U.N. chief to take up Afghan statues with Taleban

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was to meet Sunday with a top Taleban official amid reports that two massive, Third-Century Buddhas have been destroyed.

But Annan’s meeting Sunday with the Taleban’s foreign minister may come too late to save the ancient statues at Bamiyan.

Taleban spokesman Abdul Hayee Mutmaeen told Reuters on Saturday that the fundamentalist Islamic militia had destroyed about 80 percent of the two historic Buddhas, which tower 53 meters (175 feet) and 36 meters (120 feet) above the desert.

The Taleban rulers have vowed to destroy all statues that they perceive as un-Islamic in the 90 percent of Afghanistan they control. The nearly 2-week-old purge of Afghanistan’s relics has drawn outrage from scholars worldwide.

"These cultural assets don't just belong to the Taleban or the people who live near them," U.N. emergency relief coordinator Kenzo Oshima told CNN. "They belong to the whole world. They are part of a common cultural heritage."

Taleban foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil said he would meet Annan in Islamabad on Sunday as the secretary-general embarks on the first leg of a South Asian tour.

The U.N. General Assembly condemned the Taleban's edict on Friday. The Taleban move has drawn criticism even from Pakistan, one of the Taleban's few allies. Pakistan has argued that persuasion, not intimidation, must be used to convince the Taleban to salvage what remains of the country's heritage.

Since taking power over most of the country in 1996, the Taleban have imposed an austere Islamic code over Afghanistan.

They have been widely criticized for putting severe restrictions on women, conducting public executions and supporting Islamic militants abroad.

"I will discuss with Annan the bad condition of the Afghan people, the injustice of the U.N. and imposition of sanctions as well as the Afghanistan crisis as a whole," Muttawakil said. "The statues issue will also come up in the agenda of the talks, and I will say to him that this is an internal and religious issue and it is not intended to confront the world."

The Taleban are under U.N. sanctions aimed at forcing Afghanistan to hand over Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, accused of leading plots to blow up U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

They also are prosecuting an ongoing civil war during a humanitarian crisis. About 600,000 Afghans have been driven from their homes by the conflict and the worst drought in 30 years.

Annan is expected to visit Afghan refugees in Pakistan during his visit. About 80,000 Afghans live in wretched conditions beneath tents made of stitched plastic bags in the camp in northwest Pakistan.

"We need to take aid to people in their own towns and villages so they don't have the necessity to flee their homes and become internally displaced, or cross borders and become refugees," Oshima said. "We need to do this very quickly, in addition to bringing immediate relief to people who have already arrived in camps, because they are also in a very bad situation."

Taleban leaders say the statues targeted by their edict are graven images offensive to Islam -- an interpretation few other Muslims share. Other countries have offered to take possession of the relics for safekeeping, but the Taleban leaders have refused.

"There is no precedent for a country decreeing the physical annihilation of its historical patrimony," Phillippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, told CNN. "This is a deliberate disfigurement of the identity of a people."

Reuters contributed to this report.

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