The statues mentioned in the article are statues of Buddha. One of them is
175 feet tall and one is 120 feet tall and they date back to the 3rd and 5th
century AD. UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura said of the planned
destruction,
``In Afghanistan, they are destroying statues that the entire world considers
to be masterpieces,'' UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura said. ``This
iconoclastic determination shocks me.''
Considering what we have seen in Kosovo from the Kosovo Liberation Army
fundamentalist Muslims, who also were armed and supported by the United States,
the European Union, NAT O and the United Nations along this line, why would
Matsuura be shocked when the Taliban follows the KLA's lead?
The Western press has largely ignored the desecration and destruction of
Serbian Christian Churches in Kosovo by the KLA. So, the front page reports in
the Washington Post and New York Times of the Taliban's desecration and
destruction of Buddhist religious statues is a most welcome surprise.
The KLA and the Taliban have a lot in common. Both are armed fundamentalist
Muslim fanatics determined to destroy the people and the symbols of other
religions and both were initially armed and trained by the United States. Both
groups were called "freedom fighters" by the West and the weapons they are using
to kill, main religious people and destroy religious artifacts are mostly those
they have gotten from the United States..
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to give aid to the Communist
government, the United States provided Stinger missiles to the "freedom
fighters" and taught them how to shoot down Soviet aircraft. By 1999 left over
Stinger missiles were being deployed to hijack an Indian Airbus as the Taliban
demanded release of some of its terrorists.
The Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, dismissed the West's
concerns by saying:
"We do not understand why everybody is so worried. All we are
breaking are stones." A mullah is honored in the Muslim faith as one who is
learned in the shari'a, the sacred law of Muslims.
At least the Muslims in Afghanistan are being honest about what they are
doing by openly admitting why they are killing, maiming and destroying all
that stands in their way of a purely Muslim state. In Kosovo over 100
Christian churches and monasteries, some dating back to the 13th and 14th
century, have been destroyed by the KLA terrorists we helped arm.
However, in both situations, the Western media has shown literally no
concern for the suffering of the people involved, much less the threat to
religious treasures. In Afghanistan, a once stable nation of 15 million people
has been literally destroyed with little mention in the West that six million
of its population were driven out as refugees.
Cosma Shalizi in his review of "The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan
Response, 1979-1982" (University of California Press, 1995), by M. Hassan
Kakar, (http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/reviews/kakar-soviet-invasion/) notes:
"The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. It was
the last hot war it would fight, and one whose failure played a leading role
in its loss of the Cold War and disintegration. Afghanistan is infamous
today for being in the grip of the most benighted, fanatical and misogynist
government in the world. It was not always that way, but has become so
through the superpowers' acts of omission and commission --- mostly
commission. ...
"Here we come to the sowing of the dragon's teeth. US aid to the
mujahideen went through the CIA. The CIA passed it on to its counterpart in
Pakistan, the ISI (which doubles as the Pakistani secret police). The ISI
passed it on to the political parties of exiles in Peshawr, from whom, in
turn, it finally made its way, often much-reduced, to commanders inside
Afghanistan. The ISI, as a matter of deliberate policy, favored the most
extreme Islamist organizations it could lay hands on, plus ethnic
separatists --- not because it thought these groups could form a stable
government in Afghanistan, but precisely because it hoped they could not.
(Recall that the frontier with Afghanistan, including Peshawr, had been
disputed since before Pakistan formed in 1947.) The CIA went along,
reasoning that the Islamists were the most immovably anti-communist groups
available; the fact that they were also the most anti-western does not seem
to have entered into their calculations."
Well, we are in the midst of still another instance in which we have backed
the wrong horse in foreign affairs. What that policy has gotten us, and
Afghanistan, was the most oppressive, most evil, the most violent of all the
political groups in Afghanistan. And, to think that our only concern in
noticing the nation is the destruction of its cultural past by the Taliban,
when the people are also being destroyed by the Taliban says something of the
values we have after eight years of Bill Clinton.
In Kosovo, the KLA has pretty much succeeded in killing or driving out
everyone - Serbs, Romas, Jews, and others that are different from the
fundamentalist Muslims who control the KLA. And, they have done to the
Churches what the Taliban is doing to the Buddhist statues. They have blown
them up. I've checked frequently on the Serbian Orthodox website (see:
http://www.serbian-church.net/Svetinje/svetinje_e.html) over the past two
years. In the beginning, the Church believed the West would care about their
buildings being hit by KLA missiles. The West didn't care. Now, they merely
catalogue the latest atrocities - the killings, the missile attacks, on the
Churches.
The media of the West used its power to demonize the Serbs. It merely has
ignored the rape of Afghanistan until recently. Both the media and the Western
governments seem too arrogant to confess to their mistaken judgments in both
situations. In Kosovo, in spite of it being occupied by NATO troops and
supposedly being overseen by the United Nations, what exists there, as in
Afghanistan, is anarchy. The monks in Decani Monastery were critical of
Slobodan Milosevic and believed that co-existence was possible with their KLA
neighbors two years ago. Today, their website (http://www.decani.yunet.com/)
shows pictures of demolished churches and dead priests.
Today's Washington Post quotes "Cultural preservationists" as comparing the
"Taliban's actions to those of other intolerant regimes that attempted to
obliterate religious cultures, including the Chinese government's demolition
of thousands of Buddhist monasteries in Tibet and the destruction of Jewish
artifacts under Nazi rule in Germany."
In the mostly American Air Force bombing of Yugoslavia for 79 days, over a
"genocide" that UN financed forensic experts say never happened in Kosovo,
Churches and monasteries, hospitals and schools were bombed. Since NATO troops
and the UN have occupied Kosovo, the KLA has continued to systematically blow
up churches and statues and to kill or drive out non-Albanians.
George W. Bush said during his campaign that we, as a nation, needed to be
more "humble." I agreed with him every time he said it. The key to being
humble most of the time is repenting of one's wrong-doing. Perhaps the time
has come for the new American president to apologize to the surviving Afghan
and Serb people for the behavior of a past administration or two. After all,
if we can apologize for accidentally blowing up a Japanese fishing boat, we
ought to be able to apologize for arming the Taliban and the KLA and bombing
Churches, monasteries, cemeteries, hospitals and schools in Yugoslavia,
whether by accident or design.
To comment: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Mrs Jela Jovanovic, art historian
