Pakistan hopes for Buddhist boost to tourism drought

Home Asia Pacific South Asia Pakistan

Amid rising violence, the country is trying to revive travel to its northwest - rich in Buddhist history and significance - which could generate billions in revenue, but lies next to Taliban havens

TAKHT-i-BAHI, Pakistan -- Religious violence may be on the rise and the Taliban still a threat, but Pakistan is hoping a rich Buddhist heritage will help it boost international tourism to its troubled northwest.

<< Religious students sit on the premises of the Takht-i-Bahi Monastery in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province on Nov. 16 last year.
Photo: AFP

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, with its balmy climate in the mountains and its wealth of history on the border with Afghanistan, was once a playground for colonial adventurers and a favorite holiday destination for upper-crust Pakistanis.

Yet after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US ushered in war in Afghanistan and an insurgency against the Pakistani government, it has become synonymous with Pakistani Taliban and other Islamist militants who have killed thousands in recent years.

Wealthier Pakistanis and Westerners stopped visiting, scared away by attacks and the threat of being kidnapped, but the provincial government is now trying to lure thousands of visitors from wealthy Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea.

A group of about 20 Buddhist monks from South Korea made the journey to the monastery of Takht-i-Bahi, 170km from Islamabad, and close to the tribal areas that are a haven for Taliban and other Islamist militant groups.

“We really felt it is our hometown, it was a great feeling which it is not possible to describe in words,” Jeon Woon-deok, a senior South Korean monk, told reporters by e-mail of the visit last year. “We only regret that we waited so long to come here.”

The journey was no straightforward pilgrimage.

The monks defied appeals from Seoul to abandon their trip for safety reasons and were guarded by Pakistani security forces on their visit to the monastery, built of ocher colored stone and nestled on a mountainside.

From about 1000 BC until the seventh century AD, northern Pakistan and parts of modern Afghanistan formed the Gandhara Kingdom, where Greek and Buddhist customs mixed to create what became the Mahayana strand of the religion.

The monk Marananta set out from what is now northwest Pakistan to cross China and spread Buddhism on the Korean Peninsula during the fourth century.

The gardens of Takht-i-Bahi host picnicking families and daydreaming teenagers, as well as students from nearby Qoranic schools, but foreign visitors are rare.

“There used to be foreign tourists here in the past, but after the attacks there are hardly any,” local guide Iftikhar Ali said.
The flow of adventurous tourists from East Asia is no more than a trickle at the moment — Ali said he sees only one or two visitors a month on average.

“For them this place is like Mecca,” said Zulfiqar Rahim, the head of the Gandhara Art and Culture Association, which is dedicated to the promotion of Pakistan’s Buddhist heritage.

Last year, monks from Bhutan also came to visit, but the Pakistani government wants to boost numbers quickly.

“We are currently working to promote religious and archaeological Buddhist tourism,” Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Deputy Minister of Tourism Syed Jamaluddin Shah said.

The Pakistani authorities are even planning package tours for visitors from China, Japan, Singapore and South Korea, including trips to the Buddhist sites at Takht-i-Bahi, Swat, Peshawar and Taxila, near Islamabad.

“The tourism potential is enormous. If each person who comes spends US$1,200 with hotel costs and all the rest, and 1 million people come, that makes 1 billion dollars,” Rahim said, “And we’re not talking about 1 million people, but 50 million Mahayana Buddhists in Korea, China and Japan.”

However, there is a long way to go. It will be difficult to overcome huge security problems, poor tourist infrastructure and the challenges of getting a visa and permission to travel to high-risk areas.

Enormous floods in 2010 caused further damage, although the US has since provided US$5.4 million to help revive the local economy and rehabilitate tourism in the province’s Swat District.

For now, it is mostly local visitors who come to the remains of the Buddhist sites in Pakistan. Reflecting on his country’s woes, Sajjad, a teacher gazed at a statue of Buddha and sighed: “We need this calm so much.”

View the original article here

NGO ventures to revive Buddhist sites in Pakistan

The proposal is to preserve, restore and emphasize on the significance of these ancient Buddhist sites in Pakistan, and provide a lasting self-sustainable tourism plan that would generate revenue and reveal its impact and importance.

The organization is on track to draw out plans and coordinate with several prominent NGOs, citizen groups and individuals who could help save the antique treasures. Noted Indian columnist Kuldip Nayar is also taking keen interest in the exercise to promote and save these Buddhist sites from further ruin.

Texila -an ancient site and centre of learning - also existed in Pakistan. In four provinces of Pakistan, several ancient Buddhist sites were discovered. President TBF, Sidhartha Gauri, said various prominent NGOs in Pakistan including Edhi Foundation and Mia Mir Welfare Trust have extended all possible support to save the Buddhist sites. Gauri said a peace activist Karamat Ali, Magsaysay award winner I a Rahman and former ambassador Malia Lodhi have also expressed their willingness to support the cause.

