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They had tried shovels and pickaxes, then axes and hammers, then machine guns and grenades from tank guns.
But only very classic explosives in deeply drilled holes led to the desired result: On March 12, 2001, video recordings showed a huge explosion in the huge niche of a rock face in the high valley of Bamiyan, 180 kilometers by road west of the Afghan capital Kabul.
The explosives tore the body of the largest standing Buddha statue in the world, which was carved in the sandstone about 1450 years ago.
A second giant statue at least 38 meters high and dozens of smaller ones were also destroyed in the course of the attack in mid-March 2001.
The face of the Great Buddha had been destroyed centuries ago
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
It was a classic iconoclasm, an iconoclasm for supposedly religious reasons.
The perpetrators were the Sunni Islamist Taliban, who at the time ruled all of Afghanistan (and decades later still control large parts of the battered country).
Its leader Mohammed Omar wanted to set an example by destroying the Buddhas of Bamiyan: against culture, against tolerance and above all against the West.
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Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Mutawaki told the special envoy of the World Cultural Organization Unesco at a meeting in Kandahar that the destruction was an "internal matter" of his country.
The decision was taken "to obey Islam".
The so-called culture minister of the Islamist regime, Qudratullah Jamal, commented cynically: "Rest assured that neither the legs nor the heads will be spared."
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At the end of February 2001, Omar announced a “fatwa”, a kind of religiously disguised directive, according to which “all statues and non-Islamic shrines in the various areas of the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan” are to be destroyed.
"Only Allah Almighty deserves to be worshiped, no one and nothing else," was the reason: the destruction should prevent the statues from being "transformed into shrines" and admired again in the future.
The victory of Islam is final.
The smaller of the two giant Buddhas from Bamiyan 1997
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
As a result, on March 1, 2001, Taliban destruction troops moved out to carry out this order.
Her goals included the National Museum of Kabul, in which dozen of Hellenistic, Buddhist and Hindu works of art had already been destroyed, the ancient cities of Herat and Kandahar and other places.
Everywhere they began to destroy legacies of earlier cultures.
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Tragically, the efforts of the world community to protect them contributed to the destruction of the Buddhas.
For the Taliban saw this as an attempt by the hated “West” to interfere in Afghan affairs.
"The destruction of the Buddha figures is a terror of sentiments," said Germany's then Minister of State for Culture Julian Nida-Rümelin: "It is about the cultural heritage of the world - the rest of the world cannot be indifferent to that." at the same time the madness of the Islamist radicals.
Another phenomenon, which the Berlin historian Alexander Demandt had analyzed two years before the attack on the Buddhas of Bamiyan in his book “Vandalismus” (Siedler-Verlag): “Violence against culture is an increased form of violence against people. “Anyone who destroys culture is actually not fighting against its physical existence,“ but against people to whom it is dear ”.
An Afghan woman walks past the niche where the Great Buddha stood until 2001
Source: picture alliance / AFP Creative
The destruction of the Buddha statues, against which UNESCO, the United Nations in general and other state representatives such as Nida-Rümelin campaigned, appeared to the Taliban, with its otherwise limited possibilities, to be an effective means of fighting “the West”.
That is why this crime against culture was also documented, right down to the video of the blasting in the Bamiyan valley, which was distributed worldwide.
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And because it was about the act of destruction itself, it was only logical that the Taliban rejected the quickly organized offer from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to buy large amounts of “un-Islamic” art from Afghanistan.
The international community has nothing to blame, at least in this regard, because even with ignorance, the Taliban could hardly have been dissuaded from their course.
The Baal Temple in Palmyra was blown up by Islamists in 2015
Source: picture alliance / dpa
Something similar happened at the beginning of May 2012 with the UNESCO World Heritage Site mausoleums in Timbuktu, including the particularly well-known Sidi Mahmud Ben Amar building, which was completely destroyed.
The Islamist groups Ansar Dine and al-Qaida were responsible.
In 2015 and 2017, the same fate struck the ruins of the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria;
units of the self-proclaimed Islamic State raged here.
Currently, as the examples Bamiyan, Timbuktu and Palmyra show, cultural vandalism is primarily a method of Islamism.
Half a millennium ago, however, iconoclasm was a preferred means of more or less radical Christian groups.
For example, the iconoclasms of the Anabaptists, Calvinists and Puritans stand for this, as well as the devastation of the cultures of the Inca, Aztec and Maya in Central and South America by Spanish conquistadors.
Such aggression is always reprehensible - regardless of the perpetrator.
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