Afghanistan’s mind-blowing Minaret of Jam can at last lean towards hope

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/27/afghanistan-minaret-jam-lean-unesco-heritage

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In August BBC Afghanistan reported that the 820-year-old Minaret of Jam (the world’s second tallest brick minaret) was in danger of collapse. A combination of high floods in 2013, illegal excavations for archaeological artefacts nearby, an absence of funds and the difficulty of reaching and restoring a site that lies in a Taliban-dominated area, had left the tower abandoned and at a 3.47 degree tilt. This is less than the 5.5-degree tilt that the Tower of Pisa once endured, but the minaret is 30ft taller and its foundations much less secure.

Since then things have changed, as perhaps has the fate of the minaret – which has been standing since 1194 in this lonely mountain pass on the edge of the ancient kingdom of Ghor. Since taking office in September, the president, Ashraf Ghani, has made known his interest in the preservation of Afghanistan’s cultural life and his keenness for working with Unesco in Kabul. The Unesco team visited the minaret for the first time since 2006 on 18 November to take measurements. Tarcis Stevens, a Belgian conservation architect who led the team to the minaret, told the New York Times: “It’s the very first historical monument of Afghanistan, with an importance far beyond the borders of Afghanistan.”

Unesco defends its relative inactivity by saying that in 2002 and 2003 it prevented the minaret from collapsing completely by building a new supporting wall, but the Kabul office still has no clear plan for its conservation. This is partly excused on grounds of geography.

At the end of the 1960s Peter Levi, travelling with Bruce Chatwin, wrote in his book about Afghanistan, The Light Garden of the Angel King, that the Jam minaret was where the

Nevertheless, conservation in Afghanistan and also in Pakistan, where Unesco has a number of world heritage sites, is also failing. In late October, Dawn reported that artefacts from the 10,000-year-old site of Mehrgarh, near Quetta, had been trafficked for lucrative sale in Rome. Mehrgarh is rightly a world heritage site: one of the most ancient in the subcontinent, and the first in the region to be settled for farming in place of nomadic lifestyles, it predates the Indus valley civilisation by millennia.

The challenge for Unesco in this region is that it is up against governments who are unable to defend heritage against their own military and, in Afghanistan, against warlords and the Taliban. Antiquities represent an opulent opportunity, but the trade with the west also acts as a way of chipping away at the cultural heritage of minorities.

What can be done? Unesco needs to pluck up its courage and make a determined effort in Pakistan and Afghanistan to reach the military, the Taliban and the landowners upon whose estates these sites often sit.

Then there is the matter that, philosophically speaking, the case for the preservation of world heritage buildings remains fuzzy in 2014. Of course the preservation of human life is more important; the administration of polio vaccine in Afghanistan and Pakistan to children has to be worth 10 Minarets of Jam. It is just that the buildings of the past remind us of our fragile human story, the skills and genius of the past – Jam contains a double helix staircase unknown in Europe until the Renaissance – and the understanding that civilisations ebb and flow.