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Taliban Toiled for a Month to Topple Ancient Buddhas
Thursday, March 21, 2002
By David Zucchino
The Los Angeles Times

Families displaced from their Afghan villages move into caves where monks lived near the now destroyed Buddhas.
Image Credit: Marc Kaufman -- Washington Post.

Afterward, they said, the Taliban members celebrated and taunted the Hazaras. "They told us: 'We have killed your gods,'" said Mohammed, the Hazara elder. But the Hazaras did not worship the Buddhas, or consider them gods. The Buddhas were priceless symbols of the Hazara people, who regret that they could not save them. "We loved our Buddhas very much," Hussein said.

BAMIAN, Afghanistan -- LAT
It took decades to build the magnificent stone Buddhas of Bamian. It took the Taliban nearly a month last year to obliterate them.

The destruction required an extraordinary effort, so complex that foreign explosives experts had to be brought in and local residents were forced to dangle on ropes over a cliff face to chip out holes for explosives. According to witnesses and participants, the Taliban struggled with ropes and pulleys, rockets, iron rods, jackhammers, artillery and tanks before a series of massive explosions finally toppled the statues.

A young Afghan looks at one of the badly damaged Buddha carvings.
Image Credit: Marc Kaufman -- Washington Post.

"Every day these Talibs tried to destroy the Buddhas, and every day the Buddhas remained standing no matter how hard the Taliban tried," said Ahmad Hussein, 55, a Bamian native who said he watched the statues slowly disintegrate over a 26-day period in February and March 2001.

The broad outlines of the destruction have been reported. But the ethnic Hazara villagers who witnessed the siege or were pressed into service have provided new details of how the Buddhas, which had survived for more than 1,600 years, withstood repeated Taliban assaults before succumbing.

After point-blank artillery and tank fire gouged holes in the statues but left them essentially intact, the Taliban planted a row of explosives at the feet of the taller Buddha, the 175-foot statue known as Solsol, which means "year after year." The explosions merely blew off part of the statue's feet, residents said, but they destroyed the adobe-and-wood Fatha mosque at the base of the sandstone cliff from which the Buddha was hewn.
(More: The Detroit News Source)
2002 © The Los Angeles Times.

Really, just an organized, government-sponsored hate-crime.

Dan