Shaukat Qadir
Last Updated: Feb 17, 2011
On the verge of exit from Afghanistan, the US and its allies might be tempted to leave a Balkanised version of that country in their wake. The idea, championed by Robert Blackwill, a former US ambassador to India, is seen as something of an end game, where the country is divided along ethnic lines.
A divided Afghanistan, the thinking goes, would prevent a full-scale return of the Taliban by reducing its presence to the Pashtun-dominated south and, in the process, contain the threat. The presumedly peaceful north could embark on nation-building while military operations and counter-terrorism could continue in the south. It sounds simple. But is the analysis missing something?
The logic of a divided Afghanistan is based on three premises. First, there was no such country as Afghanistan until Russia and Britain decided to create it in 1893 as a buffer between the Russian and British empires. Second, Taliban support is confined to the Pashtun-dominated south. And last, a division along ethnic lines would be acceptable to all parties.
All three premises are appealing to consider - and all three are dead wrong.
The first premise is manifestly false. In 1747, Ahmed Shah Durrani began to carve out an empire covering almost all of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even though the Durrani empire had disintegrated by the late 19th century, the extension into the Indian sub-continent and Iran laid a regional framework tied to Afghanistan.
In fact, that political entity was only imperfectly divided by the British-imposed Durand Line in 1893, which drew an arbitrary division between Afghanistan and British India, along the border of present-day Pakistan. The political cohesion of the area was pulled apart by the Great Game rivalry between Britain and Russia, but Afghanistan has disputed the Durand Line since its creation.
The second premise of Balkanisation is also dangerously misleading. While the Taliban are entirely Pashtun, and the leader of the Quetta Shura, Mullah Mohammed Omar, hails from Kandahar in the south, neither Pashtuns nor Taliban support is confined there. Qunduz is a Pashtun-dominated region in the extreme north. The provinces of Logar, Nangarhar and Paktia immediately south and east of Kabul are Pashtun dominated. And west and north of Kabul, Jalalabad and the region bordering Pakistan is also Pashtun.
The bulk of the Hazara ethnic group lives in central Afghanistan, though they are a minority in every province. While Hazaras are almost exclusively Shiites and have often been discriminated against by Pashtun groups, predominantly Pashtun areas have historically hosted peoples of many religions including Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs and Parsis. The arrival of the Taliban, of course, changed this acceptance of this religious diversity.
Finally, the belief that Afghanistan would happily accept a state carved along ethnic divisions is also wrong. Despite the country's ethnic and religious diversity, there has always been a national character among Afghan people, who pride themselves on being Afghan first. Afghan Tajiks may dominate the region bordering Tajikistan, and Uzbeks near Uzbekistan, but they are all Afghans.
This sense of national identity has been bolstered by another factor that the Americans have perhaps overlooked. Afghans have a vested interest in a united country that can better exploit its mineral wealth and keeps intact the economic corridor that runs through Central Asia. While outsiders might not value the economic unity of the country, it should be the foundation of the country's future development. If divided, some of the constituent parts would quickly become economically inviable.
It remains to be seen what form Afghanistan will take after the United States and its allies make their exit. But that exit is on the horizon. As I have argued in previous articles, last month's visit of the US vice president Joe Biden and his return two days ago may signal a changing US strategy in the region. Mr Biden is the greatest proponent in Washington of a diminished US troop presence on the subcontinent, and his visits will be dealing with an exit strategy.
But regardless, events may outpace the Americans. The so-called Rabbani initiative, named for the Tajik veteran of the Afghan-Soviet war Burhanuddin Rabbani, proposes rapprochement with the Taliban in a framework that only includes Afghans. Obviously, that excludes America's hand from shaping the post-invasion order. Mr Rabbani made that proposal to the Pashtun jirga in Nangarhar
Just as the Americans are being pushed towards the exit, their plans for Afghanistan are becoming further irrelevant. Those who try to impose an outsider's solution on Afghanistan will be making the same mistakes of many wars past.
Brig Shaukat Qadir is a former Pakistani infantry officer
Source,
http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/comment/balkanisation-of-afghanistan-cuts-against-the-grain?pageCount=2
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
SBIFF 2011 Winners
Best Documentary Film Awardwent to The Boy Mir: Ten Years in Afghanistan,(US Premiere) directed by Phil Grabsky. Ten years in the making, this appealing documentary follows a young boy, Mir, from age 8 to 18, as he grows to adulthood with his family in rural Afghanistan. After the award-winning THE BOY WHO PLAYS ON THE BUDDHAS OF BAMIYAN (SBIFF, 2004) introduced 8-year-old Mir, the filmmakers returned to Afghanistan year after year. After the fall of the Taliban, Mir's family is at last able to leave the Bamiyan caves to return to their distant home in the desert north. It is a hardscrabble life. Mir helps to support the family, plowing and grazing the goats on seemingly leafless mountain slopes. His dreams of becoming a teacher-or even president!-are fading, but through it all he keeps his enthusiasm and his smile. THE BOY MIR: TEN YEARS IN AFGANISTAN reveals Afghanistan in the context of one family. It is a unique and poignant human-scaled portrait.
Source,
http://www.edhat.com/site/tidbit.cfm?nid=48474
Source,
http://www.edhat.com/site/tidbit.cfm?nid=48474
Lives intersect in 'Lipstick in Afghanistan'
Posted by Sharon Galligar Chance, Las Vegas Review-Journal guest reviewer
For Elsa Murphy, life growing up in her working-class neighborhood never has been easy, but a single swipe of lipstick could give her the confidence and courage she needs to make a difference in war-torn Afghanistan.
Roberta Gately’s debut novel, “Lipstick in Afghanistan,” is the fictionalized accounting of one woman’s unselfish devotion to her job as a nurse in a small mountain village in remote Afghanistan.
When packing for her assignment, Elsa makes sure she includes several tubes of lipstick that infuse her with poise and bravery, never dreaming that those simple tubes of color would change many lives. Elsa trained as an emergency room nurse in Boston, but nothing could have prepared her for the devastation she encounters in the small village of Bamiyan, Afghanistan.
Thrust into the job of managing the small medical clinic and supervising two local doctors, Elsa soon learns to love the humble people who need her care. She makes fast friends with local resident Parween, a young widow who bonds with the American nurse over their affection for lipstick and their overwhelming desire to make things better around them. Elsa also finds a love interest in Mike, a handsome American special forces solider, who is part of the unit assigned to protect Bamiyan from the Taliban.
As the war rages around them, all three lives change through love, friendship and understanding, but all three experience tragedy as well in a beautiful land torn apart by war.
Gately tells the story of Afghanistan in two voices with this fascinating, heart-wrenching novel. She presents Elsa’s story of an impoverished child who longs to make a difference in the world after seeing a magazine story about the genocide in Rwanda. Gately also tells Parween’s story of a charming young girl who marries young, is widowed young and desperately wants to keep her family safe from the evil influences of the Taliban. As their stories intersect, readers will be enthralled with the differences and similarities between the two young women.
Source,
http://www.lvrj.com/blogs/booknook/Lives_intersect_in_Lipstick_in_Afghanistan.html?ref=644
For Elsa Murphy, life growing up in her working-class neighborhood never has been easy, but a single swipe of lipstick could give her the confidence and courage she needs to make a difference in war-torn Afghanistan.
Roberta Gately’s debut novel, “Lipstick in Afghanistan,” is the fictionalized accounting of one woman’s unselfish devotion to her job as a nurse in a small mountain village in remote Afghanistan.
When packing for her assignment, Elsa makes sure she includes several tubes of lipstick that infuse her with poise and bravery, never dreaming that those simple tubes of color would change many lives. Elsa trained as an emergency room nurse in Boston, but nothing could have prepared her for the devastation she encounters in the small village of Bamiyan, Afghanistan.
Thrust into the job of managing the small medical clinic and supervising two local doctors, Elsa soon learns to love the humble people who need her care. She makes fast friends with local resident Parween, a young widow who bonds with the American nurse over their affection for lipstick and their overwhelming desire to make things better around them. Elsa also finds a love interest in Mike, a handsome American special forces solider, who is part of the unit assigned to protect Bamiyan from the Taliban.
As the war rages around them, all three lives change through love, friendship and understanding, but all three experience tragedy as well in a beautiful land torn apart by war.
Gately tells the story of Afghanistan in two voices with this fascinating, heart-wrenching novel. She presents Elsa’s story of an impoverished child who longs to make a difference in the world after seeing a magazine story about the genocide in Rwanda. Gately also tells Parween’s story of a charming young girl who marries young, is widowed young and desperately wants to keep her family safe from the evil influences of the Taliban. As their stories intersect, readers will be enthralled with the differences and similarities between the two young women.
Source,
http://www.lvrj.com/blogs/booknook/Lives_intersect_in_Lipstick_in_Afghanistan.html?ref=644
Monday, February 14, 2011
Searching for Buddha in Afghanistan
An archaeologist insists a third giant statue lies near the cliffs where the Bamiyan Buddhas, destroyed in 2001, once stood
By Joshua Hammer
Photographs by Alex Masi
Clad in a safari suit, sun hat, hiking boots and leather gloves, Zemaryalai Tarzi leads the way from his tent to a rectangular pit in the Bamiyan Valley of northern Afghanistan. Crenulated sandstone cliffs, honeycombed with man-made grottoes, loom above us. Two giant cavities about a half-mile apart in the rock face mark the sites where two huge sixth-century statues of the Buddha, destroyed a decade ago by the Taliban, stood for 1,500 years. At the base of the cliff lies the inner sanctum of a site Tarzi calls the Royal Monastery, an elaborate complex erected during the third century that contains corridors, esplanades and chambers where sacred objects were stored.
"We're looking at what used to be a chapel covered with murals," the 71-year-old archaeologist, peering into the pit, tells me. Rulers of the Buddhist kingdom—whose religion had taken root across the region along the Silk Road—made annual pilgrimages here to offer donations to the monks in return for their blessings. Then, in the eighth century, Islam came to the valley, and Buddhism began to wane. "In the third quarter of the ninth century, a Muslim conqueror destroyed everything—including the monastery," Tarzi says. "He gave Bamiyan the coup de grâce, but he couldn't destroy the giant Buddhas." Tarzi gazes toward the two empty niches, the one to the east 144 feet high and the one to the west 213 feet high. "It took the Taliban to do that."
The Buddhas of Bamiyan, carved out of the cliff's malleable rock, long presided over this peaceful valley, protected by its near impregnable position between the Hindu Kush mountains to the north and the Koh-i-Baba range to the south. The monumental figures survived the coming of Islam, the scourge of Muslim conqueror Yaqub ibn Layth Saffari, the invasion and annihilation of virtually the entire Bamiyan population by Mongol warriors led by Genghis Khan in A.D. 1221 and the British-Afghan wars of the 19th century. But they couldn't survive the development of modern weaponry or a fanatical brand of Islam that gained ascendancy in Afghanistan following the war between the Soviet Union and the mujahedeen in the 1980s: almost ten years ago, in March 2001, after being denounced by Taliban fanatics as "false idols," the statues were pulverized with high explosives and rocket fire. It was an act that generated worldwide outrage and endures as a symbol of mindless desecration and religious extremism.
From almost the first moment the Taliban were driven from power at the end of 2001, art historians, conservationists and others have dreamed of restoring the Buddhas. Tarzi, however, has another idea. Somewhere in the shadow of the niches, he believes, lies a third Buddha—a 1,000-foot-long reclining colossus built at roughly the same time as the standing giants. His belief is based on a description written 1,400 years ago by a Chinese monk, Xuanzang, who visited the kingdom for several weeks. Tarzi has spent seven years probing the ground beneath the niches in search of the fabled statue. He has uncovered seven monasteries, fragments of a 62-foot-long reclining Buddha and many pieces of pottery and other Buddhist relics.
But other scholars say the Chinese monk may have mistaken a rock formation for the sculpture or was confused about the Buddha's location. Even if the reclining Buddha once existed, some hypothesize that it crumbled into dust centuries ago. "The Nirvana Buddha"—so called because the sleeping Buddha is depicted as he was about to enter the transcendent state of Nirvana—"remains one of archaeology's greatest mysteries," says Kazuya Yamauchi, an archaeologist with the Japan Center for International Cooperation in Conservation, who has carried out his own search for it. "It is the dream of archaeologists to find it."
Time may be running out. Ever since U.S., coalition and Afghan Northern Alliance forces pushed the Taliban out of Afghanistan, remote Bamiyan—dominated by ethnic Hazaras who defied the Pashtun-dominated Taliban regime and suffered massacres at their hands—has been an oasis of tranquillity. But this past August, insurgents, likely Taliban, ambushed and killed a New Zealand soldier in northern Bamiyan—the first killing of a soldier in the province since the beginning of the war. "If the Taliban grows stronger elsewhere in Afghanistan, they could enter Bamiyan from different directions," says Habiba Sarabi, governor of Bamiyan province and the country's sole female provincial leader. Residents of Bamiyan—as well as archaeologists and conservationists—have lately been voicing the fear that even if new, reconstructed Buddhas rise in the niches, the Taliban would only blow them up again.
To visit Tarzi on his annual seven-week summer dig in Bamiyan, the photographer Alex Masi and I left Kabul at dawn in a Land Cruiser for a 140-mile, eight-hour journey on a dirt road on which an improvised explosive device had struck a U.N. convoy only days before. The first three hours, through Pashtun territory, were the riskiest. We drove without stopping, slumped low in our seats, wary of being recognized as foreigners. After snaking through a fertile river valley hemmed in by jagged granite and basalt peaks, we arrived at a suspension bridge marking the start of Hazara territory. "The security situation is now fine," our driver told us. "You can relax."
At the opening of the Bamiyan Valley, we passed a 19th-century mud fort and an asphalt road, part of a $200 million network under construction by the U.S. government and the Asian Development Bank. Then the valley widened to reveal a scene of breathtaking beauty: golden fields of wheat, interspersed with green plots of potato and bordered by the snowcapped, 18,000-foot peaks of the Hindu Kush and stark sandstone cliffs to the north. Finally we came over a rise and got our first look at the gaping cavities where the giant Buddhas once stood.
The vista was probably not much different from that which greeted Xuanzang, the monk who had left his home in eastern China in A.D. 629 and followed the Silk Road west across the Taklamakan Desert, arriving in Bamiyan several years later. Xuanzang was welcomed into a prosperous Buddhist enclave that had existed for some 500 years. There, cut from the cliffs, stood the greatest of the kingdom's symbols: a 180-foot-tall western Buddha and its smaller 125-foot-tall eastern counterpart—both gilded, decorated with lapis lazuli and surrounded by colorful frescoes depicting the heavens. The statues wore masks of wood and clay that in the moonlight conveyed the impression of glowing eyes, perhaps because they were embedded with rubies. Their bodies were draped in stucco tunics of a style worn by soldiers of Alexander the Great, who had passed through the region on his march to the Khyber Pass almost 1,000 years before. "[Their] golden hues sparkle on every side, and [their] precious ornaments dazzle the eyes by their brightness," wrote Xuanzang.
A member of a branch of Afghanistan's royal family, Tarzi first visited the Buddhas as an archaeology student in 1967. (He would earn a degree from the University of Strasbourg, in France, and become a prominent art historian and archaeologist in Kabul.) During the next decade, he returned to Bamiyan repeatedly to survey restoration work; the masks and some of the stucco garments had eroded away or been looted centuries earlier; the Buddhas were also crumbling.
"I visited every square inch of Bamiyan," he told me. It was during this time, he said, that he became convinced, based on Xuanzang's description, of the existence of a third Buddha. The monk mentioned a second monastery, in addition to the Royal Monastery, which is near the western Buddha. Inside it, he wrote, "there is a figure of Buddha lying in a sleeping position, as when he attained Nirvana. The figure is in length about 1,000 feet or so."
In 1978, a coup led by radical Marxists assassinated Afghanistan's first president; Tarzi's search for the sleeping Buddha was put on hold. Believing his life was in danger, Tarzi fled the country. "I left for Paris and became a refugee," he told me. He worked as a waiter in a restaurant in Strasbourg, married twice and had three children—daughters Nadia and Carole, and son David. Tarzi began teaching archaeology and became a full professor at the University of Strasbourg.
Back in Bamiyan, trouble was brewing. After several failed attempts to conquer the province, Taliban forces cut deals with Tajik and Hazara military leaders and marched in unopposed in September 1998. Many Hazara fled just ahead of the occupation. My interpreter, Ali Raza, a 26-year-old Hazara who grew up in the shadow of the eastern Buddha and played among the giant statues as a child, remembers his father calling the family together one afternoon. "He said, 'You must collect your clothes; we have to move as soon as possible, because the Taliban have arrived. If they don't kill us, we will be lucky.'" They gathered their mules and set out on foot, hiking south over snowy mountain passes to neighboring Maidan Wardak province; Raza later fled to Iran. The family didn't return home for five years.
In February 2001, Al Qaeda-supporting Taliban radicals, having won a power struggle with moderates, condemned the Buddhas as "idolatrous" and "un-Islamic" and announced their intention to destroy them. Last-ditch pleas by world leaders to Mullah Omar, the Taliban's reclusive, one-eyed leader, failed. During the next month, the Taliban—with the help of Arab munitions experts—used artillery shells and high explosives to destroy both figures. A Hazara construction worker I'll call Abdul, whom I met outside an unfinished mosque in the hills above Bamiyan, told me that the Taliban had conscripted him and 30 other Hazaras to lay plastic explosives on the ground beneath the larger Buddha's feet. It took three weeks to bring down the statue, Abdul told me. Then "the Taliban celebrated by slaughtering nine cows." Koichiro Matsuura, the head of UNESCO, the U.N.'s cultural organization, declared it "abominable to witness the cold and calculated destruction of cultural properties which were the heritage of...the whole of humanity." U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell deemed it a "tragedy."
Tarzi was in Strasbourg when he heard the news. "I watched it on television, and I said, 'This is not possible. Lamentable,'" he said.
Over lunch in the house he rents each summer in Bamiyan, he recounted the campaign he waged to return to Afghanistan after U.S. Special Forces and the Northern Alliance drove Osama bin Laden's protectors from power. In 2002, with the help of acquaintances such as the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, Tarzi persuaded the French government to give him funding (it has ranged from the equivalent of $40,000 to $50,000 a year) to search for the third Buddha. He flew to Bamiyan in July of that year and announced to a fiercely territorial warlord who had taken charge of the area that he planned to begin excavations. Tarzi was ordered to leave at once. "There was no real government in place, and I had nothing in writing. [Afghan] President [Hamid] Karzai wasn't aware of the mission. So I went back to France." The following year, Tarzi returned to Kabul, where Karzai received him warmly and gave a personal guarantee of safe passage.
Clad in a safari suit, sun hat, hiking boots and leather gloves, Zemaryalai Tarzi leads the way from his tent to a rectangular pit in the Bamiyan Valley of northern Afghanistan. Crenulated sandstone cliffs, honeycombed with man-made grottoes, loom above us. Two giant cavities about a half-mile apart in the rock face mark the sites where two huge sixth-century statues of the Buddha, destroyed a decade ago by the Taliban, stood for 1,500 years. At the base of the cliff lies the inner sanctum of a site Tarzi calls the Royal Monastery, an elaborate complex erected during the third century that contains corridors, esplanades and chambers where sacred objects were stored.
