Returning the favor

Blind woman leads ailing guide horse back to health

KABUL — Afghanistan’s embattled National Museum is finally looking ahead to a brighter future after decades of domestic turmoil and violence decimated its exhibits and artifacts.

“The situation of the National Museum improved markedly compared to the pasta sit has been rehabilitatedand efforts are underway to further improve its state of affairs,” explained the museum’s director, Mohammad Fahim Rahimi.

Once popular for having rare collections and preserving regional cultural heritage dating back several millennia, the National Museum of Afghanistan had been badly damaged and more than 70 percent of some 100,000 objects on display had been destroyed or looted during the destructive factional fighting among several armed groups in the 1990s.

In 1996 when the Taliban captured Kabul, the hardliner militants vandalized the remaining treasures inside the museum.

Regarding statues depicting humans as being un-Islamic, the radical Taliban hierarchy also dynamited the giant Buddha sin Ba my an and instructed its fighters to destroy any sculpture found in Afghanistan during its sixyear reign, which collapsed in late 2001.

“Currently we have about 5,000 artifacts and statues in the museum here and we are trying our best to collect all the objects of the museum lost in the past and bring them back,” Rahimi told Xinhua on the eve of the International Museum Day which falls on May 18.

Built in 1919, the museum, like other institutions in Afghanistan, had been damaged due to the war and civil strife.

Thousands of relics have been destroyed, looted or smuggled outside the Islamic republic.

“Around 30,000 items belonging to the museum have been retrieved from different countries since 2002,” said director Rahimi.

“Since 2007, around 7,000 valuable relics have been returned from Japan, Britain and Germany,” he added.

Describing the future of the National Museum of Afghanistan as “promising,” Rahimi revealed that 102 pieces from the museum were returned from Japan last year, while efforts to further replenish the museum with its original artifacts are ongoing.

“If more and more relics are returned to the museum its importance will be restored and the number of visitors to will go up,” said Rahimi.