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Afghan heritage crumbles They survived three decades of war but risk being toppled by road traffic, the last five mediaeval minarets of Herat are being slowly shaken to dust.
The minarets are all that remain of what was once a wonder of art and architecture, a brilliantly decorated complex of Islamic learning and devotion on the Silk Road in western Afghanistan. Little more than a century ago, more than a dozen of these minarets peered over the ancient city of Herat, part of a madrassa-mosque complex built in the 15th century by the daughter-inlaw of the all-conquering mogul emperor Timor. War and neglect have since toppled most of the camel-coloured mud-brick towers, which were once sheathed in sparkling blue, green, white and black mosaic tiles, reaching heights of more than 100 feet and shining out across the desert. But after US-led forces evicted the Taleban from national power in 2001, a relative amount of both peace and prosperity has returned to Herat and there are hopes that they can be preserved. But there is one big problem: traffic. Trucks and cars rumble along a busy road that runs right through the middle of the group of remaining minarets, shaking the ground and sending tremors through their foundations. If it is not closed, there are fears that any of the minarets could crumble or fall in the coming years and decades. One of them is already on a dangerous tilt. ”In the past five years, we tried to block the road going close to the minarets. Fortunately, we succeeded and blocked the road, for a little bit,” said Ayamuddin Ajmal, who runs the Culture Ministry’s historical monuments office in Herat. But residents objected and the provincial government, unable or unwilling to invest in a road diversion, backed down, he said. The road reopened. ”The government has also a commitment regarding preserving the minarets, but still’we see that the government has not blocked the road,” said Ajmal, who keeps a small office in a niche of another of Herat’s treasures, the Friday Mosque. The Afghan government has submitted the old city of Herat, including the minarets, as a candidate for listing as a World Heritage site. This would put Herat in the same class as China’s Great Wall, the pyramids of Egypt and the Acropolis of Athens. In theory, both central and provincial governments support the closure of the road to preserve the minarets, but in reality there is insufficient political will to do so. The road has not only remained open, it has actually been widened in the past few years, said Brendan Cassar, a culture consultant for UNESCO, the UN body that works with national governments to preserve sites of world cultural significance. ”There has to be some kind of will to preserve the heritage, some kind of expression of interest that this is important to Afghanistan’s cultural heritage and therefore important to world heritage,” Cassar said at UNESCO’s tiny office in Kabul. The old city of Herat is already on the tentative list for inclusion on UNESCO’s register of World Heritage sites. Eventual inscription on the register could help ensure more funding to preserve Herat’s antiquities and put the city on the tourist map. But both the Culture Ministry’s Ajmal and UNESCO staff in Kabul say local authorities are undermining the old city’s character, not only by refusing to close the road through the minarets complex but also by allowing unchecked development. In Afghan terms, Herat is a boom town,, thanks largely to blossoming trade across the nearby border with Iran, less than a twohour drive away on a sealed highway. New shimmering buildings of glass and concrete are sprouting up, overlooking the old city and challenging the minarets’ command of the skyline for the first time in six centuries. ”Many high buildings have been built in Herat city which is against UNESCO rules,” Ajmal said. ”The height of the buildings inside (old) Herat should not be more than seven metres.” Across the road from the tilted minaret, there is a modern building going up that is already well over seven metres tall. The minaret itself is held up by two spans of cable, bracing it against seemingly imminent collapse onto the road. It is only a temporary measure, until the road is closed and the entire site can be secured for preservation and archaeological works. There is a gaping hole about half way up the tower, exposing the stairwell inside, the legacy of a rocket or artillery attack in the 1980s, when Soviet occupiers were fighting mujahideen.
'Of
course I hate them'
Zhou Fenying is a living witness to the dark history that still poisons China’s relations with Japan more than 60 years after World War Two. When Zhou was 22, Japanese soldiers came to her village in eastern China, grabbed her and her sister-in-law and carted them off to a military brothel, she says. Now 91, Zhou has broken decades of silence to speak of her traumatic experience as a ’comfort woman’ - the euphemism the invading Japanese used to describe women forced into sex slavery. “I hid with my husband’s sister under a millstone. Later, the Japanese soldiers discovered us and pulled us out by our legs. They tied us both to their vehicle. Later they used more ropes to tie and secure us and drove us away, she told Reuters in her home village in Jiangsu province. . “They then took-us to the ’comfort woman lodge’. There was nothing good there,” she said. “For four to five hours a day, it was torture. They gave us food afterwards, but every day we cried and we just did not want to eat it,” Zhou added, sitting in her sparsely decorated home. The Chinese government says Japan has yet to atone properly for its war crimes, which it says included massacres and forcing people to work as virtual slaves in factories or as prostitutes. Zhou - neatly dressed in a dark blue traditional Chinese shirt, her greying) hair combed back into a bun avoided saying what had happened to her in the brothel, except that she was there with at least 20 other Chinese women. But her son, Jiang Weixun, 62, said she had told him they were repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers on a daily basis. This harrowing experience has left a deep scar on Zhou’s life. She cannot forget, and nor can she forgive. “If it were you, wouldn’t you hate them? Of course I hate them. But after the war, all the Japanese went home-I’m already so old. I think they are all dead by now,” Zhou said. Zhou said she had served as a ’comfort woman’ for two months before a local town official rescued her by paying off the Japanese She we back to her husband of 10 years, Ni Jincheng, who later died fighting the Japanese. Zhou remarried and lives with her son, Jiang, from her second marriage. Jiang said. he was not ashamed of his mother, one of only an estimated 50 former Chinese sex slaves still alive today. He said her experiences should, highlight to the world the extent of the wartime crimes committed by the Japanese. (Courtesy City Times)
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