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Afghans Pin Hopes On Resurrected Buddha



http://www.giant-buddhas.com/en/synopsis/

By RAHIM FAIEZ, Associated Press Writer
Sun Aug 6, 12:29 PM ET

BAMIYAN, Afghanistan - Five years after the Taliban blew them up, Afghan laborers are picking up the pieces of two once-towering Buddha statues, hoping they will rise again and breathe new life into this dirt-poor province.







While they wait for the Afghan government and international community to decide whether to rebuild them, a $1.3 million UNESCO-funded project is sorting out the chunks of clay and plaster � ranging from boulders weighing several tons to fragments the size of tennis balls � and sheltering them from the elements.

Progress is slow in the central highland town of Bamiyan where the statues were chiseled more than 1,500 years ago into a cliff face about quarter of a mile apart.

They were originally painted in gold and adorned with wooden faces and ornaments. Mural paintings of Buddha images covered cave rooftops flanking the niches from which the statues were hewn. Fragments of the murals are also being collected.

Rebuilding the statues, one 174 feet tall and the other 115 feet, will be like assembling giant jigsaw puzzles.

The town of Bamiyan, so poor that dozens of its people live in caves, has high hopes.

"We can change the local people's lives from being dominated by poverty if we rebuild one of the Buddha statues," said Habiba Surabi, governor of Bamiyan province. She is Afghanistan's first female governor.

The province, on the ancient Silk Road that linked Europe to East Asia, was once a center of Buddhism. Today most of its 400,000 people are Hazaras, a largely Shiite Muslim ethnic group that was persecuted by the Taliban during its 1997-2001 rule.

The Taliban dynamited the Buddha statues in March 2001, deeming them idolatrous and anti-Muslim. It was one of the regime's most widely condemned acts.

UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, has since placed the entire Bamiyan Valley region on its World Heritage in Danger list.

"Our job is to safeguard the pieces left from the Buddha statues and put the fragments in a shelter," said Ernst Blochinger, a German expert with the International Council on Monuments and Sites. The Paris-based group is working with UNESCO on the project, which began in 2004 and is due for completion in 14 months.

The project relies heavily on Japanese funding. Rebuilding the statues would cost some $30 million each, scientists say.

"Whenever UNESCO finishes its work, we will appeal to the international community to try find the funds to rebuild at least one Buddha statue," said Surabi, the governor.

Bamiyan Valley is a starkly beautiful region. Dominated by mountain ranges, it includes the vast Band-i-Amir lake and the red stone ruins of the once great city of Shahr-i-Zuhak. Tourists still trickle in despite a lack of amenities and a road from Kabul that is in such bad shape that the 80-mile journey takes nine hours.

Mohammed Abraham, who earns $5 a day working on the UNESCO project, remembers when hundreds of tourists came to marvel at the Buddha statues and buy handicrafts.

"Everyone here was very happy and rich compared to now," said Abraham, who lives with his eight children in a cave, without power or water, near where the larger statue stood.

"Now Bamiyan's people are very poor because we lost everything when the Taliban destroyed the Buddha. I hope our government rebuilds them so our people become rich again."

The province's sole export is potatoes. Its land isn't sufficient to grow wheat to feed its own people.

Another cave-dweller, Mohammed Ayub, 34, walks more than half a mile daily to fetch water for his family.

"I hope for the Buddha to be built again," Ayub says. "We don't have power, we don't have running water, we don't have jobs. We are living inside these cave like wild animals."

___

On the Net:

UNESCO page on Bamiyan Valley: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/208

[Bulsajo]

Another interesting article weakened by strange emphases.

[igotthisguitar]

Some more pictures & links ...

Bamiyan - The Valley Of The Giant Buddhas



For fifteen hundred years, two gigantic Buddha statues stood in their niches cut in the cliff flanking the remote Bamiyan valley of present day Afghanistan. The smaller of the two statues, thirty-five metres high and referred to as "Shamama" (Queen Mother), was hewn into the soft conglomerate of the two kilometre long rock face in the year 507. Painted blue and with a golden face, the figure was supposed to represent

the Buddha Sakyamuni. The second statue - the "Salsal" Buddha ("light shines through the universe") - was built fifty years later. At fifty-five metres, this was the greatest standing Buddha statue in the world.

The present dwellers in this valley are proud of their pre-Islamic past. They talk of the old times when Bamiyan, the main link between central Asia and India, provided the main access to the Silk Road and was the trading centre for thousands of caravans. It was this prosperity that was responsible for the Buddha statues being hewn into the soft rock face with a complex system of steps, niches, balconies, meeting rooms, altar rooms with cupolas and dwelling quarters, all cut into the rock and nestling between the two colossal figures.

For hundreds of years the Bamiyan valley, lying in the Hindukutch, was one of the most important and attractive pilgrimage sites for practising Buddhists, a true global centre of Buddhism, a melting pot of cultures.

However, in the spring of 2001, Taliban leader Mullah Omar in a fatwa, gave the order to destroy the two Buddha statues. The world was up in arms.

Years of looting of Afghanistan's cultural heritage and the religious mania of "God's warriors" and its devastating consequences on the people of Afghanistan provoked little interest yet, all of a sudden, UNESCO hastily sent a special envoy to Kabul and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York offered to purchase and preserve the statues. But to no avail.

At the beginning of March 2001, the great Buddhas of Bamiyan were blown up by specialists belonging to the al-Qaeda terror organisation.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=BAMIYAN+buddhas





HUNT FOR THE 3RD ANCIENT BUDDHA ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/2239423.stm