddened but with renewed determination, Tarzi and his team returned soon
after US-led forces and the Northern Alliance ousted the Taliban in late
2001 to renew their search for the giant missing Buddha.

What they found instead, in September this year, were parts of a previously
unknown, smaller Buddha figure, including a thumb, forefinger, palm, parts
of its arm, body and the bed on which it lay.

"This is the most significant find since we started here," Abdul Hameed
Jalia, the director of monuments and historical sites for Bamiyan province,
told AFP at the excavation site of the new 19-metre Buddha.

"At first they found part of the leg but they weren't sure what it was,"
said Jalia. "But when they found more, Mr Fayez screamed out of happiness
and ran to our office to find Mr Tarzi."

Fayez said the head and other parts were largely destroyed, possibly by Arab
invaders in the ninth century.

"We have not found the whole statue. But we can tell from other parts that
it appears to be 19-metres long," Fayez said.

The site has now been covered with earth to protect the Buddha from both the
ravages of the harsh Afghan winter and from the attention of antiquities
thieves.

Tarzi told AFP in an e-mail that he and a number of French colleagues aimed
to return next summer to dig out the rest of the statue.

Meanwhile, there are fresh clues about the 300-metre Buddha, officials say.

What appear to be the remnants of a gate complex that may have led to the
statue have been discovered under an apparently collapsed section of cliff
between the two holes left by the Taliban.

"Mr Tarzi's team has found signs that indicate that the big lying Buddha is
there and has 70 percent hopes that they will find it," said Najibullah
Harar, head of Bamiyan's information and culture department.

Amid hopes that they could one day be rebuilt, Afghan, Japanese and German
teams are also stabilising the sites of the destroyed statues -- the bigger
55-metre figure known as Salsal and the 38-metre statue known as Shahmama.

Boulder-sized chunks of the Buddhas still lie where they fell, each
individually labelled. Ghostly outlines of the two figures are still etched
in the rockface and twisted metal shell casings litter the ground.

Archaeologists' efforts have been helped by the fact that Bamiyan --
inhabited by Shia Muslims from the Hazara ethnic minority that was once
persecuted by the Taliban -- has been a relative oasis of calm.

But ongoing debate over whether to reconstruct the Buddhas reflects the
uncertainties that haunt post-Taliban Afghanistan.

"It is the desire and the wish of the Bamiyan people to see, if not both,
then at least one rebuilt," Habiba Sorabi, the governor of Bamiyan province,
told AFP in an interview at her office overlooking the statues.

Rebuilding the Buddhas could help foster a tourist industry in the
desperately poor region, which lies 200 kilometres (124 miles) northwest of
the relatively prosperous capital Kabul, she said.

UNESCO declared Bamiyan a World Heritage Site in 2003 and there have been
discussions with international partners about using the process of
anastylosis, by which ruined monuments are reassembled from old fragments
and new materials.

"But unfortunately the central government does not want to work on it,"
added Sorabi, who is the only female provincial governor in Afghanistan. "It
is a shame."