"We're looking at what used to be a chapel covered with murals," the 71-year-old archaeologist, peering into the pit, tells me. Rulers of the Buddhist kingdom—whose religion had taken root across the region along the Silk Road—made annual pilgrimages here to offer donations to the monks in return for their blessings. Then, in the eighth century, Islam came to the valley, and Buddhism began to wane. "In the third quarter of the ninth century, a Muslim conqueror destroyed everything—including the monastery," Tarzi says. "He gave Bamiyan the coup de grâce, but he couldn't destroy the giant Buddhas." Tarzi gazes toward the two empty niches, the one to the east 144 feet high and the one to the west 213 feet high. "It took the Taliban to do that."
The Buddhas of Bamiyan, carved out of the cliff's malleable rock, long presided over this peaceful valley, protected by its near impregnable position between the Hindu Kush mountains to the north and the Koh-i-Baba range to the south. The monumental figures survived the coming of Islam, the scourge of Muslim conqueror Yaqub ibn Layth Saffari, the invasion and annihilation of virtually the entire Bamiyan population by Mongol warriors led by Genghis Khan in A.D. 1221 and the British-Afghan wars of the 19th century. But they couldn't survive the development of modern weaponry or a fanatical brand of Islam that gained ascendancy in Afghanistan following the war between the Soviet Union and the mujahedeen in the 1980s: almost ten years ago, in March 2001, after being denounced by Taliban fanatics as "false idols," the statues were pulverized with high explosives and rocket fire. It was an act that generated worldwide outrage and endures as a symbol of mindless desecration and religious extremism.
From almost the first moment the Taliban were driven from power at the end of 2001, art historians, conservationists and others have dreamed of restoring the Buddhas. Tarzi, however, has another idea. Somewhere in the shadow of the niches, he believes, lies a third Buddha—a 1,000-foot-long reclining colossus built at roughly the same time as the standing giants. His belief is based on a description written 1,400 years ago by a Chinese monk, Xuanzang, who visited the kingdom for several weeks. Tarzi has spent seven years probing the ground beneath the niches in search of the fabled statue. He has uncovered seven monasteries, fragments of a 62-foot-long reclining Buddha and many pieces of pottery and other Buddhist relics.
But other scholars say the Chinese monk may have mistaken a rock formation for the sculpture or was confused about the Buddha's location. Even if the reclining Buddha once existed, some hypothesize that it crumbled into dust centuries ago. "The Nirvana Buddha"—so called because the sleeping Buddha is depicted as he was about to enter the transcendent state of Nirvana—"remains one of archaeology's greatest mysteries," says Kazuya Yamauchi, an archaeologist with the Japan Center for International Cooperation in Conservation, who has carried out his own search for it. "It is the dream of archaeologists to find it."
Time may be running out. Ever since U.S., coalition and Afghan Northern Alliance forces pushed the Taliban out of Afghanistan, remote Bamiyan—dominated by ethnic Hazaras who defied the Pashtun-dominated Taliban regime and suffered massacres at their hands—has been an oasis of tranquillity. But this past August, insurgents, likely Taliban, ambushed and killed a New Zealand soldier in northern Bamiyan—the first killing of a soldier in the province since the beginning of the war. "If the Taliban grows stronger elsewhere in Afghanistan, they could enter Bamiyan from different directions," says Habiba Sarabi, governor of Bamiyan province and the country's sole female provincial leader. Residents of Bamiyan—as well as archaeologists and conservationists—have lately been voicing the fear that even if new, reconstructed Buddhas rise in the niches, the Taliban would only blow them up again.
To visit Tarzi on his annual seven-week summer dig in Bamiyan, the photographer Alex Masi and I left Kabul at dawn in a Land Cruiser for a 140-mile, eight-hour journey on a dirt road on which an improvised explosive device had struck a U.N. convoy only days before. The first three hours, through Pashtun territory, were the riskiest. We drove without stopping, slumped low in our seats, wary of being recognized as foreigners. After snaking through a fertile river valley hemmed in by jagged granite and basalt peaks, we arrived at a suspension bridge marking the start of Hazara territory. "The security situation is now fine," our driver told us. "You can relax."
At the opening of the Bamiyan Valley, we passed a 19th-century mud fort and an asphalt road, part of a $200 million network under construction by the U.S. government and the Asian Development Bank. Then the valley widened to reveal a scene of breathtaking beauty: golden fields of wheat, interspersed with green plots of potato and bordered by the snowcapped, 18,000-foot peaks of the Hindu Kush and stark sandstone cliffs to the north. Finally we came over a rise and got our first look at the gaping cavities where the giant Buddhas once stood.
The vista was probably not much different from that which greeted Xuanzang, the monk who had left his home in eastern China in A.D. 629 and followed the Silk Road west across the Taklamakan Desert, arriving in Bamiyan several years later. Xuanzang was welcomed into a prosperous Buddhist enclave that had existed for some 500 years. There, cut from the cliffs, stood the greatest of the kingdom's symbols: a 180-foot-tall western Buddha and its smaller 125-foot-tall eastern counterpart—both gilded, decorated with lapis lazuli and surrounded by colorful frescoes depicting the heavens. The statues wore masks of wood and clay that in the moonlight conveyed the impression of glowing eyes, perhaps because they were embedded with rubies. Their bodies were draped in stucco tunics of a style worn by soldiers of Alexander the Great, who had passed through the region on his march to the Khyber Pass almost 1,000 years before. "[Their] golden hues sparkle on every side, and [their] precious ornaments dazzle the eyes by their brightness," wrote Xuanzang.
A member of a branch of Afghanistan's royal family, Tarzi first visited the Buddhas as an archaeology student in 1967. (He would earn a degree from the University of Strasbourg, in France, and become a prominent art historian and archaeologist in Kabul.) During the next decade, he returned to Bamiyan repeatedly to survey restoration work; the masks and some of the stucco garments had eroded away or been looted centuries earlier; the Buddhas were also crumbling.
"I visited every square inch of Bamiyan," he told me. It was during this time, he said, that he became convinced, based on Xuanzang's description, of the existence of a third Buddha. The monk mentioned a second monastery, in addition to the Royal Monastery, which is near the western Buddha. Inside it, he wrote, "there is a figure of Buddha lying in a sleeping position, as when he attained Nirvana. The figure is in length about 1,000 feet or so."
In 1978, a coup led by radical Marxists assassinated Afghanistan's first president; Tarzi's search for the sleeping Buddha was put on hold. Believing his life was in danger, Tarzi fled the country. "I left for Paris and became a refugee," he told me. He worked as a waiter in a restaurant in Strasbourg, married twice and had three children—daughters Nadia and Carole, and son David. Tarzi began teaching archaeology and became a full professor at the University of Strasbourg.
Back in Bamiyan, trouble was brewing. After several failed attempts to conquer the province, Taliban forces cut deals with Tajik and Hazara military leaders and marched in unopposed in September 1998. Many Hazara fled just ahead of the occupation. My interpreter, Ali Raza, a 26-year-old Hazara who grew up in the shadow of the eastern Buddha and played among the giant statues as a child, remembers his father calling the family together one afternoon. "He said, 'You must collect your clothes; we have to move as soon as possible, because the Taliban have arrived. If they don't kill us, we will be lucky.'" They gathered their mules and set out on foot, hiking south over snowy mountain passes to neighboring Maidan Wardak province; Raza later fled to Iran. The family didn't return home for five years.
In February 2001, Al Qaeda-supporting Taliban radicals, having won a power struggle with moderates, condemned the Buddhas as "idolatrous" and "un-Islamic" and announced their intention to destroy them. Last-ditch pleas by world leaders to Mullah Omar, the Taliban's reclusive, one-eyed leader, failed. During the next month, the Taliban—with the help of Arab munitions experts—used artillery shells and high explosives to destroy both figures. A Hazara construction worker I'll call Abdul, whom I met outside an unfinished mosque in the hills above Bamiyan, told me that the Taliban had conscripted him and 30 other Hazaras to lay plastic explosives on the ground beneath the larger Buddha's feet. It took three weeks to bring down the statue, Abdul told me. Then "the Taliban celebrated by slaughtering nine cows." Koichiro Matsuura, the head of UNESCO, the U.N.'s cultural organization, declared it "abominable to witness the cold and calculated destruction of cultural properties which were the heritage of...the whole of humanity." U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell deemed it a "tragedy."
Tarzi was in Strasbourg when he heard the news. "I watched it on television, and I said, 'This is not possible. Lamentable,'" he said.
Over lunch in the house he rents each summer in Bamiyan, he recounted the campaign he waged to return to Afghanistan after U.S. Special Forces and the Northern Alliance drove Osama bin Laden's protectors from power. In 2002, with the help of acquaintances such as the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, Tarzi persuaded the French government to give him funding (it has ranged from the equivalent of $40,000 to $50,000 a year) to search for the third Buddha. He flew to Bamiyan in July of that year and announced to a fiercely territorial warlord who had taken charge of the area that he planned to begin excavations. Tarzi was ordered to leave at once. "There was no real government in place, and I had nothing in writing. [Afghan] President [Hamid] Karzai wasn't aware of the mission. So I went back to France." The following year, Tarzi returned to Kabul, where Karzai received him warmly and gave a personal guarantee of safe passage.
One morning, I joined Tarzi in a tent beside the excavation site; we walked along a gully where some digging was going on. During his first excavation, in 2003, he told me with a touch of bravado, "The valley was filled with mines, but I wasn't afraid. I said, 'Follow me, and if I explode, you can take a different route.' And I took out a lot of mines myself, before the de-mining teams came here." Tarzi stopped before a second excavation pit and called to one of his diggers, a thin, bearded Hazara man who walked with a slight limp. The man, Tarzi told me, had lost both legs to a mine five years ago. "He was blown up just above where we're standing now, next to the giant Buddha," he added, as I shifted nervously. "We fitted him with prostheses, and he went back to work."
The archaeologist and I climbed into a minibus and drove to a second excavation site, just below the eastern niche where the smaller Buddha stood. He halted before the ruins of a seventh-century stupa, or relic chamber, a heap of clay and conglomerate rock. "This is where we started digging back in 2003, because the stupa was already exposed," Tarzi said. "It corresponded with Xuanzang's description, 'east of the Royal Monastery.' I thought at the beginning that the Buddha would be lying here, underneath the wheat fields. So I dug here, and I found a lot of ceramics, sculptures, but no Buddha."
Tarzi now gazed at the stupa with dismay. The 1,400-year-old ruin was covered with socks, shirts, pants and underwear, laundry laid out to dry by families living in nearby grottoes. "Please take a picture of the laundry drying on top of my stupa," he told one of the five University of Strasbourg graduate students who had joined him for the summer. Tarzi turned toward the cliff face, scanning the rough ground at its base. "If the great Buddha exists," he said, "it's there, at the foot of the great cliffs."
Not everyone is convinced. To be sure, Xuanzang's account is widely accepted. "He was remarkably accurate," says Nancy Dupree, an American expert on Afghan art and culture who has lived in Kabul for five decades. "The fact that he mentioned it means that there must have been something there." Kosaku Maeda, a retired professor of archaeology in Tokyo and one of the world's leading experts on the Bamiyan Valley, agrees that the monk probably did see a Sleeping Buddha. But Maeda believes that the figure, which was likely made of clay, would have crumbled into dust centuries ago. "If you think of a 1,000-foot-long reclining Buddha, then it would require 100 to 130 feet in height," he said. "You should see such a hill. But there is nothing." Kazuya Yamauchi, the Japanese archaeologist, believes Xuanzang's description of the figure's location is ambiguous. He contends it lies in a different part of the valley, Shari-i-Gholghola, or the "City of Screams," where the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan massacred thousands of inhabitants.
A short while after my outing with Tarzi, I climbed up some rickety metal scaffolding inside the eastern niche with Bert Praxenthaler, a Munich-based art historian and sculptor from the International Council on Monuments and Sites, a nongovernmental organization that receives UNESCO funding to shore up the niche walls, which were badly damaged by the Taliban blasts. In one of his first visits here some years ago, Praxenthaler recalls, he was rappelling inside the niche when he realized it was about to cave in. "It is just mud and pebbles baked together over millions of years," he said. "It lacks a natural cement, so the stone is rather weak. One slight earthquake would have destroyed everything." Praxenthaler and his team pumped 20 tons of mortar into cracks and fissures in the niche, then drilled dozens of long steel rods into the walls to support it."They are now stable," he said. Pointing to some faint smudges on the rough wall, he added: "You can see traces of the fingers of Buddhist workers, from 1,500 years ago." Praxenthaler's work led him to some serendipitous discoveries, including a tiny fabric bag—"closed with rope and sealed with two stamps"—concealed in a crevice behind the giant Buddha at the time it was constructed. "We still haven't opened it yet," he told me. "We think there is a Buddhist relic inside." (Praxenthaler is organizing a research project that will examine the presumably fragile contents.)
Preservation of the niches—work on the western one is scheduled to begin soon—is the first step, Praxenthaler said, in what many hope will be the reconstitution of the destroyed statues. During the past decade, conservationists, artists and others have floated many proposals, ranging from constructing concrete replicas to leaving the niches empty. Hiro Yamagata, a Japanese artist based in California, suggested that laser images of the Buddhas be projected onto the cliff face—an idea later abandoned as too costly and impractical.
For his part, Praxenthaler supports a method known as anastylosis, which involves combining surviving pieces of the Buddhas with modern materials. "It would be a fragmented Buddha, with gaps and holes, and later, they could fill in the gaps in a suitable way," he said. This approach has gathered strong backing from Governor Sarabi, as well as from archaeologists and art conservators, but it may not be feasible: most of the original Buddhas were pulverized, leaving only a few recognizable fragments. In addition, few Afghan officials think it politically wise, given the Islamic fervor and xenophobic sentiment of much of the country, especially among the Pashtun, to embrace a project celebrating the country's Buddhist past. "Conservation is OK, but at the moment they are critical about what smells like rebuilding the Buddha," Praxenthaler said. Others, including Tarzi, believe the niches should remain empty. New Buddhas, says Nancy Dupree, would turn Bamiyan into "an amusement park, and it would be a desecration to the artists who created the originals. The empty niches have a poignancy all their own." Tarzi agrees. "Leave the two Buddha niches as two pages of history," he told me, "so that future generations will know that at a certain moment, folly triumphed over reason in Afghanistan."
The funding that Tarzi currently gets from the French government allows him and his graduate students to fly from Strasbourg to Bamiyan each July, pay the rent on his house and employ guards and a digging team. He says he has been under no pressure to hasten his search, but the longer the work continues, the greater the likelihood his benefactors will run out of patience. "I've discovered sculptures, I've discovered the stupa, I've discovered the monasteries, I've developed a panorama of Bamiyan civilization from the first century to the arrival of Genghis Khan," he says. "The scientific results have been good."
Tarzi also continues to enjoy support from Afghan officials and many of his peers. "Tarzi is a well-educated, experienced Afghan archaeologist, and we need as many of those as we can get," says Brendan Cassar, the Kabul-based cultural specialist for UNESCO, which declared Bamiyan a World Heritage site in 2003. Nancy Dupree told me that Tarzi "wants to return something to Afghans to bolster their confidence and their belief [in the power of] their heritage. It's more than archaeology for him." But his ultimate goal, she fears, may never be realized. "What he has done is not to be sniffed at, he's found things there, but whether he will find the reclining Buddha, I really doubt."
After seven years of searching, even Tarzi has begun to hedge his bets. "I still have hope," he told me as we walked through irrigated fields of potatoes at the edge of his eastern excavations. "But I'm getting older—and weaker. Another three years, then I'll be finished."
Joshua Hammer reports from his base in Berlin. Photographer Alex Masi travels the world on assignment from London.
One morning, I joined Tarzi in a tent beside the excavation site; we walked along a gully where some digging was going on. During his first excavation, in 2003, he told me with a touch of bravado, "The valley was filled with mines, but I wasn't afraid. I said, 'Follow me, and if I explode, you can take a different route.' And I took out a lot of mines myself, before the de-mining teams came here." Tarzi stopped before a second excavation pit and called to one of his diggers, a thin, bearded Hazara man who walked with a slight limp. The man, Tarzi told me, had lost both legs to a mine five years ago. "He was blown up just above where we're standing now, next to the giant Buddha," he added, as I shifted nervously. "We fitted him with prostheses, and he went back to work."
The archaeologist and I climbed into a minibus and drove to a second excavation site, just below the eastern niche where the smaller Buddha stood. He halted before the ruins of a seventh-century stupa, or relic chamber, a heap of clay and conglomerate rock. "This is where we started digging back in 2003, because the stupa was already exposed," Tarzi said. "It corresponded with Xuanzang's description, 'east of the Royal Monastery.' I thought at the beginning that the Buddha would be lying here, underneath the wheat fields. So I dug here, and I found a lot of ceramics, sculptures, but no Buddha."
Tarzi now gazed at the stupa with dismay. The 1,400-year-old ruin was covered with socks, shirts, pants and underwear, laundry laid out to dry by families living in nearby grottoes. "Please take a picture of the laundry drying on top of my stupa," he told one of the five University of Strasbourg graduate students who had joined him for the summer. Tarzi turned toward the cliff face, scanning the rough ground at its base. "If the great Buddha exists," he said, "it's there, at the foot of the great cliffs."
Not everyone is convinced. To be sure, Xuanzang's account is widely accepted. "He was remarkably accurate," says Nancy Dupree, an American expert on Afghan art and culture who has lived in Kabul for five decades. "The fact that he mentioned it means that there must have been something there." Kosaku Maeda, a retired professor of archaeology in Tokyo and one of the world's leading experts on the Bamiyan Valley, agrees that the monk probably did see a Sleeping Buddha. But Maeda believes that the figure, which was likely made of clay, would have crumbled into dust centuries ago. "If you think of a 1,000-foot-long reclining Buddha, then it would require 100 to 130 feet in height," he said. "You should see such a hill. But there is nothing." Kazuya Yamauchi, the Japanese archaeologist, believes Xuanzang's description of the figure's location is ambiguous. He contends it lies in a different part of the valley, Shari-i-Gholghola, or the "City of Screams," where the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan massacred thousands of inhabitants.
A short while after my outing with Tarzi, I climbed up some rickety metal scaffolding inside the eastern niche with Bert Praxenthaler, a Munich-based art historian and sculptor from the International Council on Monuments and Sites, a nongovernmental organization that receives UNESCO funding to shore up the niche walls, which were badly damaged by the Taliban blasts. In one of his first visits here some years ago, Praxenthaler recalls, he was rappelling inside the niche when he realized it was about to cave in. "It is just mud and pebbles baked together over millions of years," he said. "It lacks a natural cement, so the stone is rather weak. One slight earthquake would have destroyed everything." Praxenthaler and his team pumped 20 tons of mortar into cracks and fissures in the niche, then drilled dozens of long steel rods into the walls to support it."They are now stable," he said. Pointing to some faint smudges on the rough wall, he added: "You can see traces of the fingers of Buddhist workers, from 1,500 years ago." Praxenthaler's work led him to some serendipitous discoveries, including a tiny fabric bag—"closed with rope and sealed with two stamps"—concealed in a crevice behind the giant Buddha at the time it was constructed. "We still haven't opened it yet," he told me. "We think there is a Buddhist relic inside." (Praxenthaler is organizing a research project that will examine the presumably fragile contents.)
