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March 14, 2001
Vatican hails efforts to protect statues
Countries protest Taliban order to destroy statues deemed un-Islamic
VATICAN CITY (CNS) - Vatican officials welcomed U.N. diplomatic efforts to prevent the destruction of two massive historic Buddha statues by Afghanistan's Islamic Taliban leadership.
"I'm happy that UNESCO and the United Nations have intervened. Let's hope they prevail," said Archbishop Francesco Marchisano, president of the Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Goods of the Church.
Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, issued a decree in late February ordering the destruction of all statues and shrines in the country that the Taliban deems un-Islamic and idolatrous.
In an effort to get the order reversed, an envoy of the Paris-based U.N. cultural agency UNESCO, Pierre Lafrance, met with the Taliban's foreign minister March 4, and planned to meet with Omar in coming days.
Among the statues marked for demolition are two 1,500-year-old Buddhas in central Bamiyan, which stand 175 feet and 120 feet high in sandstone cliff-side niches.
"This is the largest statue (of Buddha) ever made," Archbishop Marchisano told Catholic News Service March 5. "I hope (the Taliban) come to understand that they destroy with their hands what is not theirs — it belongs to the whole world."
The Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, in an editorial in the March 5-6 edition, condemned the Taliban's order for statue destruction as a manifestation of "fanatical extremism."
The Taliban attitude "foolishly does not perceive that the multiple inculturations ... among diverse civilizations are a stupefying testimony to encounters experienced not only as necessary to art but also to a tolerance which leads to discussion," said the editorial's author, Father Franco Patruno, an occasional art critic for the paper.
Lorenzo Nigro, an Eastern antiquities expert at the Vatican Museums, said the statues are "particularly rare" representations of Buddha, and, as such, are of immeasurable cultural and artistic value.
While the statues are evidence of the spread of Buddhism in Afghanistan in the sixth century, their survival through the centuries also testifies to a history of coexistence among the region's different religious believers, Nigro told CNS.
"In the whole Near East, there was always a coexistence of cultures and religions. It is in the modern epoch that unfortunately there has been a rise of extremisms," he said, pointing to the Taliban's religious justification for destroying the statues.
Nigro said the Vatican Museums house a number of Buddha statues, most of which were brought to Rome by Christian missionaries over the centuries.
The Taliban's decision sparked a series of international pleas to spare the giant Buddhas.
