Robert Knox: Help us to stop this cultural desecration

Taken from a lecture by the keeper of the British Museum's department of oriental antiquities at a conference on Afghanistan

The Kabul Museum is a wreck; its collections are for the most part lost, smuggled out and sold on or destroyed deliberately by the Taliban.

The archaeological structure of the country is destroyed, sites and monuments are most often wrecked and looted. Provincial museums are everywhere in ruins and their collections removed, some for safety to Kabul but with their current whereabouts hardly known at all. The once rich cultural life of Afghanistan in the area of museums, antiquities of all kinds and scholarly research is, therefore, virtually at rock bottom, and everything is now to be played for.

In a large room in the ministry of information, in central Kabul, delegates to the Unesco Conference on Cultural Rehabilitation last May were shown, by Omar Khan Masoodi, the director of Kabul Museum, large quantities of smashed-up sculptures in wood, stone and stucco, the results of the activity of the Taliban in 2001 at the same time as the Bamiyan Buddhas were being destroyed.

Trunks of small pieces of stucco and parts of many, many Gandharan Buddhist statues were an especially poignant reminder of the extent to which this destruction has gone. Other trunks contained fragments of stone sculpture, largely of the grey schist typical of the Buddhist art of Gandhara of the early centuries AD.

On my return to London, I made an appeal to the Foreign Office for funding for a truly British contribution to assist in the rebuilding of Kabul Museum and its collections, if only in a small way.

I am now looking for funding for a set of computers and scanners etc to help the museum create a database of information about its collections. We also want funding for scholarships for people from Kabul to come here to learn, and to take back home, the expertise needed to keep cultural matters alive in Afghanistan.