Preservation of the niches—work on the western one is scheduled to begin soon—is the first step, Praxenthaler said, in what many hope will be the reconstitution of the destroyed statues. During the past decade, conservationists, artists and others have floated many proposals, ranging from constructing concrete replicas to leaving the niches empty. Hiro Yamagata, a Japanese artist based in California, suggested that laser images of the Buddhas be projected onto the cliff face—an idea later abandoned as too costly and impractical.
For his part, Praxenthaler supports a method known as anastylosis, which involves combining surviving pieces of the Buddhas with modern materials. "It would be a fragmented Buddha, with gaps and holes, and later, they could fill in the gaps in a suitable way," he said. This approach has gathered strong backing from Governor Sarabi, as well as from archaeologists and art conservators, but it may not be feasible: most of the original Buddhas were pulverized, leaving only a few recognizable fragments. In addition, few Afghan officials think it politically wise, given the Islamic fervor and xenophobic sentiment of much of the country, especially among the Pashtun, to embrace a project celebrating the country's Buddhist past. "Conservation is OK, but at the moment they are critical about what smells like rebuilding the Buddha," Praxenthaler said. Others, including Tarzi, believe the niches should remain empty. New Buddhas, says Nancy Dupree, would turn Bamiyan into "an amusement park, and it would be a desecration to the artists who created the originals. The empty niches have a poignancy all their own." Tarzi agrees. "Leave the two Buddha niches as two pages of history," he told me, "so that future generations will know that at a certain moment, folly triumphed over reason in Afghanistan."
The funding that Tarzi currently gets from the French government allows him and his graduate students to fly from Strasbourg to Bamiyan each July, pay the rent on his house and employ guards and a digging team. He says he has been under no pressure to hasten his search, but the longer the work continues, the greater the likelihood his benefactors will run out of patience. "I've discovered sculptures, I've discovered the stupa, I've discovered the monasteries, I've developed a panorama of Bamiyan civilization from the first century to the arrival of Genghis Khan," he says. "The scientific results have been good."
Clad in a safari suit, sun hat, hiking boots and leather gloves, Zemaryalai Tarzi leads the way from his tent to a rectangular pit in the Bamiyan Valley of northern Afghanistan. Crenulated sandstone cliffs, honeycombed with man-made grottoes, loom above us. Two giant cavities about a half-mile apart in the rock face mark the sites where two huge sixth-century statues of the Buddha, destroyed a decade ago by the Taliban, stood for 1,500 years. At the base of the cliff lies the inner sanctum of a site Tarzi calls the Royal Monastery, an elaborate complex erected during the third century that contains corridors, esplanades and chambers where sacred objects were stored.
"We're looking at what used to be a chapel covered with murals," the 71-year-old archaeologist, peering into the pit, tells me. Rulers of the Buddhist kingdom—whose religion had taken root across the region along the Silk Road—made annual pilgrimages here to offer donations to the monks in return for their blessings. Then, in the eighth century, Islam came to the valley, and Buddhism began to wane. "In the third quarter of the ninth century, a Muslim conqueror destroyed everything—including the monastery," Tarzi says. "He gave Bamiyan the coup de grâce, but he couldn't destroy the giant Buddhas." Tarzi gazes toward the two empty niches, the one to the east 144 feet high and the one to the west 213 feet high. "It took the Taliban to do that."
The Buddhas of Bamiyan, carved out of the cliff's malleable rock, long presided over this peaceful valley, protected by its near impregnable position between the Hindu Kush mountains to the north and the Koh-i-Baba range to the south. The monumental figures survived the coming of Islam, the scourge of Muslim conqueror Yaqub ibn Layth Saffari, the invasion and annihilation of virtually the entire Bamiyan population by Mongol warriors led by Genghis Khan in A.D. 1221 and the British-Afghan wars of the 19th century. But they couldn't survive the development of modern weaponry or a fanatical brand of Islam that gained ascendancy in Afghanistan following the war between the Soviet Union and the mujahedeen in the 1980s: almost ten years ago, in March 2001, after being denounced by Taliban fanatics as "false idols," the statues were pulverized with high explosives and rocket fire. It was an act that generated worldwide outrage and endures as a symbol of mindless desecration and religious extremism.
From almost the first moment the Taliban were driven from power at the end of 2001, art historians, conservationists and others have dreamed of restoring the Buddhas. Tarzi, however, has another idea. Somewhere in the shadow of the niches, he believes, lies a third Buddha—a 1,000-foot-long reclining colossus built at roughly the same time as the standing giants. His belief is based on a description written 1,400 years ago by a Chinese monk, Xuanzang, who visited the kingdom for several weeks. Tarzi has spent seven years probing the ground beneath the niches in search of the fabled statue. He has uncovered seven monasteries, fragments of a 62-foot-long reclining Buddha and many pieces of pottery and other Buddhist relics.
But other scholars say the Chinese monk may have mistaken a rock formation for the sculpture or was confused about the Buddha's location. Even if the reclining Buddha once existed, some hypothesize that it crumbled into dust centuries ago. "The Nirvana Buddha"—so called because the sleeping Buddha is depicted as he was about to enter the transcendent state of Nirvana—"remains one of archaeology's greatest mysteries," says Kazuya Yamauchi, an archaeologist with the Japan Center for International Cooperation in Conservation, who has carried out his own search for it. "It is the dream of archaeologists to find it."
Time may be running out. Ever since U.S., coalition and Afghan Northern Alliance forces pushed the Taliban out of Afghanistan, remote Bamiyan—dominated by ethnic Hazaras who defied the Pashtun-dominated Taliban regime and suffered massacres at their hands—has been an oasis of tranquillity. But this past August, insurgents, likely Taliban, ambushed and killed a New Zealand soldier in northern Bamiyan—the first killing of a soldier in the province since the beginning of the war. "If the Taliban grows stronger elsewhere in Afghanistan, they could enter Bamiyan from different directions," says Habiba Sarabi, governor of Bamiyan province and the country's sole female provincial leader. Residents of Bamiyan—as well as archaeologists and conservationists—have lately been voicing the fear that even if new, reconstructed Buddhas rise in the niches, the Taliban would only blow them up again.
To visit Tarzi on his annual seven-week summer dig in Bamiyan, the photographer Alex Masi and I left Kabul at dawn in a Land Cruiser for a 140-mile, eight-hour journey on a dirt road on which an improvised explosive device had struck a U.N. convoy only days before. The first three hours, through Pashtun territory, were the riskiest. We drove without stopping, slumped low in our seats, wary of being recognized as foreigners. After snaking through a fertile river valley hemmed in by jagged granite and basalt peaks, we arrived at a suspension bridge marking the start of Hazara territory. "The security situation is now fine," our driver told us. "You can relax."
At the opening of the Bamiyan Valley, we passed a 19th-century mud fort and an asphalt road, part of a $200 million network under construction by the U.S. government and the Asian Development Bank. Then the valley widened to reveal a scene of breathtaking beauty: golden fields of wheat, interspersed with green plots of potato and bordered by the snowcapped, 18,000-foot peaks of the Hindu Kush and stark sandstone cliffs to the north. Finally we came over a rise and got our first look at the gaping cavities where the giant Buddhas once stood.
The vista was probably not much different from that which greeted Xuanzang, the monk who had left his home in eastern China in A.D. 629 and followed the Silk Road west across the Taklamakan Desert, arriving in Bamiyan several years later. Xuanzang was welcomed into a prosperous Buddhist enclave that had existed for some 500 years. There, cut from the cliffs, stood the greatest of the kingdom's symbols: a 180-foot-tall western Buddha and its smaller 125-foot-tall eastern counterpart—both gilded, decorated with lapis lazuli and surrounded by colorful frescoes depicting the heavens. The statues wore masks of wood and clay that in the moonlight conveyed the impression of glowing eyes, perhaps because they were embedded with rubies. Their bodies were draped in stucco tunics of a style worn by soldiers of Alexander the Great, who had passed through the region on his march to the Khyber Pass almost 1,000 years before. "[Their] golden hues sparkle on every side, and [their] precious ornaments dazzle the eyes by their brightness," wrote Xuanzang.
A member of a branch of Afghanistan's royal family, Tarzi first visited the Buddhas as an archaeology student in 1967. (He would earn a degree from the University of Strasbourg, in France, and become a prominent art historian and archaeologist in Kabul.) During the next decade, he returned to Bamiyan repeatedly to survey restoration work; the masks and some of the stucco garments had eroded away or been looted centuries earlier; the Buddhas were also crumbling.
"I visited every square inch of Bamiyan," he told me. It was during this time, he said, that he became convinced, based on Xuanzang's description, of the existence of a third Buddha. The monk mentioned a second monastery, in addition to the Royal Monastery, which is near the western Buddha. Inside it, he wrote, "there is a figure of Buddha lying in a sleeping position, as when he attained Nirvana. The figure is in length about 1,000 feet or so."
In 1978, a coup led by radical Marxists assassinated Afghanistan's first president; Tarzi's search for the sleeping Buddha was put on hold. Believing his life was in danger, Tarzi fled the country. "I left for Paris and became a refugee," he told me. He worked as a waiter in a restaurant in Strasbourg, married twice and had three children—daughters Nadia and Carole, and son David. Tarzi began teaching archaeology and became a full professor at the University of Strasbourg.
Back in Bamiyan, trouble was brewing. After several failed attempts to conquer the province, Taliban forces cut deals with Tajik and Hazara military leaders and marched in unopposed in September 1998. Many Hazara fled just ahead of the occupation. My interpreter, Ali Raza, a 26-year-old Hazara who grew up in the shadow of the eastern Buddha and played among the giant statues as a child, remembers his father calling the family together one afternoon. "He said, 'You must collect your clothes; we have to move as soon as possible, because the Taliban have arrived. If they don't kill us, we will be lucky.'" They gathered their mules and set out on foot, hiking south over snowy mountain passes to neighboring Maidan Wardak province; Raza later fled to Iran. The family didn't return home for five years.
In February 2001, Al Qaeda-supporting Taliban radicals, having won a power struggle with moderates, condemned the Buddhas as "idolatrous" and "un-Islamic" and announced their intention to destroy them. Last-ditch pleas by world leaders to Mullah Omar, the Taliban's reclusive, one-eyed leader, failed. During the next month, the Taliban—with the help of Arab munitions experts—used artillery shells and high explosives to destroy both figures. A Hazara construction worker I'll call Abdul, whom I met outside an unfinished mosque in the hills above Bamiyan, told me that the Taliban had conscripted him and 30 other Hazaras to lay plastic explosives on the ground beneath the larger Buddha's feet. It took three weeks to bring down the statue, Abdul told me. Then "the Taliban celebrated by slaughtering nine cows." Koichiro Matsuura, the head of UNESCO, the U.N.'s cultural organization, declared it "abominable to witness the cold and calculated destruction of cultural properties which were the heritage of...the whole of humanity." U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell deemed it a "tragedy."
Tarzi was in Strasbourg when he heard the news. "I watched it on television, and I said, 'This is not possible. Lamentable,'" he said.
Over lunch in the house he rents each summer in Bamiyan, he recounted the campaign he waged to return to Afghanistan after U.S. Special Forces and the Northern Alliance drove Osama bin Laden's protectors from power. In 2002, with the help of acquaintances such as the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, Tarzi persuaded the French government to give him funding (it has ranged from the equivalent of $40,000 to $50,000 a year) to search for the third Buddha. He flew to Bamiyan in July of that year and announced to a fiercely territorial warlord who had taken charge of the area that he planned to begin excavations. Tarzi was ordered to leave at once. "There was no real government in place, and I had nothing in writing. [Afghan] President [Hamid] Karzai wasn't aware of the mission. So I went back to France." The following year, Tarzi returned to Kabul, where Karzai received him warmly and gave a personal guarantee of safe passage.
One morning, I joined Tarzi in a tent beside the excavation site; we walked along a gully where some digging was going on. During his first excavation, in 2003, he told me with a touch of bravado, "The valley was filled with mines, but I wasn't afraid. I said, 'Follow me, and if I explode, you can take a different route.' And I took out a lot of mines myself, before the de-mining teams came here." Tarzi stopped before a second excavation pit and called to one of his diggers, a thin, bearded Hazara man who walked with a slight limp. The man, Tarzi told me, had lost both legs to a mine five years ago. "He was blown up just above where we're standing now, next to the giant Buddha," he added, as I shifted nervously. "We fitted him with prostheses, and he went back to work."
The archaeologist and I climbed into a minibus and drove to a second excavation site, just below the eastern niche where the smaller Buddha stood. He halted before the ruins of a seventh-century stupa, or relic chamber, a heap of clay and conglomerate rock. "This is where we started digging back in 2003, because the stupa was already exposed," Tarzi said. "It corresponded with Xuanzang's description, 'east of the Royal Monastery.' I thought at the beginning that the Buddha would be lying here, underneath the wheat fields. So I dug here, and I found a lot of ceramics, sculptures, but no Buddha."
Tarzi now gazed at the stupa with dismay. The 1,400-year-old ruin was covered with socks, shirts, pants and underwear, laundry laid out to dry by families living in nearby grottoes. "Please take a picture of the laundry drying on top of my stupa," he told one of the five University of Strasbourg graduate students who had joined him for the summer. Tarzi turned toward the cliff face, scanning the rough ground at its base. "If the great Buddha exists," he said, "it's there, at the foot of the great cliffs."
Not everyone is convinced. To be sure, Xuanzang's account is widely accepted. "He was remarkably accurate," says Nancy Dupree, an American expert on Afghan art and culture who has lived in Kabul for five decades. "The fact that he mentioned it means that there must have been something there." Kosaku Maeda, a retired professor of archaeology in Tokyo and one of the world's leading experts on the Bamiyan Valley, agrees that the monk probably did see a Sleeping Buddha. But Maeda believes that the figure, which was likely made of clay, would have crumbled into dust centuries ago. "If you think of a 1,000-foot-long reclining Buddha, then it would require 100 to 130 feet in height," he said. "You should see such a hill. But there is nothing." Kazuya Yamauchi, the Japanese archaeologist, believes Xuanzang's description of the figure's location is ambiguous. He contends it lies in a different part of the valley, Shari-i-Gholghola, or the "City of Screams," where the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan massacred thousands of inhabitants.
A short while after my outing with Tarzi, I climbed up some rickety metal scaffolding inside the eastern niche with Bert Praxenthaler, a Munich-based art historian and sculptor from the International Council on Monuments and Sites, a nongovernmental organization that receives UNESCO funding to shore up the niche walls, which were badly damaged by the Taliban blasts. In one of his first visits here some years ago, Praxenthaler recalls, he was rappelling inside the niche when he realized it was about to cave in. "It is just mud and pebbles baked together over millions of years," he said. "It lacks a natural cement, so the stone is rather weak. One slight earthquake would have destroyed everything." Praxenthaler and his team pumped 20 tons of mortar into cracks and fissures in the niche, then drilled dozens of long steel rods into the walls to support it."They are now stable," he said. Pointing to some faint smudges on the rough wall, he added: "You can see traces of the fingers of Buddhist workers, from 1,500 years ago." Praxenthaler's work led him to some serendipitous discoveries, including a tiny fabric bag—"closed with rope and sealed with two stamps"—concealed in a crevice behind the giant Buddha at the time it was constructed. "We still haven't opened it yet," he told me. "We think there is a Buddhist relic inside." (Praxenthaler is organizing a research project that will examine the presumably fragile contents.)
Preservation of the niches—work on the western one is scheduled to begin soon—is the first step, Praxenthaler said, in what many hope will be the reconstitution of the destroyed statues. During the past decade, conservationists, artists and others have floated many proposals, ranging from constructing concrete replicas to leaving the niches empty. Hiro Yamagata, a Japanese artist based in California, suggested that laser images of the Buddhas be projected onto the cliff face—an idea later abandoned as too costly and impractical.
For his part, Praxenthaler supports a method known as anastylosis, which involves combining surviving pieces of the Buddhas with modern materials. "It would be a fragmented Buddha, with gaps and holes, and later, they could fill in the gaps in a suitable way," he said. This approach has gathered strong backing from Governor Sarabi, as well as from archaeologists and art conservators, but it may not be feasible: most of the original Buddhas were pulverized, leaving only a few recognizable fragments. In addition, few Afghan officials think it politically wise, given the Islamic fervor and xenophobic sentiment of much of the country, especially among the Pashtun, to embrace a project celebrating the country's Buddhist past. "Conservation is OK, but at the moment they are critical about what smells like rebuilding the Buddha," Praxenthaler said. Others, including Tarzi, believe the niches should remain empty. New Buddhas, says Nancy Dupree, would turn Bamiyan into "an amusement park, and it would be a desecration to the artists who created the originals. The empty niches have a poignancy all their own." Tarzi agrees. "Leave the two Buddha niches as two pages of history," he told me, "so that future generations will know that at a certain moment, folly triumphed over reason in Afghanistan."
The funding that Tarzi currently gets from the French government allows him and his graduate students to fly from Strasbourg to Bamiyan each July, pay the rent on his house and employ guards and a digging team. He says he has been under no pressure to hasten his search, but the longer the work continues, the greater the likelihood his benefactors will run out of patience. "I've discovered sculptures, I've discovered the stupa, I've discovered the monasteries, I've developed a panorama of Bamiyan civilization from the first century to the arrival of Genghis Khan," he says. "The scientific results have been good."
Tarzi also continues to enjoy support from Afghan officials and many of his peers. "Tarzi is a well-educated, experienced Afghan archaeologist, and we need as many of those as we can get," says Brendan Cassar, the Kabul-based cultural specialist for UNESCO, which declared Bamiyan a World Heritage site in 2003. Nancy Dupree told me that Tarzi "wants to return something to Afghans to bolster their confidence and their belief [in the power of] their heritage. It's more than archaeology for him." But his ultimate goal, she fears, may never be realized. "What he has done is not to be sniffed at, he's found things there, but whether he will find the reclining Buddha, I really doubt."
After seven years of searching, even Tarzi has begun to hedge his bets. "I still have hope," he told me as we walked through irrigated fields of potatoes at the edge of his eastern excavations. "But I'm getting older—and weaker. Another three years, then I'll be finished."
Joshua Hammer reports from his base in Berlin. Photographer Alex Masi travels the world on assignment from London.
Tarzi also continues to enjoy support from Afghan officials and many of his peers. "Tarzi is a well-educated, experienced Afghan archaeologist, and we need as many of those as we can get," says Brendan Cassar, the Kabul-based cultural specialist for UNESCO, which declared Bamiyan a World Heritage site in 2003. Nancy Dupree told me that Tarzi "wants to return something to Afghans to bolster their confidence and their belief [in the power of] their heritage. It's more than archaeology for him." But his ultimate goal, she fears, may never be realized. "What he has done is not to be sniffed at, he's found things there, but whether he will find the reclining Buddha, I really doubt."
After seven years of searching, even Tarzi has begun to hedge his bets. "I still have hope," he told me as we walked through irrigated fields of potatoes at the edge of his eastern excavations. "But I'm getting older—and weaker. Another three years, then I'll be finished."
