PARIS, June 6 – Afghanistan’s famed Buddha statues may have been reduced to dust by that country’s Taliban rulers but the memory of the giant figures lives on in Paris in a new exhibition organized by UNESCO.
Billed as a direct response to the smashing of the statues earlier this year, the exhibition celebrates Afghanistan’s cultural heritage, and features a photographic eulogy to the Buddhas.
The Taliban considered the statues, which were chiseled into a cliff in the central Bamiyan Valley more than 1,500 years ago, idolatrous and against the tenets of Islam and demolished them in March, despite an international outcry.
The Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization struggled to persuade the Taliban to spare the mammoth mountain carvings, sending a special envoy to the region to negotiate with the religious leaders. To no avail.
“The destruction by the Taliban of the pre-Islamic statuary … is a dreadful loss for the memory of
mankind,” UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura said in a statement to mark the opening on Tuesday of the exhibit.
UNESCO officials pledged to work with the Taliban to salvage remaining statues and other Afghan art.
“This is a reminder, telling us we should not fall victim to the sin of forgetting,” said Mounir Bouchenaki, UNESCO assistant director-general for culture. “We can’t reconstitute them, but thanks to the photos we can preserve their images.”
Among the exhibits is a pair of tall before-and-after photographs of the larger Buddha, which had towered 51 meters (170 feet) high.
The first photo shows the faceless, but largely intact Buddha in a picture taken in 1974. The second, taken in 2001, shows the crater and rubble left behind after the Taliban demolished the statue.
“This is really sad, that such a rich culture is being reduced to dust,” said visitor Alexander Plevako, a member of the Ukrainian delegation to UNESCO.
The exhibition features about 80 objects – mainly photographs, as well as fragments of other statues and a pair of carpets.
Photos of colorfully dressed children reading tattered books and a blue mosaic-covered mosque in the northern Afghan town of Mazar-i-Sharif sit alongside pictures of frescoes of a seated Buddha.
The exhibition, called “Heritage of Humanity – Beyond Destruction,” is co-sponsored by the permanent Japanese delegation to UNESCO and will run until June 29.