The TBF had recently highlighted ancient Buddhist sites in the Sindh province of Pakistan, many of which were unheard of to a larger population across the globe. Mastoor Fatima Bukhari, a professor with the Department of Archaeology, Shah Abdul Latif University, Pakistan assisted TBF in digging out essential information about the ancient sites in Sindh. Efforts to rope in some Buddhist organizations worldwide with a plan to highlight these sites in Pakistan to a much wider audience globally are also underway.

Sidhartha said, ?The people in India and Pakistan believe that the restoration of these ancient monuments will contribute to the peace process and create harmony among Asian nations.

The Buddhist sites in Pakistan were not protected so far?. The TBF has been working on highlighting the plight of ancient Buddhist sites in different countries in Asia, including some in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

View the original article here

Pakistan struggles with smuggled Buddhist relics

Home Archaeology

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Lacking the necessary cash and manpower, Pakistan is struggling to stem the flow of millions of dollars in ancient Buddhist artifacts that looters dig up in the country's northwest and smuggle to collectors around the world.

<< Photo credit: AP | In this photo taken on July 6, 2012, A Pakistani official looks at Buddha statues confiscated by custom authorities in Karachi, Pakistan. Lacking the necessary cash and manpower, Pakistan is struggling to stem the flow of millions of dollars in ancient Buddhist artifacts that shadowy criminal gangs dig up from the country’s northwest and smuggle to collectors around the world. (AP Photo/B.K. Shakil Adil)

The black market trade in smuggled antiquities is a global problem that some experts estimate is worth billions of dollars per year. The main targets are poor countries like Pakistan that possess a rich cultural heritage but don't have the resources to protect it.
The illicit excavations rob Pakistan of an important potential source of tourism revenue, as valuable icons are spirited out of the country, and destroy any chance for archaeologists to document the history of the sites.

"We are facing a serious problem because Pakistan is a vast country, and we have very meager resources," said Fazal Dad Kakar, head of the government's department of archaeology and museums. "We have no manpower to watch the hundreds of Buddhist sites and monasteries in the country, most of which are located in isolated valleys."

Many of the sites are in the Swat Valley, a verdant, mountainous area in the northwest that was once part of Gandhara, an important Buddhist kingdom that stretched across modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan more than 1,000 years ago.

Police seized a large container filled with nearly 400 artifacts in the southern port city of Karachi in July that were being trucked north to be smuggled out of the country. About 40 percent were found to be genuine, including nearly 100 Buddhist sculptures up to 1,800-years-old worth millions of dollars, said Qasim Ali Qasim, director of archaeology and museums in southern Sindh province.
There were effectively no restrictions on whisking Buddhist relics out of Pakistan's northwest in the first few decades after the country achieved independence from Britain in 1947, said Malik Naveed, a former police chief of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where the Swat Valley is located.

That changed in 1975 when the government passed a set of laws criminalizing the practice. But Kakar, the federal archaeology chief, said the laws are difficult to enforce given a lack of funds, and people who are caught rarely receive punishments severe enough to act as much of a deterrent.

Police arrested several people connected to the seizure in Karachi in July, but they have yet to be formally charged.

Two men who were arrested last October for excavating a statue of Buddha from a site in Swat were only fined about $50 each, far less than the maximum punishment of a year in prison and a fine of more than $800 they could have received, said Syed Naeen, a public prosecutor in the area.

A Manhattan art dealer, Subhash Kapoor, is under arrest in neighboring India for allegedly smuggling millions of dollars in antiquities out of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan that he sold to museums and private collectors from his gallery in New York and online, according to police investigators involved with the case.
Rather than dig up Buddhist relics, some Pakistanis have focused on making replicas, such as the ones seized in Karachi, that they often try to pass off as the real thing -- although this practice is also illegal in the country. Many operate covertly around the ancient Buddhist site of Taxila, a short drive from the capital, Islamabad.
"I learned the practice from my fellow villagers in my childhood and can fake anything using cement, small stones, some colors and chemicals," said Salahud Deen, who works out of his home in a village near Taxila.

The 30-year-old high school dropout was contacted by The Associated Press through the owner of a tea shop in the area and showed off a sample of his wares, including a small statue of the Buddha's head. He said he recently received an order from a man in Sri Lanka to make a 3-foot tall "fasting Buddha" statue and expected to make a little more than $200 in the process.

Locals who deal in real Buddhist artifacts they have stolen from sites in the northwest likely make much more money, but it's almost nothing compared to what people higher up the food chain earn. Looters receive on average less than 1 percent of the final sale price of an item, while middlemen and dealers get the other 99 percent, according to the former head of the U.N. Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute, Sandro Calvani.

Kakar, the federal archaeology chief, tried to stop Christie's auction house in New York from selling a "fasting Buddha" from the 3rd or 4th century last year as well as dozens of other Buddhist relics he claimed were smuggled out of Pakistan illegally.

Christie's went ahead and sold the Buddha for nearly $4.5 million and has asked Pakistan to provide proof of its claims, the auction house said.