Joshua Hammer reports from his base in Berlin. Photographer Alex Masi travels the world on assignment from London.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Searching-for-Buddha-in-Afghanistan.html#ixzz1Dy23EvBX
By Joshua Hammer
Photographs by Alex Masi
Clad in a safari suit, sun hat, hiking boots and leather gloves, Zemaryalai Tarzi leads the way from his tent to a rectangular pit in the Bamiyan Valley of northern Afghanistan. Crenulated sandstone cliffs, honeycombed with man-made grottoes, loom above us. Two giant cavities about a half-mile apart in the rock face mark the sites where two huge sixth-century statues of the Buddha, destroyed a decade ago by the Taliban, stood for 1,500 years. At the base of the cliff lies the inner sanctum of a site Tarzi calls the Royal Monastery, an elaborate complex erected during the third century that contains corridors, esplanades and chambers where sacred objects were stored.
"We're looking at what used to be a chapel covered with murals," the 71-year-old archaeologist, peering into the pit, tells me. Rulers of the Buddhist kingdom—whose religion had taken root across the region along the Silk Road—made annual pilgrimages here to offer donations to the monks in return for their blessings. Then, in the eighth century, Islam came to the valley, and Buddhism began to wane. "In the third quarter of the ninth century, a Muslim conqueror destroyed everything—including the monastery," Tarzi says. "He gave Bamiyan the coup de grâce, but he couldn't destroy the giant Buddhas." Tarzi gazes toward the two empty niches, the one to the east 144 feet high and the one to the west 213 feet high. "It took the Taliban to do that."
The Buddhas of Bamiyan, carved out of the cliff's malleable rock, long presided over this peaceful valley, protected by its near impregnable position between the Hindu Kush mountains to the north and the Koh-i-Baba range to the south. The monumental figures survived the coming of Islam, the scourge of Muslim conqueror Yaqub ibn Layth Saffari, the invasion and annihilation of virtually the entire Bamiyan population by Mongol warriors led by Genghis Khan in A.D. 1221 and the British-Afghan wars of the 19th century. But they couldn't survive the development of modern weaponry or a fanatical brand of Islam that gained ascendancy in Afghanistan following the war between the Soviet Union and the mujahedeen in the 1980s: almost ten years ago, in March 2001, after being denounced by Taliban fanatics as "false idols," the statues were pulverized with high explosives and rocket fire. It was an act that generated worldwide outrage and endures as a symbol of mindless desecration and religious extremism.
From almost the first moment the Taliban were driven from power at the end of 2001, art historians, conservationists and others have dreamed of restoring the Buddhas. Tarzi, however, has another idea. Somewhere in the shadow of the niches, he believes, lies a third Buddha—a 1,000-foot-long reclining colossus built at roughly the same time as the standing giants. His belief is based on a description written 1,400 years ago by a Chinese monk, Xuanzang, who visited the kingdom for several weeks. Tarzi has spent seven years probing the ground beneath the niches in search of the fabled statue. He has uncovered seven monasteries, fragments of a 62-foot-long reclining Buddha and many pieces of pottery and other Buddhist relics.
But other scholars say the Chinese monk may have mistaken a rock formation for the sculpture or was confused about the Buddha's location. Even if the reclining Buddha once existed, some hypothesize that it crumbled into dust centuries ago. "The Nirvana Buddha"—so called because the sleeping Buddha is depicted as he was about to enter the transcendent state of Nirvana—"remains one of archaeology's greatest mysteries," says Kazuya Yamauchi, an archaeologist with the Japan Center for International Cooperation in Conservation, who has carried out his own search for it. "It is the dream of archaeologists to find it."
Time may be running out. Ever since U.S., coalition and Afghan Northern Alliance forces pushed the Taliban out of Afghanistan, remote Bamiyan—dominated by ethnic Hazaras who defied the Pashtun-dominated Taliban regime and suffered massacres at their hands—has been an oasis of tranquillity. But this past August, insurgents, likely Taliban, ambushed and killed a New Zealand soldier in northern Bamiyan—the first killing of a soldier in the province since the beginning of the war. "If the Taliban grows stronger elsewhere in Afghanistan, they could enter Bamiyan from different directions," says Habiba Sarabi, governor of Bamiyan province and the country's sole female provincial leader. Residents of Bamiyan—as well as archaeologists and conservationists—have lately been voicing the fear that even if new, reconstructed Buddhas rise in the niches, the Taliban would only blow them up again.
To visit Tarzi on his annual seven-week summer dig in Bamiyan, the photographer Alex Masi and I left Kabul at dawn in a Land Cruiser for a 140-mile, eight-hour journey on a dirt road on which an improvised explosive device had struck a U.N. convoy only days before. The first three hours, through Pashtun territory, were the riskiest. We drove without stopping, slumped low in our seats, wary of being recognized as foreigners. After snaking through a fertile river valley hemmed in by jagged granite and basalt peaks, we arrived at a suspension bridge marking the start of Hazara territory. "The security situation is now fine," our driver told us. "You can relax."
At the opening of the Bamiyan Valley, we passed a 19th-century mud fort and an asphalt road, part of a $200 million network under construction by the U.S. government and the Asian Development Bank. Then the valley widened to reveal a scene of breathtaking beauty: golden fields of wheat, interspersed with green plots of potato and bordered by the snowcapped, 18,000-foot peaks of the Hindu Kush and stark sandstone cliffs to the north. Finally we came over a rise and got our first look at the gaping cavities where the giant Buddhas once stood.
The vista was probably not much different from that which greeted Xuanzang, the monk who had left his home in eastern China in A.D. 629 and followed the Silk Road west across the Taklamakan Desert, arriving in Bamiyan several years later. Xuanzang was welcomed into a prosperous Buddhist enclave that had existed for some 500 years. There, cut from the cliffs, stood the greatest of the kingdom's symbols: a 180-foot-tall western Buddha and its smaller 125-foot-tall eastern counterpart—both gilded, decorated with lapis lazuli and surrounded by colorful frescoes depicting the heavens. The statues wore masks of wood and clay that in the moonlight conveyed the impression of glowing eyes, perhaps because they were embedded with rubies. Their bodies were draped in stucco tunics of a style worn by soldiers of Alexander the Great, who had passed through the region on his march to the Khyber Pass almost 1,000 years before. "[Their] golden hues sparkle on every side, and [their] precious ornaments dazzle the eyes by their brightness," wrote Xuanzang.
A member of a branch of Afghanistan's royal family, Tarzi first visited the Buddhas as an archaeology student in 1967. (He would earn a degree from the University of Strasbourg, in France, and become a prominent art historian and archaeologist in Kabul.) During the next decade, he returned to Bamiyan repeatedly to survey restoration work; the masks and some of the stucco garments had eroded away or been looted centuries earlier; the Buddhas were also crumbling.
"I visited every square inch of Bamiyan," he told me. It was during this time, he said, that he became convinced, based on Xuanzang's description, of the existence of a third Buddha. The monk mentioned a second monastery, in addition to the Royal Monastery, which is near the western Buddha. Inside it, he wrote, "there is a figure of Buddha lying in a sleeping position, as when he attained Nirvana. The figure is in length about 1,000 feet or so."
In 1978, a coup led by radical Marxists assassinated Afghanistan's first president; Tarzi's search for the sleeping Buddha was put on hold. Believing his life was in danger, Tarzi fled the country. "I left for Paris and became a refugee," he told me. He worked as a waiter in a restaurant in Strasbourg, married twice and had three children—daughters Nadia and Carole, and son David. Tarzi began teaching archaeology and became a full professor at the University of Strasbourg.
Back in Bamiyan, trouble was brewing. After several failed attempts to conquer the province, Taliban forces cut deals with Tajik and Hazara military leaders and marched in unopposed in September 1998. Many Hazara fled just ahead of the occupation. My interpreter, Ali Raza, a 26-year-old Hazara who grew up in the shadow of the eastern Buddha and played among the giant statues as a child, remembers his father calling the family together one afternoon. "He said, 'You must collect your clothes; we have to move as soon as possible, because the Taliban have arrived. If they don't kill us, we will be lucky.'" They gathered their mules and set out on foot, hiking south over snowy mountain passes to neighboring Maidan Wardak province; Raza later fled to Iran. The family didn't return home for five years.
In February 2001, Al Qaeda-supporting Taliban radicals, having won a power struggle with moderates, condemned the Buddhas as "idolatrous" and "un-Islamic" and announced their intention to destroy them. Last-ditch pleas by world leaders to Mullah Omar, the Taliban's reclusive, one-eyed leader, failed. During the next month, the Taliban—with the help of Arab munitions experts—used artillery shells and high explosives to destroy both figures. A Hazara construction worker I'll call Abdul, whom I met outside an unfinished mosque in the hills above Bamiyan, told me that the Taliban had conscripted him and 30 other Hazaras to lay plastic explosives on the ground beneath the larger Buddha's feet. It took three weeks to bring down the statue, Abdul told me. Then "the Taliban celebrated by slaughtering nine cows." Koichiro Matsuura, the head of UNESCO, the U.N.'s cultural organization, declared it "abominable to witness the cold and calculated destruction of cultural properties which were the heritage of...the whole of humanity." U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell deemed it a "tragedy."
Tarzi was in Strasbourg when he heard the news. "I watched it on television, and I said, 'This is not possible. Lamentable,'" he said.
Over lunch in the house he rents each summer in Bamiyan, he recounted the campaign he waged to return to Afghanistan after U.S. Special Forces and the Northern Alliance drove Osama bin Laden's protectors from power. In 2002, with the help of acquaintances such as the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, Tarzi persuaded the French government to give him funding (it has ranged from the equivalent of $40,000 to $50,000 a year) to search for the third Buddha. He flew to Bamiyan in July of that year and announced to a fiercely territorial warlord who had taken charge of the area that he planned to begin excavations. Tarzi was ordered to leave at once. "There was no real government in place, and I had nothing in writing. [Afghan] President [Hamid] Karzai wasn't aware of the mission. So I went back to France." The following year, Tarzi returned to Kabul, where Karzai received him warmly and gave a personal guarantee of safe passage.
Clad in a safari suit, sun hat, hiking boots and leather gloves, Zemaryalai Tarzi leads the way from his tent to a rectangular pit in the Bamiyan Valley of northern Afghanistan. Crenulated sandstone cliffs, honeycombed with man-made grottoes, loom above us. Two giant cavities about a half-mile apart in the rock face mark the sites where two huge sixth-century statues of the Buddha, destroyed a decade ago by the Taliban, stood for 1,500 years. At the base of the cliff lies the inner sanctum of a site Tarzi calls the Royal Monastery, an elaborate complex erected during the third century that contains corridors, esplanades and chambers where sacred objects were stored.
"We're looking at what used to be a chapel covered with murals," the 71-year-old archaeologist, peering into the pit, tells me. Rulers of the Buddhist kingdom—whose religion had taken root across the region along the Silk Road—made annual pilgrimages here to offer donations to the monks in return for their blessings. Then, in the eighth century, Islam came to the valley, and Buddhism began to wane. "In the third quarter of the ninth century, a Muslim conqueror destroyed everything—including the monastery," Tarzi says. "He gave Bamiyan the coup de grâce, but he couldn't destroy the giant Buddhas." Tarzi gazes toward the two empty niches, the one to the east 144 feet high and the one to the west 213 feet high. "It took the Taliban to do that."
The Buddhas of Bamiyan, carved out of the cliff's malleable rock, long presided over this peaceful valley, protected by its near impregnable position between the Hindu Kush mountains to the north and the Koh-i-Baba range to the south. The monumental figures survived the coming of Islam, the scourge of Muslim conqueror Yaqub ibn Layth Saffari, the invasion and annihilation of virtually the entire Bamiyan population by Mongol warriors led by Genghis Khan in A.D. 1221 and the British-Afghan wars of the 19th century. But they couldn't survive the development of modern weaponry or a fanatical brand of Islam that gained ascendancy in Afghanistan following the war between the Soviet Union and the mujahedeen in the 1980s: almost ten years ago, in March 2001, after being denounced by Taliban fanatics as "false idols," the statues were pulverized with high explosives and rocket fire. It was an act that generated worldwide outrage and endures as a symbol of mindless desecration and religious extremism.
From almost the first moment the Taliban were driven from power at the end of 2001, art historians, conservationists and others have dreamed of restoring the Buddhas. Tarzi, however, has another idea. Somewhere in the shadow of the niches, he believes, lies a third Buddha—a 1,000-foot-long reclining colossus built at roughly the same time as the standing giants. His belief is based on a description written 1,400 years ago by a Chinese monk, Xuanzang, who visited the kingdom for several weeks. Tarzi has spent seven years probing the ground beneath the niches in search of the fabled statue. He has uncovered seven monasteries, fragments of a 62-foot-long reclining Buddha and many pieces of pottery and other Buddhist relics.
But other scholars say the Chinese monk may have mistaken a rock formation for the sculpture or was confused about the Buddha's location. Even if the reclining Buddha once existed, some hypothesize that it crumbled into dust centuries ago. "The Nirvana Buddha"—so called because the sleeping Buddha is depicted as he was about to enter the transcendent state of Nirvana—"remains one of archaeology's greatest mysteries," says Kazuya Yamauchi, an archaeologist with the Japan Center for International Cooperation in Conservation, who has carried out his own search for it. "It is the dream of archaeologists to find it."
Time may be running out. Ever since U.S., coalition and Afghan Northern Alliance forces pushed the Taliban out of Afghanistan, remote Bamiyan—dominated by ethnic Hazaras who defied the Pashtun-dominated Taliban regime and suffered massacres at their hands—has been an oasis of tranquillity. But this past August, insurgents, likely Taliban, ambushed and killed a New Zealand soldier in northern Bamiyan—the first killing of a soldier in the province since the beginning of the war. "If the Taliban grows stronger elsewhere in Afghanistan, they could enter Bamiyan from different directions," says Habiba Sarabi, governor of Bamiyan province and the country's sole female provincial leader. Residents of Bamiyan—as well as archaeologists and conservationists—have lately been voicing the fear that even if new, reconstructed Buddhas rise in the niches, the Taliban would only blow them up again.
To visit Tarzi on his annual seven-week summer dig in Bamiyan, the photographer Alex Masi and I left Kabul at dawn in a Land Cruiser for a 140-mile, eight-hour journey on a dirt road on which an improvised explosive device had struck a U.N. convoy only days before. The first three hours, through Pashtun territory, were the riskiest. We drove without stopping, slumped low in our seats, wary of being recognized as foreigners. After snaking through a fertile river valley hemmed in by jagged granite and basalt peaks, we arrived at a suspension bridge marking the start of Hazara territory. "The security situation is now fine," our driver told us. "You can relax."
At the opening of the Bamiyan Valley, we passed a 19th-century mud fort and an asphalt road, part of a $200 million network under construction by the U.S. government and the Asian Development Bank. Then the valley widened to reveal a scene of breathtaking beauty: golden fields of wheat, interspersed with green plots of potato and bordered by the snowcapped, 18,000-foot peaks of the Hindu Kush and stark sandstone cliffs to the north. Finally we came over a rise and got our first look at the gaping cavities where the giant Buddhas once stood.
The vista was probably not much different from that which greeted Xuanzang, the monk who had left his home in eastern China in A.D. 629 and followed the Silk Road west across the Taklamakan Desert, arriving in Bamiyan several years later. Xuanzang was welcomed into a prosperous Buddhist enclave that had existed for some 500 years. There, cut from the cliffs, stood the greatest of the kingdom's symbols: a 180-foot-tall western Buddha and its smaller 125-foot-tall eastern counterpart—both gilded, decorated with lapis lazuli and surrounded by colorful frescoes depicting the heavens. The statues wore masks of wood and clay that in the moonlight conveyed the impression of glowing eyes, perhaps because they were embedded with rubies. Their bodies were draped in stucco tunics of a style worn by soldiers of Alexander the Great, who had passed through the region on his march to the Khyber Pass almost 1,000 years before. "[Their] golden hues sparkle on every side, and [their] precious ornaments dazzle the eyes by their brightness," wrote Xuanzang.
A member of a branch of Afghanistan's royal family, Tarzi first visited the Buddhas as an archaeology student in 1967. (He would earn a degree from the University of Strasbourg, in France, and become a prominent art historian and archaeologist in Kabul.) During the next decade, he returned to Bamiyan repeatedly to survey restoration work; the masks and some of the stucco garments had eroded away or been looted centuries earlier; the Buddhas were also crumbling.
"I visited every square inch of Bamiyan," he told me. It was during this time, he said, that he became convinced, based on Xuanzang's description, of the existence of a third Buddha. The monk mentioned a second monastery, in addition to the Royal Monastery, which is near the western Buddha. Inside it, he wrote, "there is a figure of Buddha lying in a sleeping position, as when he attained Nirvana. The figure is in length about 1,000 feet or so."
In 1978, a coup led by radical Marxists assassinated Afghanistan's first president; Tarzi's search for the sleeping Buddha was put on hold. Believing his life was in danger, Tarzi fled the country. "I left for Paris and became a refugee," he told me. He worked as a waiter in a restaurant in Strasbourg, married twice and had three children—daughters Nadia and Carole, and son David. Tarzi began teaching archaeology and became a full professor at the University of Strasbourg.
Back in Bamiyan, trouble was brewing. After several failed attempts to conquer the province, Taliban forces cut deals with Tajik and Hazara military leaders and marched in unopposed in September 1998. Many Hazara fled just ahead of the occupation. My interpreter, Ali Raza, a 26-year-old Hazara who grew up in the shadow of the eastern Buddha and played among the giant statues as a child, remembers his father calling the family together one afternoon. "He said, 'You must collect your clothes; we have to move as soon as possible, because the Taliban have arrived. If they don't kill us, we will be lucky.'" They gathered their mules and set out on foot, hiking south over snowy mountain passes to neighboring Maidan Wardak province; Raza later fled to Iran. The family didn't return home for five years.
In February 2001, Al Qaeda-supporting Taliban radicals, having won a power struggle with moderates, condemned the Buddhas as "idolatrous" and "un-Islamic" and announced their intention to destroy them. Last-ditch pleas by world leaders to Mullah Omar, the Taliban's reclusive, one-eyed leader, failed. During the next month, the Taliban—with the help of Arab munitions experts—used artillery shells and high explosives to destroy both figures. A Hazara construction worker I'll call Abdul, whom I met outside an unfinished mosque in the hills above Bamiyan, told me that the Taliban had conscripted him and 30 other Hazaras to lay plastic explosives on the ground beneath the larger Buddha's feet. It took three weeks to bring down the statue, Abdul told me. Then "the Taliban celebrated by slaughtering nine cows." Koichiro Matsuura, the head of UNESCO, the U.N.'s cultural organization, declared it "abominable to witness the cold and calculated destruction of cultural properties which were the heritage of...the whole of humanity." U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell deemed it a "tragedy."
Tarzi was in Strasbourg when he heard the news. "I watched it on television, and I said, 'This is not possible. Lamentable,'" he said.
Over lunch in the house he rents each summer in Bamiyan, he recounted the campaign he waged to return to Afghanistan after U.S. Special Forces and the Northern Alliance drove Osama bin Laden's protectors from power. In 2002, with the help of acquaintances such as the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, Tarzi persuaded the French government to give him funding (it has ranged from the equivalent of $40,000 to $50,000 a year) to search for the third Buddha. He flew to Bamiyan in July of that year and announced to a fiercely territorial warlord who had taken charge of the area that he planned to begin excavations. Tarzi was ordered to leave at once. "There was no real government in place, and I had nothing in writing. [Afghan] President [Hamid] Karzai wasn't aware of the mission. So I went back to France." The following year, Tarzi returned to Kabul, where Karzai received him warmly and gave a personal guarantee of safe passage.
