Repairing a Broken Culture.(attempts to repair Taliban's destruction of Afghanistan artifacts and historic monuments)

In the basement of Afghanistan's culture ministry, a statue's broken foot and part of a skirt lie discarded in the corner. A lion's paw peeks out of a pile of rubble; a small rock turns out to be part of an elephant head. They are all that's left of the thousands of sculptures smashed to bits by the Taliban. And as workers frantically sort and label the surviving fragments, they inadvertently crunch more shattered remains underfoot. Wearing thick eyeglasses and sporting a dusty, gray turban, 63-year-old Mirgolam Nabi, a museum archivist, works at breakneck speed, cataloging the relics. "When the Taliban came here they had guns; how could we stop them?" he asks. "I suffered through this as if I were watching my father be killed. This was our history."

Now that the Taliban have fled northern and central Afghanistan, the true extent of the cultural destruction they wrought is becoming apparent. They were particularly offended by anything resembling the human form, and there are few human statues or frescoes of people remaining intact anywhere in the country. They also hastened the exodus of the country's cultural elite, the flood of departing artists, writers and historians that began in the wake of the 1979 Soviet invasion. Indeed, few countries have ever seen their cultural heritage decimated as rapidly as Afghanistan. And yet a small but determined cadre of preserva-tionists is emerging to rebuild it. They are painstakingly collecting broken fragments for reconstruction and trying to track down artifacts that have been removed from the country for safekeeping. They are also carefully preserving those that remain intact, many of which were saved by museum workers who tricked the Taliban by holding works upside down or detaching panels so they would not be recognizable as human or animal forms. And the country is making a concerted effort to lure the cultural refugees back home. "We are trying to call back all the artists who escaped over the past five years," says Sidikulah Towhidi, of the Ministry for Information and Culture. "But it is still quite early. We are working on it."

The first step is facing up to the devastation. In addition to destroying the well-known giant Bamiyan Buddhas, the Taliban fired their rockets on the Minar-i-Chakri Buddhist pillar (first to second centuries), once a landmark for traders along the Silk Road. The more contemporary Mausoleum of Amir Abdur Rahman (who ruled Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901) is falling apart due to neglect and what preservationists call "inappropriate use by military personnel." What had been the easternmost Greek city of Ai Khanoum (fourth to second centuries B.C.) has been plundered by illegal diggers. Nighttime looters have excavated holy shrines searching for gold and antiques. And locals, desperate to stay warm, hacked away at intricate wooden engravings in the windows of 19th-century homes for firewood.

Perhaps no institution has suffered more than the Kabul Museum. Once home to 100,000 works of art--including statues, paintings, armaments and pottery from as far back as prehistoric times, as well as one of the world's oldest and largest coin collections--the museum has been almost completely destroyed by looting, rockets and fire over the past nine years. "In 1993 a rocket came through the top floor and burned the entire area," says former deputy director Omarakhan Massoudi, who left his post in despair last year. By 1995, 70 percent of the museum's remaining items had been looted. "It was not ordinary people or small commanders that did the looting," says ...