U.N. expert: Don't rebuild Afghan Buddhas

Rubble testifies to violence of 21st century

The Buddhas of Bamiyan once drew tourists from all over the world.

KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) -- A U.N. expert strongly recommended Wednesday that the 1,700-year-old statues of Buddha in Afghanistan destroyed by the Taliban not be rebuilt.

"My opinion is that reconstruction should not be done," Japan's Ikuo Hirayama, one of UNESCO's 'goodwill ambassadors', told journalists at the close of an international conference on Afghanistan's cultural heritage.

Hirayama, president of Tokyo's National University of Fine Arts, said he believed the destroyed statues should stand as a reminder to the destruction of the 21st century. The statues had been carved into the cliffs of Bamiyan in the third and fourth centuries and were among the largest ever created of the Buddha.

A top official from UNESCO, the United Nations' main cultural agency, said the three-day conference of Afghan and international experts had reached a consensus that rebuilding the statues would not be a priority.

Archaeologists estimate that reconstructing the statues, blown up by the Taliban last year as being blasphemous, would cost several million dollars.