One morning, I joined Tarzi in a tent beside the excavation site; we walked along a gully where some digging was going on. During his first excavation, in 2003, he told me with a touch of bravado, "The valley was filled with mines, but I wasn't afraid. I said, 'Follow me, and if I explode, you can take a different route.' And I took out a lot of mines myself, before the de-mining teams came here." Tarzi stopped before a second excavation pit and called to one of his diggers, a thin, bearded Hazara man who walked with a slight limp. The man, Tarzi told me, had lost both legs to a mine five years ago. "He was blown up just above where we're standing now, next to the giant Buddha," he added, as I shifted nervously. "We fitted him with prostheses, and he went back to work."
The archaeologist and I climbed into a minibus and drove to a second excavation site, just below the eastern niche where the smaller Buddha stood. He halted before the ruins of a seventh-century stupa, or relic chamber, a heap of clay and conglomerate rock. "This is where we started digging back in 2003, because the stupa was already exposed," Tarzi said. "It corresponded with Xuanzang's description, 'east of the Royal Monastery.' I thought at the beginning that the Buddha would be lying here, underneath the wheat fields. So I dug here, and I found a lot of ceramics, sculptures, but no Buddha."
Tarzi now gazed at the stupa with dismay. The 1,400-year-old ruin was covered with socks, shirts, pants and underwear, laundry laid out to dry by families living in nearby grottoes. "Please take a picture of the laundry drying on top of my stupa," he told one of the five University of Strasbourg graduate students who had joined him for the summer. Tarzi turned toward the cliff face, scanning the rough ground at its base. "If the great Buddha exists," he said, "it's there, at the foot of the great cliffs."
Not everyone is convinced. To be sure, Xuanzang's account is widely accepted. "He was remarkably accurate," says Nancy Dupree, an American expert on Afghan art and culture who has lived in Kabul for five decades. "The fact that he mentioned it means that there must have been something there." Kosaku Maeda, a retired professor of archaeology in Tokyo and one of the world's leading experts on the Bamiyan Valley, agrees that the monk probably did see a Sleeping Buddha. But Maeda believes that the figure, which was likely made of clay, would have crumbled into dust centuries ago. "If you think of a 1,000-foot-long reclining Buddha, then it would require 100 to 130 feet in height," he said. "You should see such a hill. But there is nothing." Kazuya Yamauchi, the Japanese archaeologist, believes Xuanzang's description of the figure's location is ambiguous. He contends it lies in a different part of the valley, Shari-i-Gholghola, or the "City of Screams," where the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan massacred thousands of inhabitants.
A short while after my outing with Tarzi, I climbed up some rickety metal scaffolding inside the eastern niche with Bert Praxenthaler, a Munich-based art historian and sculptor from the International Council on Monuments and Sites, a nongovernmental organization that receives UNESCO funding to shore up the niche walls, which were badly damaged by the Taliban blasts. In one of his first visits here some years ago, Praxenthaler recalls, he was rappelling inside the niche when he realized it was about to cave in. "It is just mud and pebbles baked together over millions of years," he said. "It lacks a natural cement, so the stone is rather weak. One slight earthquake would have destroyed everything." Praxenthaler and his team pumped 20 tons of mortar into cracks and fissures in the niche, then drilled dozens of long steel rods into the walls to support it."They are now stable," he said. Pointing to some faint smudges on the rough wall, he added: "You can see traces of the fingers of Buddhist workers, from 1,500 years ago." Praxenthaler's work led him to some serendipitous discoveries, including a tiny fabric bag—"closed with rope and sealed with two stamps"—concealed in a crevice behind the giant Buddha at the time it was constructed. "We still haven't opened it yet," he told me. "We think there is a Buddhist relic inside." (Praxenthaler is organizing a research project that will examine the presumably fragile contents.)
Preservation of the niches—work on the western one is scheduled to begin soon—is the first step, Praxenthaler said, in what many hope will be the reconstitution of the destroyed statues. During the past decade, conservationists, artists and others have floated many proposals, ranging from constructing concrete replicas to leaving the niches empty. Hiro Yamagata, a Japanese artist based in California, suggested that laser images of the Buddhas be projected onto the cliff face—an idea later abandoned as too costly and impractical.
For his part, Praxenthaler supports a method known as anastylosis, which involves combining surviving pieces of the Buddhas with modern materials. "It would be a fragmented Buddha, with gaps and holes, and later, they could fill in the gaps in a suitable way," he said. This approach has gathered strong backing from Governor Sarabi, as well as from archaeologists and art conservators, but it may not be feasible: most of the original Buddhas were pulverized, leaving only a few recognizable fragments. In addition, few Afghan officials think it politically wise, given the Islamic fervor and xenophobic sentiment of much of the country, especially among the Pashtun, to embrace a project celebrating the country's Buddhist past. "Conservation is OK, but at the moment they are critical about what smells like rebuilding the Buddha," Praxenthaler said. Others, including Tarzi, believe the niches should remain empty. New Buddhas, says Nancy Dupree, would turn Bamiyan into "an amusement park, and it would be a desecration to the artists who created the originals. The empty niches have a poignancy all their own." Tarzi agrees. "Leave the two Buddha niches as two pages of history," he told me, "so that future generations will know that at a certain moment, folly triumphed over reason in Afghanistan."
The funding that Tarzi currently gets from the French government allows him and his graduate students to fly from Strasbourg to Bamiyan each July, pay the rent on his house and employ guards and a digging team. He says he has been under no pressure to hasten his search, but the longer the work continues, the greater the likelihood his benefactors will run out of patience. "I've discovered sculptures, I've discovered the stupa, I've discovered the monasteries, I've developed a panorama of Bamiyan civilization from the first century to the arrival of Genghis Khan," he says. "The scientific results have been good."
Tarzi also continues to enjoy support from Afghan officials and many of his peers. "Tarzi is a well-educated, experienced Afghan archaeologist, and we need as many of those as we can get," says Brendan Cassar, the Kabul-based cultural specialist for UNESCO, which declared Bamiyan a World Heritage site in 2003. Nancy Dupree told me that Tarzi "wants to return something to Afghans to bolster their confidence and their belief [in the power of] their heritage. It's more than archaeology for him." But his ultimate goal, she fears, may never be realized. "What he has done is not to be sniffed at, he's found things there, but whether he will find the reclining Buddha, I really doubt."
After seven years of searching, even Tarzi has begun to hedge his bets. "I still have hope," he told me as we walked through irrigated fields of potatoes at the edge of his eastern excavations. "But I'm getting older—and weaker. Another three years, then I'll be finished."
Joshua Hammer reports from his base in Berlin. Photographer Alex Masi travels the world on assignment from London.
One morning, I joined Tarzi in a tent beside the excavation site; we walked along a gully where some digging was going on. During his first excavation, in 2003, he told me with a touch of bravado, "The valley was filled with mines, but I wasn't afraid. I said, 'Follow me, and if I explode, you can take a different route.' And I took out a lot of mines myself, before the de-mining teams came here." Tarzi stopped before a second excavation pit and called to one of his diggers, a thin, bearded Hazara man who walked with a slight limp. The man, Tarzi told me, had lost both legs to a mine five years ago. "He was blown up just above where we're standing now, next to the giant Buddha," he added, as I shifted nervously. "We fitted him with prostheses, and he went back to work."
The archaeologist and I climbed into a minibus and drove to a second excavation site, just below the eastern niche where the smaller Buddha stood. He halted before the ruins of a seventh-century stupa, or relic chamber, a heap of clay and conglomerate rock. "This is where we started digging back in 2003, because the stupa was already exposed," Tarzi said. "It corresponded with Xuanzang's description, 'east of the Royal Monastery.' I thought at the beginning that the Buddha would be lying here, underneath the wheat fields. So I dug here, and I found a lot of ceramics, sculptures, but no Buddha."
Tarzi now gazed at the stupa with dismay. The 1,400-year-old ruin was covered with socks, shirts, pants and underwear, laundry laid out to dry by families living in nearby grottoes. "Please take a picture of the laundry drying on top of my stupa," he told one of the five University of Strasbourg graduate students who had joined him for the summer. Tarzi turned toward the cliff face, scanning the rough ground at its base. "If the great Buddha exists," he said, "it's there, at the foot of the great cliffs."
Not everyone is convinced. To be sure, Xuanzang's account is widely accepted. "He was remarkably accurate," says Nancy Dupree, an American expert on Afghan art and culture who has lived in Kabul for five decades. "The fact that he mentioned it means that there must have been something there." Kosaku Maeda, a retired professor of archaeology in Tokyo and one of the world's leading experts on the Bamiyan Valley, agrees that the monk probably did see a Sleeping Buddha. But Maeda believes that the figure, which was likely made of clay, would have crumbled into dust centuries ago. "If you think of a 1,000-foot-long reclining Buddha, then it would require 100 to 130 feet in height," he said. "You should see such a hill. But there is nothing." Kazuya Yamauchi, the Japanese archaeologist, believes Xuanzang's description of the figure's location is ambiguous. He contends it lies in a different part of the valley, Shari-i-Gholghola, or the "City of Screams," where the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan massacred thousands of inhabitants.
A short while after my outing with Tarzi, I climbed up some rickety metal scaffolding inside the eastern niche with Bert Praxenthaler, a Munich-based art historian and sculptor from the International Council on Monuments and Sites, a nongovernmental organization that receives UNESCO funding to shore up the niche walls, which were badly damaged by the Taliban blasts. In one of his first visits here some years ago, Praxenthaler recalls, he was rappelling inside the niche when he realized it was about to cave in. "It is just mud and pebbles baked together over millions of years," he said. "It lacks a natural cement, so the stone is rather weak. One slight earthquake would have destroyed everything." Praxenthaler and his team pumped 20 tons of mortar into cracks and fissures in the niche, then drilled dozens of long steel rods into the walls to support it."They are now stable," he said. Pointing to some faint smudges on the rough wall, he added: "You can see traces of the fingers of Buddhist workers, from 1,500 years ago." Praxenthaler's work led him to some serendipitous discoveries, including a tiny fabric bag—"closed with rope and sealed with two stamps"—concealed in a crevice behind the giant Buddha at the time it was constructed. "We still haven't opened it yet," he told me. "We think there is a Buddhist relic inside." (Praxenthaler is organizing a research project that will examine the presumably fragile contents.)
Preservation of the niches—work on the western one is scheduled to begin soon—is the first step, Praxenthaler said, in what many hope will be the reconstitution of the destroyed statues. During the past decade, conservationists, artists and others have floated many proposals, ranging from constructing concrete replicas to leaving the niches empty. Hiro Yamagata, a Japanese artist based in California, suggested that laser images of the Buddhas be projected onto the cliff face—an idea later abandoned as too costly and impractical.
For his part, Praxenthaler supports a method known as anastylosis, which involves combining surviving pieces of the Buddhas with modern materials. "It would be a fragmented Buddha, with gaps and holes, and later, they could fill in the gaps in a suitable way," he said. This approach has gathered strong backing from Governor Sarabi, as well as from archaeologists and art conservators, but it may not be feasible: most of the original Buddhas were pulverized, leaving only a few recognizable fragments. In addition, few Afghan officials think it politically wise, given the Islamic fervor and xenophobic sentiment of much of the country, especially among the Pashtun, to embrace a project celebrating the country's Buddhist past. "Conservation is OK, but at the moment they are critical about what smells like rebuilding the Buddha," Praxenthaler said. Others, including Tarzi, believe the niches should remain empty. New Buddhas, says Nancy Dupree, would turn Bamiyan into "an amusement park, and it would be a desecration to the artists who created the originals. The empty niches have a poignancy all their own." Tarzi agrees. "Leave the two Buddha niches as two pages of history," he told me, "so that future generations will know that at a certain moment, folly triumphed over reason in Afghanistan."
The funding that Tarzi currently gets from the French government allows him and his graduate students to fly from Strasbourg to Bamiyan each July, pay the rent on his house and employ guards and a digging team. He says he has been under no pressure to hasten his search, but the longer the work continues, the greater the likelihood his benefactors will run out of patience. "I've discovered sculptures, I've discovered the stupa, I've discovered the monasteries, I've developed a panorama of Bamiyan civilization from the first century to the arrival of Genghis Khan," he says. "The scientific results have been good."
Clad in a safari suit, sun hat, hiking boots and leather gloves, Zemaryalai Tarzi leads the way from his tent to a rectangular pit in the Bamiyan Valley of northern Afghanistan. Crenulated sandstone cliffs, honeycombed with man-made grottoes, loom above us. Two giant cavities about a half-mile apart in the rock face mark the sites where two huge sixth-century statues of the Buddha, destroyed a decade ago by the Taliban, stood for 1,500 years. At the base of the cliff lies the inner sanctum of a site Tarzi calls the Royal Monastery, an elaborate complex erected during the third century that contains corridors, esplanades and chambers where sacred objects were stored.
"We're looking at what used to be a chapel covered with murals," the 71-year-old archaeologist, peering into the pit, tells me. Rulers of the Buddhist kingdom—whose religion had taken root across the region along the Silk Road—made annual pilgrimages here to offer donations to the monks in return for their blessings. Then, in the eighth century, Islam came to the valley, and Buddhism began to wane. "In the third quarter of the ninth century, a Muslim conqueror destroyed everything—including the monastery," Tarzi says. "He gave Bamiyan the coup de grâce, but he couldn't destroy the giant Buddhas." Tarzi gazes toward the two empty niches, the one to the east 144 feet high and the one to the west 213 feet high. "It took the Taliban to do that."
The Buddhas of Bamiyan, carved out of the cliff's malleable rock, long presided over this peaceful valley, protected by its near impregnable position between the Hindu Kush mountains to the north and the Koh-i-Baba range to the south. The monumental figures survived the coming of Islam, the scourge of Muslim conqueror Yaqub ibn Layth Saffari, the invasion and annihilation of virtually the entire Bamiyan population by Mongol warriors led by Genghis Khan in A.D. 1221 and the British-Afghan wars of the 19th century. But they couldn't survive the development of modern weaponry or a fanatical brand of Islam that gained ascendancy in Afghanistan following the war between the Soviet Union and the mujahedeen in the 1980s: almost ten years ago, in March 2001, after being denounced by Taliban fanatics as "false idols," the statues were pulverized with high explosives and rocket fire. It was an act that generated worldwide outrage and endures as a symbol of mindless desecration and religious extremism.
From almost the first moment the Taliban were driven from power at the end of 2001, art historians, conservationists and others have dreamed of restoring the Buddhas. Tarzi, however, has another idea. Somewhere in the shadow of the niches, he believes, lies a third Buddha—a 1,000-foot-long reclining colossus built at roughly the same time as the standing giants. His belief is based on a description written 1,400 years ago by a Chinese monk, Xuanzang, who visited the kingdom for several weeks. Tarzi has spent seven years probing the ground beneath the niches in search of the fabled statue. He has uncovered seven monasteries, fragments of a 62-foot-long reclining Buddha and many pieces of pottery and other Buddhist relics.
But other scholars say the Chinese monk may have mistaken a rock formation for the sculpture or was confused about the Buddha's location. Even if the reclining Buddha once existed, some hypothesize that it crumbled into dust centuries ago. "The Nirvana Buddha"—so called because the sleeping Buddha is depicted as he was about to enter the transcendent state of Nirvana—"remains one of archaeology's greatest mysteries," says Kazuya Yamauchi, an archaeologist with the Japan Center for International Cooperation in Conservation, who has carried out his own search for it. "It is the dream of archaeologists to find it."
Time may be running out. Ever since U.S., coalition and Afghan Northern Alliance forces pushed the Taliban out of Afghanistan, remote Bamiyan—dominated by ethnic Hazaras who defied the Pashtun-dominated Taliban regime and suffered massacres at their hands—has been an oasis of tranquillity. But this past August, insurgents, likely Taliban, ambushed and killed a New Zealand soldier in northern Bamiyan—the first killing of a soldier in the province since the beginning of the war. "If the Taliban grows stronger elsewhere in Afghanistan, they could enter Bamiyan from different directions," says Habiba Sarabi, governor of Bamiyan province and the country's sole female provincial leader. Residents of Bamiyan—as well as archaeologists and conservationists—have lately been voicing the fear that even if new, reconstructed Buddhas rise in the niches, the Taliban would only blow them up again.
To visit Tarzi on his annual seven-week summer dig in Bamiyan, the photographer Alex Masi and I left Kabul at dawn in a Land Cruiser for a 140-mile, eight-hour journey on a dirt road on which an improvised explosive device had struck a U.N. convoy only days before. The first three hours, through Pashtun territory, were the riskiest. We drove without stopping, slumped low in our seats, wary of being recognized as foreigners. After snaking through a fertile river valley hemmed in by jagged granite and basalt peaks, we arrived at a suspension bridge marking the start of Hazara territory. "The security situation is now fine," our driver told us. "You can relax."
At the opening of the Bamiyan Valley, we passed a 19th-century mud fort and an asphalt road, part of a $200 million network under construction by the U.S. government and the Asian Development Bank. Then the valley widened to reveal a scene of breathtaking beauty: golden fields of wheat, interspersed with green plots of potato and bordered by the snowcapped, 18,000-foot peaks of the Hindu Kush and stark sandstone cliffs to the north. Finally we came over a rise and got our first look at the gaping cavities where the giant Buddhas once stood.
The vista was probably not much different from that which greeted Xuanzang, the monk who had left his home in eastern China in A.D. 629 and followed the Silk Road west across the Taklamakan Desert, arriving in Bamiyan several years later. Xuanzang was welcomed into a prosperous Buddhist enclave that had existed for some 500 years. There, cut from the cliffs, stood the greatest of the kingdom's symbols: a 180-foot-tall western Buddha and its smaller 125-foot-tall eastern counterpart—both gilded, decorated with lapis lazuli and surrounded by colorful frescoes depicting the heavens. The statues wore masks of wood and clay that in the moonlight conveyed the impression of glowing eyes, perhaps because they were embedded with rubies. Their bodies were draped in stucco tunics of a style worn by soldiers of Alexander the Great, who had passed through the region on his march to the Khyber Pass almost 1,000 years before. "[Their] golden hues sparkle on every side, and [their] precious ornaments dazzle the eyes by their brightness," wrote Xuanzang.
A member of a branch of Afghanistan's royal family, Tarzi first visited the Buddhas as an archaeology student in 1967. (He would earn a degree from the University of Strasbourg, in France, and become a prominent art historian and archaeologist in Kabul.) During the next decade, he returned to Bamiyan repeatedly to survey restoration work; the masks and some of the stucco garments had eroded away or been looted centuries earlier; the Buddhas were also crumbling.
"I visited every square inch of Bamiyan," he told me. It was during this time, he said, that he became convinced, based on Xuanzang's description, of the existence of a third Buddha. The monk mentioned a second monastery, in addition to the Royal Monastery, which is near the western Buddha. Inside it, he wrote, "there is a figure of Buddha lying in a sleeping position, as when he attained Nirvana. The figure is in length about 1,000 feet or so."
