arkworld: Reclaiming Identities

Not all's lost in Afghanistan. A few weeks ago, a shipment from the Afghan Museum in Exile in Switzerland landed on the doorstep of the National Museum in Kabul. It's still sitting there, a potent symbol of the painfully slow pace of progress. But at least I feel comfortable using the word "progress" in the Afghan context. There is progress.

Afghanistan's treasures rival Egypt, if not in scale, then in quality and variety. The largest artefacts, the Bamiyan Buddhas, were destroyed by what I referred to in my last post as the Taliban's religious reductionism. Countless others were obliterated by the civil war, looters, more Taliban zealots and the wrath of nature, but these 1 400 pieces survived, along with an unknown number of others locked away somewhere in the dungeons of the Presidential Palace.

Afghanistan's history is coming out of hiding - in bits and pieces of course, as stolen artefacts are located, shattered ceramics delicately reassembled, statues re-excavated from rubble, stories patched together from a jumbled mess of ideology, hatred and greed. The disintegration of the museum is a sad but salient reminder of what some people will do for a sip from the goblet of power - steal a peoples' history, demolish it, crush identities and reduce multiple selves to a manageable singularity. Over 70% of Afghanistan's cultural history is still missing, circulating among profiteers who place their own selfish desire for wealth above the shared history of humankind.

But history is not so easily defeated. In Kabul, it's showing just how resilient it can be. The museum is on the mend, rising out of the rubble like a New Iram. Its first show will open on April 25th - an exhibition of photographs of the Tashqurghan Bazaar before and after it was leveled by fighting between the Soviet Red Army and Afghan mujahideen in the mid-1980s by writer, photographer and ethnographer Dr. Roelof J. Munneke. From what I've seen, it's a moving tribute to what has been lost and a determined statement for what can be saved (full story to be published in the travel section of the Hindustan Times shortly).

The Museum should be fully operational by sometime in mid-Summer. Some pics:

War and Peace - Afghanistan's