Hope for Kabul museum

Standing in the grounds of the Kabul museum, caretaker Sheruzzuddin, who has worked there for the past 25 years, looked sad as he reminisced about the days when the building was still intact. "This building used to sparkle, but now it is dull and dead," he told IRIN.

"I hope we can bring it back to its original state," he said, adding that many of the precious stones embedded in the statues outside the building had been stolen over the years

The museum, standing as it does at the crossroads of many ancient civilizations, should be a record of centuries of conquest, trade and culture. But the shattered building is a testament to two decades of war: its doors are riddled with bullet holes, piles of rubble can be found everywhere, and at least 70 percent of display and storage items have been looted.

One of the heaviest blows suffered by the museum was in 1993, when fighting among the Mujahidin, or holy warriors, intensified, and a rocket hit the upper floor, followed by endless looting. At that time, museum officials tried to salvage whatever they could. "Some items were taken away from the museum to the centre of Kabul for safe keeping due to the security situation," the deputy director of National Museums in Afghanistan, Omar Khan Mas'udi, told IRIN.

In an effort to prevent further looting, the UN repaired the doors and bricked up the windows in 1994, and some of the exhibits were taken for safekeeping to the Afghan museum-in-exile in Switzerland. However, despite these measures, many items were sold, and at one stage in the early 1990s, the bazaars in the Pakistani cities of Peshawar, Islamabad and Karachi were full of objects stolen from Kabul museum.

Inside the building, a flat lump of stone is all that's left of a 2,000 year old statue of King Kaneshka. It was smashed by the Taliban regime, who believed any depiction of a living thing was against their brand of fundamentalist Islam. The ceilings of the museum have suffered years of bombardment, and bare beams are all that is holding it up.

Before its demise in 1978, the museum housed about 100,000 exhibits, many of which dated back to prehistoric times. These had included one of the biggest caches discovered in 1939, comprising 1,800 artefacts from India, Rome, Greece, Egypt and Central Asia, Mas'udi said. The building was also home to one of the largest collections of Greek and Roman coins found in and around Kabul, dating from the 8th century BC to the late 19th century, he noted.

The Afghan Interim Administration is now determined to restore the historicial building to its previous glory and there are already signs of hope. "A nation survives when its culture survives," a banner recently hung over the main entrance proclaims.

The UN is trying to help the authorities retrieve some items being kept in private collections abroad. "There are 20 valuable pieces which have been identified outside of Afghanistan, and some are in the Tokyo museum," the director and team leader of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in Kabul, Martin Hadlow, told IRIN. He added that they were still working on a plan to bring these back.

"We have made an urgent appeal for donors to rehabilitate the museum, and need between US $150,000 and US $250,000," he said, adding that the Interim Administration was keen on effecting the rehabilitation because of the existence of a cultural link with the items through many generations.

However, scepticism persists over whether collectors would respond to the idea of returning precious artefacts in their possession. An expert on Afghanistan's cultural heritage, Nancy Hatch-Dupree, told IRIN in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province. "It is a nice idea, but this all depends on whether you can counter the greed of collectors."

She went on to say that there had been very good gestures from two collectors, respectively in Tokyo and London. "A marble foot belonging to a statue from the 3rd century BC has gone on display in Tokyo with a view to being returned," Hatch-Dupree said.

A former Pakistani politician, Gen Naseerullah Babar, well known for his fondness for antiquities, had in the 1990s reportedly purchased an extremely fragile ivory panel dating back to the middle of the 3rd century AD. He has been quoted by one of Pakistan's leading magazines as saying he will return it when the political situation in Afghanistan stabilises.

However, Hatch-Dupree warned that there was a lack of coordination on retrieving exhibits and rebuilding the site. "There is an administration now, and people should be talking to the relevant ministries if they are to survive. It seems as if people are doing their own thing and are not collaborating with the government," she said.

Between 1994 and 1996, museum staff worked to register the exhibits which had survived the destruction of 1993. Just before the Taliban takeover in September 1996, guards from various factions were posted outside the museum, but, during each changeover, the fleeing guards stole whatever they could from the building, Hatch-Dupree said.

When the Taliban first assumed power, there had been no insurmountable difficulties in safeguarding the museum, Mas'udi said. However, the situation gradually deteriorated. In 2001, the Taliban decided to enforce a decree to destroy statues, including those in the museum and the two world-famous Buddha statues which were reduced to rubble in the central province of Bamian.

Museum workers managed to save some fragments of the destroyed statues, which they hid in a storeroom at the back of the building in the hope that they could be restored. "We were lucky to save the pieces. We still have 25 percent of the objects, and we plan to bring them back after restoring the building," Mas'udi said. "It is very important to keep the museum alive, because there are items that belong to our civilization, and we have some unique objects."