In 1978, a coup led by radical Marxists assassinated Afghanistan's first president; Tarzi's search for the sleeping Buddha was put on hold. Believing his life was in danger, Tarzi fled the country. "I left for Paris and became a refugee," he told me. He worked as a waiter in a restaurant in Strasbourg, married twice and had three children—daughters Nadia and Carole, and son David. Tarzi began teaching archaeology and became a full professor at the University of Strasbourg.
Back in Bamiyan, trouble was brewing. After several failed attempts to conquer the province, Taliban forces cut deals with Tajik and Hazara military leaders and marched in unopposed in September 1998. Many Hazara fled just ahead of the occupation. My interpreter, Ali Raza, a 26-year-old Hazara who grew up in the shadow of the eastern Buddha and played among the giant statues as a child, remembers his father calling the family together one afternoon. "He said, 'You must collect your clothes; we have to move as soon as possible, because the Taliban have arrived. If they don't kill us, we will be lucky.'" They gathered their mules and set out on foot, hiking south over snowy mountain passes to neighboring Maidan Wardak province; Raza later fled to Iran. The family didn't return home for five years.
In February 2001, Al Qaeda-supporting Taliban radicals, having won a power struggle with moderates, condemned the Buddhas as "idolatrous" and "un-Islamic" and announced their intention to destroy them. Last-ditch pleas by world leaders to Mullah Omar, the Taliban's reclusive, one-eyed leader, failed. During the next month, the Taliban—with the help of Arab munitions experts—used artillery shells and high explosives to destroy both figures. A Hazara construction worker I'll call Abdul, whom I met outside an unfinished mosque in the hills above Bamiyan, told me that the Taliban had conscripted him and 30 other Hazaras to lay plastic explosives on the ground beneath the larger Buddha's feet. It took three weeks to bring down the statue, Abdul told me. Then "the Taliban celebrated by slaughtering nine cows." Koichiro Matsuura, the head of UNESCO, the U.N.'s cultural organization, declared it "abominable to witness the cold and calculated destruction of cultural properties which were the heritage of...the whole of humanity." U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell deemed it a "tragedy."
Tarzi was in Strasbourg when he heard the news. "I watched it on television, and I said, 'This is not possible. Lamentable,'" he said.
Over lunch in the house he rents each summer in Bamiyan, he recounted the campaign he waged to return to Afghanistan after U.S. Special Forces and the Northern Alliance drove Osama bin Laden's protectors from power. In 2002, with the help of acquaintances such as the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, Tarzi persuaded the French government to give him funding (it has ranged from the equivalent of $40,000 to $50,000 a year) to search for the third Buddha. He flew to Bamiyan in July of that year and announced to a fiercely territorial warlord who had taken charge of the area that he planned to begin excavations. Tarzi was ordered to leave at once. "There was no real government in place, and I had nothing in writing. [Afghan] President [Hamid] Karzai wasn't aware of the mission. So I went back to France." The following year, Tarzi returned to Kabul, where Karzai received him warmly and gave a personal guarantee of safe passage.
One morning, I joined Tarzi in a tent beside the excavation site; we walked along a gully where some digging was going on. During his first excavation, in 2003, he told me with a touch of bravado, "The valley was filled with mines, but I wasn't afraid. I said, 'Follow me, and if I explode, you can take a different route.' And I took out a lot of mines myself, before the de-mining teams came here." Tarzi stopped before a second excavation pit and called to one of his diggers, a thin, bearded Hazara man who walked with a slight limp. The man, Tarzi told me, had lost both legs to a mine five years ago. "He was blown up just above where we're standing now, next to the giant Buddha," he added, as I shifted nervously. "We fitted him with prostheses, and he went back to work."
The archaeologist and I climbed into a minibus and drove to a second excavation site, just below the eastern niche where the smaller Buddha stood. He halted before the ruins of a seventh-century stupa, or relic chamber, a heap of clay and conglomerate rock. "This is where we started digging back in 2003, because the stupa was already exposed," Tarzi said. "It corresponded with Xuanzang's description, 'east of the Royal Monastery.' I thought at the beginning that the Buddha would be lying here, underneath the wheat fields. So I dug here, and I found a lot of ceramics, sculptures, but no Buddha."
Tarzi now gazed at the stupa with dismay. The 1,400-year-old ruin was covered with socks, shirts, pants and underwear, laundry laid out to dry by families living in nearby grottoes. "Please take a picture of the laundry drying on top of my stupa," he told one of the five University of Strasbourg graduate students who had joined him for the summer. Tarzi turned toward the cliff face, scanning the rough ground at its base. "If the great Buddha exists," he said, "it's there, at the foot of the great cliffs."
Not everyone is convinced. To be sure, Xuanzang's account is widely accepted. "He was remarkably accurate," says Nancy Dupree, an American expert on Afghan art and culture who has lived in Kabul for five decades. "The fact that he mentioned it means that there must have been something there." Kosaku Maeda, a retired professor of archaeology in Tokyo and one of the world's leading experts on the Bamiyan Valley, agrees that the monk probably did see a Sleeping Buddha. But Maeda believes that the figure, which was likely made of clay, would have crumbled into dust centuries ago. "If you think of a 1,000-foot-long reclining Buddha, then it would require 100 to 130 feet in height," he said. "You should see such a hill. But there is nothing." Kazuya Yamauchi, the Japanese archaeologist, believes Xuanzang's description of the figure's location is ambiguous. He contends it lies in a different part of the valley, Shari-i-Gholghola, or the "City of Screams," where the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan massacred thousands of inhabitants.
A short while after my outing with Tarzi, I climbed up some rickety metal scaffolding inside the eastern niche with Bert Praxenthaler, a Munich-based art historian and sculptor from the International Council on Monuments and Sites, a nongovernmental organization that receives UNESCO funding to shore up the niche walls, which were badly damaged by the Taliban blasts. In one of his first visits here some years ago, Praxenthaler recalls, he was rappelling inside the niche when he realized it was about to cave in. "It is just mud and pebbles baked together over millions of years," he said. "It lacks a natural cement, so the stone is rather weak. One slight earthquake would have destroyed everything." Praxenthaler and his team pumped 20 tons of mortar into cracks and fissures in the niche, then drilled dozens of long steel rods into the walls to support it."They are now stable," he said. Pointing to some faint smudges on the rough wall, he added: "You can see traces of the fingers of Buddhist workers, from 1,500 years ago." Praxenthaler's work led him to some serendipitous discoveries, including a tiny fabric bag—"closed with rope and sealed with two stamps"—concealed in a crevice behind the giant Buddha at the time it was constructed. "We still haven't opened it yet," he told me. "We think there is a Buddhist relic inside." (Praxenthaler is organizing a research project that will examine the presumably fragile contents.)
Preservation of the niches—work on the western one is scheduled to begin soon—is the first step, Praxenthaler said, in what many hope will be the reconstitution of the destroyed statues. During the past decade, conservationists, artists and others have floated many proposals, ranging from constructing concrete replicas to leaving the niches empty. Hiro Yamagata, a Japanese artist based in California, suggested that laser images of the Buddhas be projected onto the cliff face—an idea later abandoned as too costly and impractical.
For his part, Praxenthaler supports a method known as anastylosis, which involves combining surviving pieces of the Buddhas with modern materials. "It would be a fragmented Buddha, with gaps and holes, and later, they could fill in the gaps in a suitable way," he said. This approach has gathered strong backing from Governor Sarabi, as well as from archaeologists and art conservators, but it may not be feasible: most of the original Buddhas were pulverized, leaving only a few recognizable fragments. In addition, few Afghan officials think it politically wise, given the Islamic fervor and xenophobic sentiment of much of the country, especially among the Pashtun, to embrace a project celebrating the country's Buddhist past. "Conservation is OK, but at the moment they are critical about what smells like rebuilding the Buddha," Praxenthaler said. Others, including Tarzi, believe the niches should remain empty. New Buddhas, says Nancy Dupree, would turn Bamiyan into "an amusement park, and it would be a desecration to the artists who created the originals. The empty niches have a poignancy all their own." Tarzi agrees. "Leave the two Buddha niches as two pages of history," he told me, "so that future generations will know that at a certain moment, folly triumphed over reason in Afghanistan."
The funding that Tarzi currently gets from the French government allows him and his graduate students to fly from Strasbourg to Bamiyan each July, pay the rent on his house and employ guards and a digging team. He says he has been under no pressure to hasten his search, but the longer the work continues, the greater the likelihood his benefactors will run out of patience. "I've discovered sculptures, I've discovered the stupa, I've discovered the monasteries, I've developed a panorama of Bamiyan civilization from the first century to the arrival of Genghis Khan," he says. "The scientific results have been good."
Tarzi also continues to enjoy support from Afghan officials and many of his peers. "Tarzi is a well-educated, experienced Afghan archaeologist, and we need as many of those as we can get," says Brendan Cassar, the Kabul-based cultural specialist for UNESCO, which declared Bamiyan a World Heritage site in 2003. Nancy Dupree told me that Tarzi "wants to return something to Afghans to bolster their confidence and their belief [in the power of] their heritage. It's more than archaeology for him." But his ultimate goal, she fears, may never be realized. "What he has done is not to be sniffed at, he's found things there, but whether he will find the reclining Buddha, I really doubt."
After seven years of searching, even Tarzi has begun to hedge his bets. "I still have hope," he told me as we walked through irrigated fields of potatoes at the edge of his eastern excavations. "But I'm getting older—and weaker. Another three years, then I'll be finished."
Joshua Hammer reports from his base in Berlin. Photographer Alex Masi travels the world on assignment from London.
Tarzi also continues to enjoy support from Afghan officials and many of his peers. "Tarzi is a well-educated, experienced Afghan archaeologist, and we need as many of those as we can get," says Brendan Cassar, the Kabul-based cultural specialist for UNESCO, which declared Bamiyan a World Heritage site in 2003. Nancy Dupree told me that Tarzi "wants to return something to Afghans to bolster their confidence and their belief [in the power of] their heritage. It's more than archaeology for him." But his ultimate goal, she fears, may never be realized. "What he has done is not to be sniffed at, he's found things there, but whether he will find the reclining Buddha, I really doubt."
After seven years of searching, even Tarzi has begun to hedge his bets. "I still have hope," he told me as we walked through irrigated fields of potatoes at the edge of his eastern excavations. "But I'm getting older—and weaker. Another three years, then I'll be finished."
Joshua Hammer reports from his base in Berlin. Photographer Alex Masi travels the world on assignment from London.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Searching-for-Buddha-in-Afghanistan.html#ixzz1Dy23EvBX
Sunday, February 13, 2011
A new Bamiyan
by Nancy Hatch Dupree and Chris Sands
Nearly a decade after Afghanistan and the world recoiled in shock at the Taliban regime’s destruction of two giant Buddhist statues, the country is again on the brink of a cultural disaster. Now, however, it is not Islamic militants who pose the threat, nor is it a government pushed into a corner after years of isolation by the West. Today the danger comes from a source few could have seen coming back then: unchecked capitalism.
Often encouraged by the United States, domestic and international companies are beginning to carve up Afghanistan in search of the vast mineral resources that lie beneath its surface. Already, there are signs that this unprecedented pursuit of wealth could do more damage to the cultural history of the country than war ever has. It must be regulated before it is too late.
Nowhere is the sheer scale of the potential catastrophe more apparent than in Logar, a province bordering Kabul. There, at Mes Aynak, lies an ancient Buddhist monastery that predates the arrival of Islam in Afghanistan. The site possibly surpasses in splendour the famous relics destroyed by the Taliban in March, 2001, making it an almost perfect snapshot of an ancient society and era we still know far too little about. It is an almost perfect snapshot of an ancient society and era we still know far too little about. There are hallways, coins, ornately decorated rooms, domed shrines and dozens of statues of Buddha; but the preservation of many of the artifacts is in jeopardy.
In 2007, the state-owned Chinese company China Metallurgical Group Corporation won a $3.5 billion contract to develop a massive unexploited copper reserve in the same area. Archeologists now have only three years to finish the excavation work, putting the site at severe risk.
When the Taliban regime blew up the two Buddhas in the central province of Bamiyan, a global outcry resulted. The UN condemned the destruction and international Islamic scholars were vocal in their criticism. Today, a decade and another war later, the world is silent.
The threat to the monastery comes just months after the US announced with fanfare that it had discovered approximately $1 trillion worth of untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan. “There is stunning potential here”, Gen David Petraeus, the commander of Nato forces in the country, told The New York Times. Competition for a number of contracts has already been strong, with the latest awarded to an Afghan company to spend up to $50 million on a gold mine in the northern province of Baghlan. With support from private British, American, Turkish and Indonesian investors, production is due to start by 2013. Meanwhile, bidding for a 1.8 billion ton iron ore deposit in Hajigak, Bamiyan, has attracted interest from firms in India, Australia, Iran and Canada, amongst others.
It is beyond doubt that reconstruction and economic development are needed in what is one of the poorest countries on earth. The prospect of thousands more jobs becoming available in the years ahead should be welcomed, so should the long-term self-sustainability and pride a thriving mining industry could help engender. However, a nation’s integrity can only be assured when its members hold fast to cherished values. The pursuit of wealth without dignity, respect for the past and the environment will ultimately set Afghanistan back, not help it progress.
A creeping money culture has taken root here and all the signs are that it is getting worse. More and more people are thinking in terms of earning a quick profit, with no thought of what it will do to their heritage or how it will impact on future generations. The US and its allies have, intentionally or not, helped set this worrying trend.
High value mining contracts should, and must, include clauses stipulating the preservation of historic sites found during development. Without such basic conditions they will leave an indelible scar on Afghan history.
For over thirty years Afghanistan’s culture has just about managed to survive in the face of horrific chaos and bloodshed, even though its museums and archeological sites have been looted and plundered, its paintings desecrated and its statues destroyed. Now comes the biggest threat of all.
Source: http://mondediplo.com/blogs/a-new-bamiyan
Nearly a decade after Afghanistan and the world recoiled in shock at the Taliban regime’s destruction of two giant Buddhist statues, the country is again on the brink of a cultural disaster. Now, however, it is not Islamic militants who pose the threat, nor is it a government pushed into a corner after years of isolation by the West. Today the danger comes from a source few could have seen coming back then: unchecked capitalism.
Often encouraged by the United States, domestic and international companies are beginning to carve up Afghanistan in search of the vast mineral resources that lie beneath its surface. Already, there are signs that this unprecedented pursuit of wealth could do more damage to the cultural history of the country than war ever has. It must be regulated before it is too late.
Nowhere is the sheer scale of the potential catastrophe more apparent than in Logar, a province bordering Kabul. There, at Mes Aynak, lies an ancient Buddhist monastery that predates the arrival of Islam in Afghanistan. The site possibly surpasses in splendour the famous relics destroyed by the Taliban in March, 2001, making it an almost perfect snapshot of an ancient society and era we still know far too little about. It is an almost perfect snapshot of an ancient society and era we still know far too little about. There are hallways, coins, ornately decorated rooms, domed shrines and dozens of statues of Buddha; but the preservation of many of the artifacts is in jeopardy.
In 2007, the state-owned Chinese company China Metallurgical Group Corporation won a $3.5 billion contract to develop a massive unexploited copper reserve in the same area. Archeologists now have only three years to finish the excavation work, putting the site at severe risk.
When the Taliban regime blew up the two Buddhas in the central province of Bamiyan, a global outcry resulted. The UN condemned the destruction and international Islamic scholars were vocal in their criticism. Today, a decade and another war later, the world is silent.
The threat to the monastery comes just months after the US announced with fanfare that it had discovered approximately $1 trillion worth of untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan. “There is stunning potential here”, Gen David Petraeus, the commander of Nato forces in the country, told The New York Times. Competition for a number of contracts has already been strong, with the latest awarded to an Afghan company to spend up to $50 million on a gold mine in the northern province of Baghlan. With support from private British, American, Turkish and Indonesian investors, production is due to start by 2013. Meanwhile, bidding for a 1.8 billion ton iron ore deposit in Hajigak, Bamiyan, has attracted interest from firms in India, Australia, Iran and Canada, amongst others.
It is beyond doubt that reconstruction and economic development are needed in what is one of the poorest countries on earth. The prospect of thousands more jobs becoming available in the years ahead should be welcomed, so should the long-term self-sustainability and pride a thriving mining industry could help engender. However, a nation’s integrity can only be assured when its members hold fast to cherished values. The pursuit of wealth without dignity, respect for the past and the environment will ultimately set Afghanistan back, not help it progress.
A creeping money culture has taken root here and all the signs are that it is getting worse. More and more people are thinking in terms of earning a quick profit, with no thought of what it will do to their heritage or how it will impact on future generations. The US and its allies have, intentionally or not, helped set this worrying trend.
High value mining contracts should, and must, include clauses stipulating the preservation of historic sites found during development. Without such basic conditions they will leave an indelible scar on Afghan history.
For over thirty years Afghanistan’s culture has just about managed to survive in the face of horrific chaos and bloodshed, even though its museums and archeological sites have been looted and plundered, its paintings desecrated and its statues destroyed. Now comes the biggest threat of all.
Source: http://mondediplo.com/blogs/a-new-bamiyan
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
The men hidden from view
By,
Caroline Fleay and Nina Boydell
08 February 2011
Thousands of kilometres from where most Australians live is an expanding collection of small demountable huts surrounded by two huge wire fences.
It is not easy to visit this place of detention – for most people it involves an expensive flight to Broome in WA’s northwest region, and a further two hour drive to a turn-off on the Broome-Derby road. The final five kilometres is down a long stretch of road punctuated by signs warning the visitor that there is “No Through Road” and to “Turn Back”.
Finally a perimeter check point is reached. Personal identification is checked here, and if it matches the written forms the visitor had sent to the place of detention prior to the visit, the visitor is allowed to proceed. Upon arriving at the enormous wire gates of the main entrance, another checkpoint is entered and the visitor’s personal identification and belongings are surrendered.
So who are the 1,200 men that are kept inside such an isolated and secure compound? Upon our arrival at the detention centre, it felt like we were entering a prisoner of war camp. But the men in this place are not prisoners of war captured by Australian troops. They are mostly Hazara men from Afghanistan – a country where Australian troops are embroiled in a conflict that seeks to oust the Taliban and other such violent groups, the very groups that many Hazara are fleeing.
The men that Australia detains in this isolated camp are the allies of our Australian troops but they are those our troops are not able to protect in their own land. Many Hazara men are forced to leave Afghanistan or face the terror of the ever-present violence that threatens their lives and those of their families. This is who we are keeping hidden at the Curtin Immigration Detention Centre, the same isolated centre that the Howard government finally agreed to close in 2002.
Our visit to the detention centre last week was profoundly moving. A small group of us were welcomed by hundreds of men incredibly grateful for a rare visit and eager to meet and talk to Australians who were not in uniforms. We listened to their stories and answered their questions about Australia and heard of the anguish of those who had been on hunger strike the week before out of desperation that they had heard nothing for months about the outcome of their refugee claims.
Some of the men walked with us down the long path to the front wire gates as we left on the last day of our visit. They stood and waved to us until they could no longer see us. These are hidden men who feel forgotten.
Although the men may be getting their basic needs met, such as adequate food and shelter, their anguish makes it obvious that no amount of care provided within a place of detention will ease the agony of their wait. “We have everything we need but not our freedom.” Many are incredibly resilient, trying to keep their minds busy to avoid the despair. Others have lost hope and have tried to kill themselves.