Kakar was more successful with two shipments of Buddhist artifacts from Dubai and Tokyo that were seized by U.S. customs authorities in 2005, he said. He was able to prove the sculptures came from Pakistan by analyzing the age and composition of the stone, and the U.S. returned them, said Kakar.

Neil Brodie, an expert on the illicit trade in antiquities at the University of Glasgow, said it was critical for authorities to put pressure on private collectors and museums whose demand for ancient relics is fueling the black market. Some museums, particularly in Italy and Britain, have become more diligent about avoiding antiquities with questionable histories, but those in the U.S. have much more work to do, he said.

"You are losing the archaeological record on the ground by the destruction that is entailed by digging these relics out," said Brodie.

___

Associated Press writers Sherin Zada in Mingora, Pakistan, Adil Jawad in Karachi, Pakistan, and Ashok Sharma in Chennai, India, contributed to this report.

View the original article here

Pakistan: Buddha attacked by Taliban gets facelift

Home Asia Pacific South Asia Pakistan

JAHANABAD, Pakistan -- When the Taliban blew the face off a towering, 1,500-year-old rock carving of Buddha in northwest Pakistan almost five years ago, it fell to an intrepid Italian archaeologist to come to the rescue.

<< In this May 24 photo, people sit near a sculpture of the Buddha whose face was destroyed by Taliban fighters at Jahanabad, Pakistan, in the Swat valley. (AP-Yonhap News)

Thanks to the efforts of Luca Olivieri and his partners, the 6-meter-tall image near the town of Jahanabad is getting a facelift, and many other archaeological treasures in the scenic Swat Valley are being excavated and preserved.

Hard-line Muslims have a history of targeting Buddhist, Hindu and other religious sites they consider heretical to Islam. Six months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the Taliban shocked the world by dynamiting a pair of 1,500-year-old Buddhist statues in central Afghanistan.

The Jahanabad Buddha, etched high on a huge rock face in the 6th or 7th century, is one of the largest such carvings in South Asia. It was attacked in the fall of 2007 when the Pakistani Taliban swarmed across the scenic Swat Valley. The army drove most of them out two years later, but foreign tourists who used to visit the region still tend to stay away.

Olivieri himself had to leave in 2008 after more than two decades of tending to the riches dating back to Alexander the Great and the Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim invaders who followed. The 49-year-old head of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan returned in 2010 and is back at work.

Taliban militants climbed ropes to insert explosives in holes drilled into the face and shoulders of the Jahanabad Buddha, said Olivieri. The explosives in the shoulders failed to detonate, but the others blew off most of the face above the lips and cracked other parts of the carving and surrounding rock.

Olivieri and his team began work this month on fixing the cracks and what’s left of the face. A full reconstruction is impossible because detailed documentation and fragments of the face are lacking.

“Whatever you do in the absence of perfect data is a fake,’’ said Olivieri, who says he has wanted to be an archaeologist since age 6 and still brings a youthful exuberance to his work even as his beard grows gray.

Arriving as a university student in 1987, he was fascinated by Swat, once an important center of Buddhist culture and trade. The monk credited with introducing Buddhism to Tibet, Padmasambhava, was born in Swat.

In more recent decades, the area was known as “the Switzerland of Pakistan,’’ popular with religious tourists from China, Japan and South Korea, and the hope is that restoration of the Jahanabad Buddha will spark a revival of tourism here.

Olivieri’s mission is funded by the Italian government, which works with local Pakistani antiquities authorities. It has uncovered over 120 Buddhist sites among Swat’s soaring hills and rushing rivers. Of roughly 200 Buddhist rock carvings in Swat, the Jahanabad Buddha was among the few to survive with its face intact for so long, said Olivieri. Most were defaced centuries ago by Muslim invaders who, like the Taliban, consider Buddha a false idol.

Maulana Shamsur Rehman, a leading Islamist politician in Swat, says the attack on the Buddha should never have happened. Islam preaches freedom and protection for followers of all religions, he told The Associated Press, and “in line with Islamic rules, nobody should have an objection to the repair work on the Buddha statue.’’

In 2001, militants damaged the excavated ruins of a 7th century Hindu temple in Swat overlooking a stronghold conquered by Alexander in the 4th century B.C. Unable to protect the temple, the Italian mission had to rebury it.

Ironically, the site that Olivieri was most worried about during the Taliban’s violent reign in Swat was an Islamic one ? the roughly 1,000-year-old Udegram Ghaznavid mosque, the third oldest in Pakistan. He feared the militants would occupy and damage it, but that never happened.

Pakistani security officials say the Taliban are again trying to infiltrate Swat, but militants are not the only threat to the archaeological sites. Looters are perhaps a bigger problem. Many relics looted from Swat are in private and public collections around the world.

In December police arrested several men in Swat and seized a roughly one-meter-tall, 1,800-year-old Buddhist statue that could have fetched tens of thousands of dollars on the international antiquities market.

View the original article here