Pakistan: Buddha attacked by Taliban gets facelift

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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.

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Afghanistan rebuilds Buddhist statues destroyed by Taliban

The Taliban destroyed the historic statues a decade ago. But in a painstaking process, the two giant carvings of Buddha are being reconstructed on the side of a cliff in central Afghanistan.

When the Taliban controlled Afghanistan a decade ago, they were fanatical about eliminating everything they considered un-Islamic.

Their biggest targets — literally and figuratively — were the two monumental Buddha statues carved out of the sandstone cliffs in central Afghanistan. One stood nearly 180 feet tall and the other about 120 feet high, and together they had watched over the dusty Bamiyan Valley since the sixth century, several centuries before Islam reached the region.

Despite international opposition, the Taliban destroyed the statues with massive explosions in 2001. At the time they were blown up, the statues were the largest Buddha carvings in the world, and it seemed they were gone for good.

But today, teams from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, along with the International Council on Monuments and Sites, are engaged in the painstaking process of putting the broken Buddhas back together.

Up to half of the Buddha pieces can be recovered, according to Bert Praxenthaler, a German art historian and sculptor, who has been working at the site for the past eight years. He and his crew have sifted through 400 tons of rubble and have recovered many parts of the statues along with shrapnel, land mines and explosives that were used in their demolition.

But how do you rebuild the Buddhas from the rubble?

"The archaeological term is 'anastylosis,' but most people think it's some kind of strange disease," said Praxenthaler.

For those in the archaeology world, "anastylosis" is actually a familiar term. It was the process used to restore the Parthenon of Athens. It involves combining the monument's original pieces with modern material.

On a recent day, Praxenthaler was leading a group through a tunnel behind the niche where the smaller of the two statues once stood.

"We are now on top of the Buddha," he explained. "There was just a wall and a small opening to sit on the top, or the head, of the Buddha. But now there is no head."

The workers were busy removing scaffolding after months spent reinforcing the wall where the Buddha's head once was.

Mixed Feelings About Project

Bamiyan is an extremely poor and remote land in one of the world's most underdeveloped countries. The Buddha statues were once a major tourist attraction, but Afghanistan has been at war virtually nonstop for more than three decades. The fighting drove away the tourists years before the Taliban blew up the statues.

The restoration project is designed to rebuild the historic site, as well as bring back the tourists. The project has the support of Habiba Sarabi, the popular provincial governor. And there are reasons to be hopeful. Bamiyan is now considered one of the less dangerous places in Afghanistan.

Yet others, like human rights activist Abdullah Hamadi, say the empty niches where the Buddhas stood are a reminder of the Taliban's fanaticism, and should be left as they are.

"The Buddha was destroyed," said Hamadi. "If you made it, rebuilt it, that is not the history. The history is the broken Buddha."

Hamadi is from the nearby district of Yakawlang, where the Taliban massacred more than 300 members of a minority group, called the Hazaras, in 2001. Those killings took place just two months before the Taliban blew up the Buddha statues.

While Bamiyan is much safer today, the Taliban can still strike. Recently, Taliban insurgents kidnapped and beheaded Jawad Zahak, the head of the Bamiyan provincial council, while he was driving his family toward Kabul, about 150 miles to the southeast.

Some in Bamiyan say they would rather see the money for the restoration project go toward services like electricity and housing, which are in desperately short supply.

Homeless Take Shelter In Caves

In fact, the caves at the site of the Buddha statues are the only shelter some Bamiyan residents can find. Homeless villagers like Marzia and her six children are living in one of the caves, while the family's goats bleat nearby. Marzia, who like many Afghans uses only one name, said she has no use for the statues.

"We don't have a house, so where else can we live?" she said.

A few enterprising villagers have found ways to make money off the story surrounding the Buddhas. One is Said Merza Husain, known around town as the man who was forced to help the Taliban blow up the statues.

He said he had no choice but to obey the Taliban a decade ago. If he had resisted, they would have killed him. One of his friends refused to take part, and the Taliban shot him.

But that is the only information Husain will share for free. To hear more of the story, he charges anywhere between $20 and $100.

Meanwhile, Bert Praxenthaler's team was about to halt their work temporarily during the scorching Afghan summer. One longtime worker, Ali Reza, was picking up his pay. He signed his name and received a wad of Afghanis.

Praxenthaler also handed him a certificate and thanked him first in Dari, then in English. Piecing together Bamiyan's Buddhas will take many more years. After a summer break, Praxenthaler's team plans to resume their work in the fall.

This story was partly funded by a Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion. Copyright 2011 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

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