There are young men in the Curtin detention centre who hardly look 18 and who have been forced to flee their families completely alone to try to find a safer life. There are also many family men of all ages who desperately worry for the fate of their wives and children as they wait many months for the decision about their refugee application. Can you imagine how desperate you must be to find a safer life for your family, to make the decision to leave them behind? So that you alone would endure the terror of the journey of reaching Australia, with the hope that once you arrive you would be welcomed and your family allowed to join you?
Whatever you think of the means that these men took to leave Afghanistan and finally arrive in Australia, they are now here. They are not enemies of Australia. Based on Department of Immigration statistics from 2009-2010, 99.7% of Afghans arriving in Australia seeking asylum were found to be refugees. It is very likely that most if not all of the men in the Curtin detention centre have also fled similar persecution. We should not be detaining them for months and soon-to-be years behind large fences. They should be living in our communities while they wait for the interminable time it takes for their refugee applications to be assessed.
Despite reports from the Australian government that suggest it is now safe for some Hazaras to return to Afghanistan, many other reports and those with family and friends in Afghanistan will tell you this is not true.
William Maley, one of Australia’s foremost experts on Afghanistan, is highly sceptical of the Australian government’s recent agreement with the Afghanistan government that could allow for the forcible repatriation of some Hazaras. He argues that the security situation in Afghanistan is “by most accounts deteriorating” and warns that if policymakers push through with this agreement “they will likely end up with blood on their hands”.
The men in the Curtin Immigration Detention Centre should not be punished for trying to find safety for themselves and their families. And they are not the only ones. There are currently 6,730 men, women and children in immigration detention centres throughout Australia, including on the overcrowded Christmas Island. Many are very likely to be seeking asylum from persecution in their own countries.
Keeping people hidden behind large fences for months on end cannot be understood as anything but punishment. The Australian government must stop it.
Caroline Fleay is a lecturer at the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University. She is the author of Australia and Human Rights: Situating the Howard Government (2010).
Nina Boydell works in community development and human rights education.
Source,
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/43698.html
Caroline Fleay and Nina Boydell
08 February 2011
Thousands of kilometres from where most Australians live is an expanding collection of small demountable huts surrounded by two huge wire fences.
It is not easy to visit this place of detention – for most people it involves an expensive flight to Broome in WA’s northwest region, and a further two hour drive to a turn-off on the Broome-Derby road. The final five kilometres is down a long stretch of road punctuated by signs warning the visitor that there is “No Through Road” and to “Turn Back”.
Finally a perimeter check point is reached. Personal identification is checked here, and if it matches the written forms the visitor had sent to the place of detention prior to the visit, the visitor is allowed to proceed. Upon arriving at the enormous wire gates of the main entrance, another checkpoint is entered and the visitor’s personal identification and belongings are surrendered.
So who are the 1,200 men that are kept inside such an isolated and secure compound? Upon our arrival at the detention centre, it felt like we were entering a prisoner of war camp. But the men in this place are not prisoners of war captured by Australian troops. They are mostly Hazara men from Afghanistan – a country where Australian troops are embroiled in a conflict that seeks to oust the Taliban and other such violent groups, the very groups that many Hazara are fleeing.
The men that Australia detains in this isolated camp are the allies of our Australian troops but they are those our troops are not able to protect in their own land. Many Hazara men are forced to leave Afghanistan or face the terror of the ever-present violence that threatens their lives and those of their families. This is who we are keeping hidden at the Curtin Immigration Detention Centre, the same isolated centre that the Howard government finally agreed to close in 2002.
Our visit to the detention centre last week was profoundly moving. A small group of us were welcomed by hundreds of men incredibly grateful for a rare visit and eager to meet and talk to Australians who were not in uniforms. We listened to their stories and answered their questions about Australia and heard of the anguish of those who had been on hunger strike the week before out of desperation that they had heard nothing for months about the outcome of their refugee claims.
Some of the men walked with us down the long path to the front wire gates as we left on the last day of our visit. They stood and waved to us until they could no longer see us. These are hidden men who feel forgotten.
Although the men may be getting their basic needs met, such as adequate food and shelter, their anguish makes it obvious that no amount of care provided within a place of detention will ease the agony of their wait. “We have everything we need but not our freedom.” Many are incredibly resilient, trying to keep their minds busy to avoid the despair. Others have lost hope and have tried to kill themselves.
There are young men in the Curtin detention centre who hardly look 18 and who have been forced to flee their families completely alone to try to find a safer life. There are also many family men of all ages who desperately worry for the fate of their wives and children as they wait many months for the decision about their refugee application. Can you imagine how desperate you must be to find a safer life for your family, to make the decision to leave them behind? So that you alone would endure the terror of the journey of reaching Australia, with the hope that once you arrive you would be welcomed and your family allowed to join you?
Whatever you think of the means that these men took to leave Afghanistan and finally arrive in Australia, they are now here. They are not enemies of Australia. Based on Department of Immigration statistics from 2009-2010, 99.7% of Afghans arriving in Australia seeking asylum were found to be refugees. It is very likely that most if not all of the men in the Curtin detention centre have also fled similar persecution. We should not be detaining them for months and soon-to-be years behind large fences. They should be living in our communities while they wait for the interminable time it takes for their refugee applications to be assessed.
Despite reports from the Australian government that suggest it is now safe for some Hazaras to return to Afghanistan, many other reports and those with family and friends in Afghanistan will tell you this is not true.
William Maley, one of Australia’s foremost experts on Afghanistan, is highly sceptical of the Australian government’s recent agreement with the Afghanistan government that could allow for the forcible repatriation of some Hazaras. He argues that the security situation in Afghanistan is “by most accounts deteriorating” and warns that if policymakers push through with this agreement “they will likely end up with blood on their hands”.
The men in the Curtin Immigration Detention Centre should not be punished for trying to find safety for themselves and their families. And they are not the only ones. There are currently 6,730 men, women and children in immigration detention centres throughout Australia, including on the overcrowded Christmas Island. Many are very likely to be seeking asylum from persecution in their own countries.
Keeping people hidden behind large fences for months on end cannot be understood as anything but punishment. The Australian government must stop it.
Caroline Fleay is a lecturer at the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University. She is the author of Australia and Human Rights: Situating the Howard Government (2010).
Nina Boydell works in community development and human rights education.
Source,
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/43698.html
Saturday, January 29, 2011
People-smugglers target Australian Hazaras
January 29, 2011 - 12:34AM
AAP
Sophisticated people-smuggling syndicates charging thousands of dollars to ferry asylum seekers from Afghanistan to Australia are preying on Hazara communities in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide.
The syndicates charge clients $12,000 for the trip and are believed to have generated tens of millions of dollars in the past two years, The Age newspaper reported on Saturday.
A well-placed source in the Afghan community told the newspaper this week:
Advertisement: Story continues below "The syndicates are an open secret within the Hazara community.
"Everybody knows who runs them, who to approach and who makes the money.
"It is astonishing they can operate so openly."
The largest Australian-based smuggling operation is believed to operate out of nondescript shop fronts in Dandenong, in Melbourne's south-east, home to thousands of Afghan refugees, including many of Hazara ethnicity.
The top smugglers have Australian citizenship and travel unimpeded between Australia and Afghanistan, it is claimed.
The smugglers boast they can reunite family and friends with relatives living in Australia within months, if not weeks.
© 2011 AAP
Source: http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/peoplesmugglers-target-australian-hazaras-20110129-1a8lz.html
AAP
Sophisticated people-smuggling syndicates charging thousands of dollars to ferry asylum seekers from Afghanistan to Australia are preying on Hazara communities in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide.
The syndicates charge clients $12,000 for the trip and are believed to have generated tens of millions of dollars in the past two years, The Age newspaper reported on Saturday.
A well-placed source in the Afghan community told the newspaper this week:
Advertisement: Story continues below "The syndicates are an open secret within the Hazara community.
"Everybody knows who runs them, who to approach and who makes the money.
"It is astonishing they can operate so openly."
The largest Australian-based smuggling operation is believed to operate out of nondescript shop fronts in Dandenong, in Melbourne's south-east, home to thousands of Afghan refugees, including many of Hazara ethnicity.
The top smugglers have Australian citizenship and travel unimpeded between Australia and Afghanistan, it is claimed.
The smugglers boast they can reunite family and friends with relatives living in Australia within months, if not weeks.
© 2011 AAP
Source: http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/peoplesmugglers-target-australian-hazaras-20110129-1a8lz.html
Car bomb injures 10 in SW Pakistan: police
(AFP) – Jan, 29, 2011
QUETTA, Pakistan — Ten people including four policemen were injured Saturday when a car bomb targeting a senior police official exploded in the southwestern city of Quetta, police said.
The bomb, planted in a Suzuki car, exploded as a police vehicle carrying Shaban Ali passed through the heart of Quetta, the capital of oil and gas rich Baluchistan province, senior police official Hamid Shakeel told AFP.
"At least 10 people including four policemen and and six passers-by were wounded in the attack targeting Shaban Ali, who remained unhurt." Shakeel said.
He added that nobody has so far claimed responsibility for the attack.
Local security officials, who declined to be identified, also confirmed the incident.
Baluchistan, which borders Afghanistan and Iran, has seen an upswing in violence recently, with the province suffering from a separatist insurgency, sectarian violence and Taliban militants.
Hundreds of people have died since rebels rose up in 2004 demanding political autonomy and a greater share of profits from the region's natural oil, gas and mineral resources.
Source,http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jlFJKpDVcXm6TmCmMvKapsyL3j0Q?docId=CNG.d0438e089708981536317df1dc6b362e.121
QUETTA, Pakistan — Ten people including four policemen were injured Saturday when a car bomb targeting a senior police official exploded in the southwestern city of Quetta, police said.
The bomb, planted in a Suzuki car, exploded as a police vehicle carrying Shaban Ali passed through the heart of Quetta, the capital of oil and gas rich Baluchistan province, senior police official Hamid Shakeel told AFP.
"At least 10 people including four policemen and and six passers-by were wounded in the attack targeting Shaban Ali, who remained unhurt." Shakeel said.
He added that nobody has so far claimed responsibility for the attack.
Local security officials, who declined to be identified, also confirmed the incident.
Baluchistan, which borders Afghanistan and Iran, has seen an upswing in violence recently, with the province suffering from a separatist insurgency, sectarian violence and Taliban militants.
Hundreds of people have died since rebels rose up in 2004 demanding political autonomy and a greater share of profits from the region's natural oil, gas and mineral resources.
Source,http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jlFJKpDVcXm6TmCmMvKapsyL3j0Q?docId=CNG.d0438e089708981536317df1dc6b362e.121
Friday, January 28, 2011
Afghanistan shortlists 15 Indian firms for Hajigak bid
Priyadarshi Siddhanta
Posted: Thu Jan 27 2011, 01:15 hrs
New Delhi:
Enthused by the response of Indian metal and mining giants for developing the Hajigak iron ore mine in Afghanistan, the Hamid Karzai government has shortlisted 15 of them for competitive bidding process for the mine to begin soon.
A total of 22 companies had confirmed their Expression of Interests (EoI) to the Afghan government for exploring the Hajigak mine, located in the Bamiyan province of the country.
High grade iron ore reserves of the mine is estimated to be about 1.8 billion tonnes.
An estimated expenditure of about Rs 10,000 crore is required to develop the mine and its peripheral infrastructure for evacuation of the mineral.
In a letter on January 17, Afghan mines minister Wahidullah Shahrani said of the 22 firms shortlisted for the coming bidding process, 15 are Indian companies.
They include big-ticket names like maharatna Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), navratna behemoths NMDC and Rashtriya Ispat Nigam limited, besides private sector giants like Tata, Essar, Jindal Steel and Power, Ispat, Monnet Ispat, JSW, Jindal Saw among others.
Interestingly, Iranian firms like Gol-e-Gohar Iron Ore and Behin Sanate Diba have also tendered their EoI.
In his letter, Shahrani said his ministry was in the process of finalising the bidder’s package for all the phases of the process. “It is anticipated that the bidder’s due diligence period will start around March 1, 2011 and extend at least through August 3, 2011. We appreciate your interest in the Hajigak project and look forward to receiving a competitive bid from you,” the Afghan mines minister said.
Soviet era studies reveal that the said mine was amendable to open pit mining methods. In the EoI floated recently, the Afghanistan government said it would conduct a bidding process for multiple exploration concessions, and the selected bidder would be granted mineral concessions under the Afghan Mineral Law 2010.
The Afghan government is also keen that the Indian companies set up steel and other iron ore processing plants near Hajigak. The country is believed to be sitting on over $2.5 trillion worth of untapped mineral deposits. It has huge copper mines in Balkhab and Aynak areas.
Shahrani had met Indian mines ministry officials in November last and expressed his country’s desire to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between both the nations to promote mining and end use industries back in Afghanistan.
The ministry of external affairs too has been asking the mines ministry to evaluate the response from the Indian companies.
Source,
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/afghanistan-shortlists-15-indian-firms-for-hajigak-bid/742499/2
Posted: Thu Jan 27 2011, 01:15 hrs
New Delhi:
Enthused by the response of Indian metal and mining giants for developing the Hajigak iron ore mine in Afghanistan, the Hamid Karzai government has shortlisted 15 of them for competitive bidding process for the mine to begin soon.
A total of 22 companies had confirmed their Expression of Interests (EoI) to the Afghan government for exploring the Hajigak mine, located in the Bamiyan province of the country.
High grade iron ore reserves of the mine is estimated to be about 1.8 billion tonnes.
An estimated expenditure of about Rs 10,000 crore is required to develop the mine and its peripheral infrastructure for evacuation of the mineral.
In a letter on January 17, Afghan mines minister Wahidullah Shahrani said of the 22 firms shortlisted for the coming bidding process, 15 are Indian companies.
They include big-ticket names like maharatna Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), navratna behemoths NMDC and Rashtriya Ispat Nigam limited, besides private sector giants like Tata, Essar, Jindal Steel and Power, Ispat, Monnet Ispat, JSW, Jindal Saw among others.
Interestingly, Iranian firms like Gol-e-Gohar Iron Ore and Behin Sanate Diba have also tendered their EoI.
In his letter, Shahrani said his ministry was in the process of finalising the bidder’s package for all the phases of the process. “It is anticipated that the bidder’s due diligence period will start around March 1, 2011 and extend at least through August 3, 2011. We appreciate your interest in the Hajigak project and look forward to receiving a competitive bid from you,” the Afghan mines minister said.
Soviet era studies reveal that the said mine was amendable to open pit mining methods. In the EoI floated recently, the Afghanistan government said it would conduct a bidding process for multiple exploration concessions, and the selected bidder would be granted mineral concessions under the Afghan Mineral Law 2010.
The Afghan government is also keen that the Indian companies set up steel and other iron ore processing plants near Hajigak. The country is believed to be sitting on over $2.5 trillion worth of untapped mineral deposits. It has huge copper mines in Balkhab and Aynak areas.
Shahrani had met Indian mines ministry officials in November last and expressed his country’s desire to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between both the nations to promote mining and end use industries back in Afghanistan.
The ministry of external affairs too has been asking the mines ministry to evaluate the response from the Indian companies.
Source,
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/afghanistan-shortlists-15-indian-firms-for-hajigak-bid/742499/2
After standoff, Karzai opens newly assertive Afghan parliament
By Ben Arnoldy | Published Thu, Jan 27 2011 8:20 am
NEW DELHI — President Hamid Karzai inaugurated Afghanistan’s newly elected parliament on Wednesday, a concession by him that adds weight to the increasingly assertive legislative branch.
Mr. Karzai had tried to delay the convening of the new parliament until a special court finished investigating allegations of election fraud. The victorious candidates – as of today, sitting parliamentarians – had argued the court was unconstitutional and that they would convene with or without the president’s blessing. Key international players appeared to back the new parliament, prompting Karzai to complain about “foreign hands” stoking the crisis.
Since Karzai’s fraud-marred reelection, lawmakers have successfully challenged more of his major decisions, holding out the prospect of diverse power centers competing inside the constitutional process, rather than just on the battlefield. Yet the parliament remains weak, and this particular standoff with Karzai may not be over.
“There are so many issues not resolved: What will be the role of the special court, whether [its] decisions will be binding or not, and how to implement the decisions,” says Shahmahmood Miakhel, country director for the United States Institute of Peace in Kabul. “So we can not say this is the end of the story.”
Special deals with the special court?
Statements from Karzai indicate that he thinks a deal was struck with parliamentarians to allow the special court to continue its investigation and to abide by its findings, expected in February. But legislative leaders appear to be saying something different.
“There is no special agreement between MPs and President Karzai on the special court,” says Fawzia Kofi, a reelected MP from Badakhshan. “The agreement was that cases of criminal issues related to elections should be dealt according to the law – the Constitution, and electoral law, and the regular courts – not the special court.”
However, MPs have a certain amount of immunity under the law. Ms. Kofi says the immunity does not extend to “obvious crimes” like murder and bribes, but simply protects free speech. Mr. Miakhel, however, notes that the courts have to seek permission from the leadership of parliament before pursuing criminal cases against MPs.
Kofi says she expects that the new parliament will vote quickly to abolish the special court. The court was appointed by the Supreme Court, a body widely seen as beholden to Karzai. Parliamentarians have also noted that the group tasked under law to address election violations – the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) – has already passed judgment on the 2,648 top priority complaints.
But roughly 200 losing candidates have kept up steady protests of the official election results certified by the Independent Election Commission (IEC) and have pinned their hopes on the special court.
Stronger opposition presence in parliament
Research on the winning candidates conducted by the Kabul Center for Strategic Studies found that “as a result of strict control, monitoring, and observation of IEC and ECC, the government was not able to bring many pro-government candidates.” Instead, opposition groups now have a stronger presence in this parliament than in the previous one.
But the center’s director, Waliullah Rahmani, cautions that “it doesn’t mean that we will have a stronger opposition group inside the parliament. [The] study shows that these groups and figures are fragmented.”
The study found that 51 percent of the new parliamentarians are “independent,” a group that Karzai’s government might find easier to sway. The lack of strong political parties has left a high number of independents and little cohesion among lawmakers, rendering the parliament generally weak.
The largest ethnic group, Pashtuns, won 96 out of the 249 seats – a proportion slightly lower than some demographic estimates would predict if voting followed purely ethnic lines. The Hazara minority group punched far above its weight, winning 61 seats.
This was dramatically demonstrated in Ghazni Province, which is split demographically between Pashtuns and minority groups, but which sent all Hazaras and no Pashtuns to parliament this time. The most visible leader of the 200 losing candidates, Daoud Sultanzai, hails from Ghazni.
Parliament’s ethnic proportions have made some Afghans like Karzai nervous about further alienation of Pashtuns, the core group from which the insurgency draws its ranks. But others like Mr. Rahmani point out that those who peacefully participate in the democratic process should reap some benefits.
“This is what we can call a reward for democracy. I believe Pashtuns will understand that when there is high turnout, then they can get the reward, like what the Hazaras did in Afghanistan,” says Rahmani, who is a Hazara and whose brother won a seat in parliament from Ghazni Province.
