Tue, Mar 20, 2001 page1

• Insult prompted statue destruction

  AFGHANISTAN The Taliban say they razed Buddhist statues after foreigners offered money to protect the ancient works, but not to help starving children

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  With outrage still fresh around the world over the destruction of two giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan, a Taliban envoy says the Islamic government made its decision in a rage after a foreign delegation offered money to preserve the ancient works while a million Afghans faced starvation.

  "When your children are dying in front of you, then you don't care about a piece of art," Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, the envoy, said in an interview on Friday.

  Rahmatullah is in the US on a mission to improve ties and to try to ease the Taliban's international isolation.

  One of the main focuses of his visit, he said, will be to find a way out of the impasse surrounding Osama bin Laden, who is suspected of terrorism and whose presence in Afghanistan has prompted international sanctions.

  Still, Rahmatullah expressed no remorse over the demolition of the two Buddhas that were carved from a cliff in central Afghanistan 1,400 years ago and considered one of the world's artistic treasures.

  An adviser to the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, Rahmatullah gave for the first time in New York the Taliban's version of events: How a council of religious scholars ordered the statues be destroyed in a fit of indignation.

  The destruction, according to his account, was prompted last month when a visiting delegation of mostly European envoys, as well as a representative of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization offered money to protect the giant standing Buddhas at Bamiyan, where the Taliban was engaged in fighting an opposition alliance.

  Other reports, however, have said the religious leaders were debating the move for months, and ultimately decided that the statues were idolatrous and should be obliterated.

  At the time the foreign delegation visited, UN relief officials were giving warning that a long drought and a harsh winter were confronting up to a million Afghans with starvation.

  Rahmatullah said that when the visitors offered money to repair and maintain the statues, the Taliban's mullahs were outraged.

  "The scholars told them that instead of spending money on statues, why didn't they help our children who are dying of malnutrition? They rejected that, saying, `This money is only for statues.'"

  "The scholars were so angry," he continued. "They said, `If you are destroying our future with economic sanctions, you can't care about our heritage.' And so they decided that these statues must be destroyed." The Taliban's Supreme Court confirmed the edict.

  "If we had wanted to destroy those statues, we could have done it three years ago," Rahmatullah said. "So why didn't we?

  "In our religion, if anything is harmless, we just leave it. If money is going to statues while children are dying of malnutrition next door, then that makes it harmful, and we destroy it.

  "What do you expect from a country when you just ostracize them and isolate them and send in cruise missiles and their children are dying?" he said, referring to the sanctions and American attacks against bin Laden's base in Afghanistan after the bombing of two American embassies in Africa in 1998.

  "You don't recognize their government," Rahmatullah added. "It is a kind of resentment that is growing in Afghanistan."

  At the same time, he said the Taliban would not destroy statues actually being worshiped and would not touch the Hindu temples still left in Afghanistan.

  Rahmatullah was due to meet officials of the US State Department and the National Security Council yesterday in Washington, where he will also speak next week at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council of the United States and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

  He would not disclose details of a possible new proposal for a way out of the standoff over bin Laden, the Taliban's fourth, saying he needed a signal from Washington first.

  But there are reports in Pakistan that one option might be turning bin Laden over to a special tribunal, perhaps in The Hague, for trial by a panel of Islamic judges.

  The Clinton administration had rejected an Afghan trial, international monitoring of bin Laden -- whom Rahmatullah described as a nobody the Americans made into a hero -- or exile in another Muslim country.

  Rahmatullah's visit and the wide hearing he is getting have provoked criticism in Congress, particularly from supporters of India, which along with Russia has begun to give military help to the Taliban's opposition. He was given an American visa because he falls below the rank of the highest officials in the Taliban government, who are barred from traveling under an embargo.

  Throughout a long interview on a range of subjects, Rahmatullah maintained the fiercely independent attitude of the Taliban, who have demonstrated repeatedly to the UN that they will cooperate with the world only on their own terms.

  "They want to change our policies through economic sanctions," he said of the US and other nations that pushed an embargo through the Security Council. "That does not work. For us, our ideology is first, then the economy. To try to change our ideology with economic sanctions is ridiculous."

  Rahmatullah said the Taliban were in desperate need of agricultural help to supply farmers who once planted opium and to teach them to grow other crops. The UN narcotics control program has told the Taliban it has no money for seeds, and drug control officials wonder if the new ban on poppy cultivation can be sustained.
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