Source,
http://www.minnpost.com/worldcsm/2011/01/27/25258/after_standoff_karzai_opens_newly_assertive_afghan_parliament
NEW DELHI — President Hamid Karzai inaugurated Afghanistan’s newly elected parliament on Wednesday, a concession by him that adds weight to the increasingly assertive legislative branch.
Mr. Karzai had tried to delay the convening of the new parliament until a special court finished investigating allegations of election fraud. The victorious candidates – as of today, sitting parliamentarians – had argued the court was unconstitutional and that they would convene with or without the president’s blessing. Key international players appeared to back the new parliament, prompting Karzai to complain about “foreign hands” stoking the crisis.
Since Karzai’s fraud-marred reelection, lawmakers have successfully challenged more of his major decisions, holding out the prospect of diverse power centers competing inside the constitutional process, rather than just on the battlefield. Yet the parliament remains weak, and this particular standoff with Karzai may not be over.
“There are so many issues not resolved: What will be the role of the special court, whether [its] decisions will be binding or not, and how to implement the decisions,” says Shahmahmood Miakhel, country director for the United States Institute of Peace in Kabul. “So we can not say this is the end of the story.”
Special deals with the special court?
Statements from Karzai indicate that he thinks a deal was struck with parliamentarians to allow the special court to continue its investigation and to abide by its findings, expected in February. But legislative leaders appear to be saying something different.
“There is no special agreement between MPs and President Karzai on the special court,” says Fawzia Kofi, a reelected MP from Badakhshan. “The agreement was that cases of criminal issues related to elections should be dealt according to the law – the Constitution, and electoral law, and the regular courts – not the special court.”
However, MPs have a certain amount of immunity under the law. Ms. Kofi says the immunity does not extend to “obvious crimes” like murder and bribes, but simply protects free speech. Mr. Miakhel, however, notes that the courts have to seek permission from the leadership of parliament before pursuing criminal cases against MPs.
Kofi says she expects that the new parliament will vote quickly to abolish the special court. The court was appointed by the Supreme Court, a body widely seen as beholden to Karzai. Parliamentarians have also noted that the group tasked under law to address election violations – the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) – has already passed judgment on the 2,648 top priority complaints.
But roughly 200 losing candidates have kept up steady protests of the official election results certified by the Independent Election Commission (IEC) and have pinned their hopes on the special court.
Stronger opposition presence in parliament
Research on the winning candidates conducted by the Kabul Center for Strategic Studies found that “as a result of strict control, monitoring, and observation of IEC and ECC, the government was not able to bring many pro-government candidates.” Instead, opposition groups now have a stronger presence in this parliament than in the previous one.
But the center’s director, Waliullah Rahmani, cautions that “it doesn’t mean that we will have a stronger opposition group inside the parliament. [The] study shows that these groups and figures are fragmented.”
The study found that 51 percent of the new parliamentarians are “independent,” a group that Karzai’s government might find easier to sway. The lack of strong political parties has left a high number of independents and little cohesion among lawmakers, rendering the parliament generally weak.
The largest ethnic group, Pashtuns, won 96 out of the 249 seats – a proportion slightly lower than some demographic estimates would predict if voting followed purely ethnic lines. The Hazara minority group punched far above its weight, winning 61 seats.
This was dramatically demonstrated in Ghazni Province, which is split demographically between Pashtuns and minority groups, but which sent all Hazaras and no Pashtuns to parliament this time. The most visible leader of the 200 losing candidates, Daoud Sultanzai, hails from Ghazni.
Parliament’s ethnic proportions have made some Afghans like Karzai nervous about further alienation of Pashtuns, the core group from which the insurgency draws its ranks. But others like Mr. Rahmani point out that those who peacefully participate in the democratic process should reap some benefits.
“This is what we can call a reward for democracy. I believe Pashtuns will understand that when there is high turnout, then they can get the reward, like what the Hazaras did in Afghanistan,” says Rahmani, who is a Hazara and whose brother won a seat in parliament from Ghazni Province.
Source,
http://www.minnpost.com/worldcsm/2011/01/27/25258/after_standoff_karzai_opens_newly_assertive_afghan_parliament
Thursday, January 20, 2011
15 Indian companies bid for Afghan iron deposits news
20 January 2011
With the negotiations for the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) oil pipeline reaching a successful outcome and the security situation within the country taking a turn for the better over the last quarter of 2010, Afghanistan is now moving ahead on a path of national development. On Wednesday it invited 22 companies, including 15 from India, to bid for the development of its giant Hajigak iron ore deposits.
The country's ministry for mines has set 3 August 2011 as the deadline for bids for what it says is the largest un-mined iron deposit in Asia. It said it expected exploration to begin in 2012.
The Hajigak deposit straddles Bamiyan, Parwan and Wardak provinces.
The ministry estimates the worth of its reserves at as much as $350 billion.
Source,
http://www.domain-b.com/industry/Mining/20110120_afghan_iron_deposits.html
With the negotiations for the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) oil pipeline reaching a successful outcome and the security situation within the country taking a turn for the better over the last quarter of 2010, Afghanistan is now moving ahead on a path of national development. On Wednesday it invited 22 companies, including 15 from India, to bid for the development of its giant Hajigak iron ore deposits.
The country's ministry for mines has set 3 August 2011 as the deadline for bids for what it says is the largest un-mined iron deposit in Asia. It said it expected exploration to begin in 2012.
The Hajigak deposit straddles Bamiyan, Parwan and Wardak provinces.
The ministry estimates the worth of its reserves at as much as $350 billion.
Source,
http://www.domain-b.com/industry/Mining/20110120_afghan_iron_deposits.html
Afghanistan invites bids for Hajigak iron deposit
Wed Jan 19, 2011 3:08pm GMT
KABUL Jan 19 (Reuters) - Afghanistan on Wednesday invited 22 companies, including 15 from India, to bid for its giant Hajigak iron ore deposit despite concerns over a worsening insurgency.
The country's Mines Ministry set Aug. 3, 2011 as the deadline for bids for what it says is the largest unmined iron deposit in Asia. It said it expected exploration to begin in 2012, pressing ahead with the project despite security concerns weighing on investors.
The Hajigak deposit straddles Bamiyan, Parwan and Wardak provinces, with only Bamiyan relatively peaceful. The ministry estimates the worth of its reserves at as much as $350 billion.
The United States has trumpeted Afghanistan's rich mineral deposits as the key to future prosperity, but experts say the bounty is years, even decades away and point to massive security and infrastructure challenges for potential investors.
Violence in Afghanistan is at it worst since U.S-backed forces overthrew the Taliban in late 2001 with record casualties on all sides and a raging insurgency spreading to once-peaceful areas of the country.
The government has a specially trained force to protect mines and other infrastructure, with many of its members drawn from villages surrounding the asset under guard.
The ministry said the interested companies included India's Jindal Steel and Power Ltd , JSW Steel , Tata Steel , NMDC , Steel Authority of India and Ispat Industries . UK-based Stemcor was also named, as well as Canadian-based Kilo Goldmines Ltd .
"The development of Hajigak will involve major infrastructure improvements and will stimulate the local economy and improve and lives of the citizens of Bamiyan province and beyond," Mines Minister Wahidullah Shahrani said in a statement.
United Mining and Minerals Co. was the only Chinese company on the list, the ministry said.
China's top integrated copper producer, Jiangxi Copper Co , and Metallurgical Corp of China are developing the vast Aynak copper mine south of Kabul after they were handed the contract in 2007. The $4 billion project is the biggest non-military investment in the country so far.
Metallurgical Corp pulled out of an earlier tender for Hajigak in 2009 following accusations it had won the Aynak contract by giving bribes. The firm denied the charges.
The Mines Ministry cancelled the tender, blaming the cancellation on the global recession and changes in the world market structure for iron. (Reporting by Matt Robinson, additional reporting by Hamid Shalizi, editing by Miral Fahmy)
(If you have a query or comment about this story, send an e-mail to news.feedback.asia@thomsonreuters.com)
Source,
http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFSGE70I0BB20110119?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0
KABUL Jan 19 (Reuters) - Afghanistan on Wednesday invited 22 companies, including 15 from India, to bid for its giant Hajigak iron ore deposit despite concerns over a worsening insurgency.
The country's Mines Ministry set Aug. 3, 2011 as the deadline for bids for what it says is the largest unmined iron deposit in Asia. It said it expected exploration to begin in 2012, pressing ahead with the project despite security concerns weighing on investors.
The Hajigak deposit straddles Bamiyan, Parwan and Wardak provinces, with only Bamiyan relatively peaceful. The ministry estimates the worth of its reserves at as much as $350 billion.
The United States has trumpeted Afghanistan's rich mineral deposits as the key to future prosperity, but experts say the bounty is years, even decades away and point to massive security and infrastructure challenges for potential investors.
Violence in Afghanistan is at it worst since U.S-backed forces overthrew the Taliban in late 2001 with record casualties on all sides and a raging insurgency spreading to once-peaceful areas of the country.
The government has a specially trained force to protect mines and other infrastructure, with many of its members drawn from villages surrounding the asset under guard.
The ministry said the interested companies included India's Jindal Steel and Power Ltd , JSW Steel , Tata Steel , NMDC , Steel Authority of India and Ispat Industries . UK-based Stemcor was also named, as well as Canadian-based Kilo Goldmines Ltd .
"The development of Hajigak will involve major infrastructure improvements and will stimulate the local economy and improve and lives of the citizens of Bamiyan province and beyond," Mines Minister Wahidullah Shahrani said in a statement.
United Mining and Minerals Co. was the only Chinese company on the list, the ministry said.
China's top integrated copper producer, Jiangxi Copper Co , and Metallurgical Corp of China are developing the vast Aynak copper mine south of Kabul after they were handed the contract in 2007. The $4 billion project is the biggest non-military investment in the country so far.
Metallurgical Corp pulled out of an earlier tender for Hajigak in 2009 following accusations it had won the Aynak contract by giving bribes. The firm denied the charges.
The Mines Ministry cancelled the tender, blaming the cancellation on the global recession and changes in the world market structure for iron. (Reporting by Matt Robinson, additional reporting by Hamid Shalizi, editing by Miral Fahmy)
(If you have a query or comment about this story, send an e-mail to news.feedback.asia@thomsonreuters.com)
Source,
http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFSGE70I0BB20110119?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0
Asylum seekers end hunger strike
Jan, 20th, 2011
The head of Western Australia's Hazara community, Daniel Rezaie, has confirmed a hunger strike at the Curtin Detention Centre has been called off.
It has been claimed that hundreds of asylum seekers took part in the hunger strike, angry over the time it is taking to process the applications.
Mr Rezaie says the asylum seekers called off the strike because they were promised that a representative from Canberra would be sent to talk to them, and they may have their claims processed faster.
He says several people have been taken to hospital.
"It's a lot of people taken to the hospital, because they are in so bad a condition," he said.
"Today it's more than 70 people taken to the hospital."
Source,
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/01/20/3117708.htm
The head of Western Australia's Hazara community, Daniel Rezaie, has confirmed a hunger strike at the Curtin Detention Centre has been called off.
It has been claimed that hundreds of asylum seekers took part in the hunger strike, angry over the time it is taking to process the applications.
Mr Rezaie says the asylum seekers called off the strike because they were promised that a representative from Canberra would be sent to talk to them, and they may have their claims processed faster.
He says several people have been taken to hospital.
"It's a lot of people taken to the hospital, because they are in so bad a condition," he said.
"Today it's more than 70 people taken to the hospital."
Source,
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/01/20/3117708.htm
Afghan Parliament Opening Delayed
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV And MARIA ABI-HABIB
KABUL—Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Wednesday delayed the incoming parliament's opening by a month to give a tribunal more time to investigate fraud allegations, as the conflict over controversial legislative elections intensified.
Former Afghan lawmakers listen to Sediqullah Haqiq, head of a tribunal investigating alleged fraud during last year's election, in Kabul Wednesday.
Mr. Karzai has repeatedly criticized the new parliament, which was scheduled to convene for the first time Sunday, as unrepresentative because it doesn't allocate enough seats to the country's biggest ethnic group, the Pashtuns. Mr. Karzai, a Pashtun who created the special court last month to review fraud claims by losing candidates, agreed to that court's request for the delay just hours after it was made.
The president's move puts him at odds with the United Nations and the U.S.-led coalition, which have accepted as final the election's results, as certified by Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission in December.
The IEC and the U.N.-backed watchdog, the Electoral Complaints Commission, are refusing to cooperate with the special court, saying the judges have no legal authority to interfere with election results under the Afghan constitution. Mr. Karzai on Wednesday ordered all Afghan government bodies to collaborate with the inquiry.
Over the past year, the Afghan parliament has emerged as a check on Mr. Karzai's powers, vetoing his ministerial candidates and opposing several of his policies. The new parliament's composition is seen as even more hostile to Mr. Karzai. Some Western diplomats say the Afghan president's true goal is to weaken the new legislature—and to keep it from convening for as long as possible.
Delaying the inauguration "is something that will hurt the legitimacy and the credibility of the new parliament," said Haroun Mir, the director of the Afghanistan Center for Research and Policy Studies, who unsuccessfully ran for parliament himself.
Western diplomats said representatives of the international community will gather Thursday to discuss how to react to Mr. Karzai's move. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul said its views on the election are reflected by last month's U.N. Security Council statement, which welcomed the election commission's certification of the results and urged "all Afghan institutions act within their clearly defined areas of competence, in accordance with the relevant laws and the Afghan Constitution."
The Sept. 18 parliamentary election had the lowest turnout of any Afghan election since the Taliban regime was ousted in 2001. While international observers agree there was widespread fraud, they say the electoral commission behaved far more professionally last year than in the 2009 presidential election.
Afghanistan's attorney general, a close ally of Mr. Karzai, is seeking criminal charges against top IEC and ECC officials for their alleged involvement in fraud during the parliamentary vote.
More
U.S. Slows Afghan Security-Force Expansion Gains by Taliban Open Door to Opium Revival The special court's request to delay the parliament's opening was made on the last day of orientation for incoming Afghan lawmakers, a session held in Kabul's Intercontinental Hotel. Winning candidates shunned the remaining seminars to gather in the hallways, talking in hushed and angry tones about how to mobilize their protesters.
"Democracy isn't a toy to be played with—people risked their lives to vote," said winning incumbent Shinkai Karokhail, elected from Kabul.
Incoming lawmakers said they are worried that the political crisis will spill onto the streets of Afghanistan's major cities, pitting Pashtuns against the country's minorities, such as the Hazaras, who are well-represented in the new legislature. In the Pashtun-majority Ghazni province, for example, all 11 elected lawmakers are Hazaras, largely because the Taliban have succeeded in derailing the vote in most Pashtun villages.
It isn't clear how the special court will carry out its investigations, as both the IEC and the ECC said they won't share any information with the judges, referring them instead to the election commissions' websites.
The special court's chairman, Sediqullah Haqiq, raised the possibility that the entire election may be thrown out. "We have received complaints from all the provinces, and in each province people complained about fraud," he said Wednesday, speaking in a courtroom packed with losing parliamentary candidates.
In the eastern Paktika province, meanwhile, a roadside bomb Wednesday killed 13 Afghan civilians, including women and children, officials said. Paktika is one of the provinces most heavily affected by the Taliban, who routinely plant roadside explosive devices as they target coalition and Afghan forces.
—Arif Afzalzada and Habib Khan Totakhil contributed to this article.
ASIA NEWS JANUARY 20, 2011
Source,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704590704576091660358954054.html
KABUL—Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Wednesday delayed the incoming parliament's opening by a month to give a tribunal more time to investigate fraud allegations, as the conflict over controversial legislative elections intensified.
Former Afghan lawmakers listen to Sediqullah Haqiq, head of a tribunal investigating alleged fraud during last year's election, in Kabul Wednesday.
Mr. Karzai has repeatedly criticized the new parliament, which was scheduled to convene for the first time Sunday, as unrepresentative because it doesn't allocate enough seats to the country's biggest ethnic group, the Pashtuns. Mr. Karzai, a Pashtun who created the special court last month to review fraud claims by losing candidates, agreed to that court's request for the delay just hours after it was made.
The president's move puts him at odds with the United Nations and the U.S.-led coalition, which have accepted as final the election's results, as certified by Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission in December.
The IEC and the U.N.-backed watchdog, the Electoral Complaints Commission, are refusing to cooperate with the special court, saying the judges have no legal authority to interfere with election results under the Afghan constitution. Mr. Karzai on Wednesday ordered all Afghan government bodies to collaborate with the inquiry.
Over the past year, the Afghan parliament has emerged as a check on Mr. Karzai's powers, vetoing his ministerial candidates and opposing several of his policies. The new parliament's composition is seen as even more hostile to Mr. Karzai. Some Western diplomats say the Afghan president's true goal is to weaken the new legislature—and to keep it from convening for as long as possible.
Delaying the inauguration "is something that will hurt the legitimacy and the credibility of the new parliament," said Haroun Mir, the director of the Afghanistan Center for Research and Policy Studies, who unsuccessfully ran for parliament himself.
Western diplomats said representatives of the international community will gather Thursday to discuss how to react to Mr. Karzai's move. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul said its views on the election are reflected by last month's U.N. Security Council statement, which welcomed the election commission's certification of the results and urged "all Afghan institutions act within their clearly defined areas of competence, in accordance with the relevant laws and the Afghan Constitution."
The Sept. 18 parliamentary election had the lowest turnout of any Afghan election since the Taliban regime was ousted in 2001. While international observers agree there was widespread fraud, they say the electoral commission behaved far more professionally last year than in the 2009 presidential election.
Afghanistan's attorney general, a close ally of Mr. Karzai, is seeking criminal charges against top IEC and ECC officials for their alleged involvement in fraud during the parliamentary vote.
More
U.S. Slows Afghan Security-Force Expansion Gains by Taliban Open Door to Opium Revival The special court's request to delay the parliament's opening was made on the last day of orientation for incoming Afghan lawmakers, a session held in Kabul's Intercontinental Hotel. Winning candidates shunned the remaining seminars to gather in the hallways, talking in hushed and angry tones about how to mobilize their protesters.
"Democracy isn't a toy to be played with—people risked their lives to vote," said winning incumbent Shinkai Karokhail, elected from Kabul.
Incoming lawmakers said they are worried that the political crisis will spill onto the streets of Afghanistan's major cities, pitting Pashtuns against the country's minorities, such as the Hazaras, who are well-represented in the new legislature. In the Pashtun-majority Ghazni province, for example, all 11 elected lawmakers are Hazaras, largely because the Taliban have succeeded in derailing the vote in most Pashtun villages.
It isn't clear how the special court will carry out its investigations, as both the IEC and the ECC said they won't share any information with the judges, referring them instead to the election commissions' websites.
The special court's chairman, Sediqullah Haqiq, raised the possibility that the entire election may be thrown out. "We have received complaints from all the provinces, and in each province people complained about fraud," he said Wednesday, speaking in a courtroom packed with losing parliamentary candidates.
In the eastern Paktika province, meanwhile, a roadside bomb Wednesday killed 13 Afghan civilians, including women and children, officials said. Paktika is one of the provinces most heavily affected by the Taliban, who routinely plant roadside explosive devices as they target coalition and Afghan forces.
—Arif Afzalzada and Habib Khan Totakhil contributed to this article.
ASIA NEWS JANUARY 20, 2011
Source,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704590704576091660358954054.html
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