The international community did not make a sincere effort to stop the Taliban from destroying 7th-century Bamiyan Buddhist statues in 2001, Afghanistan’s minister of culture said during a four-day visit here on Wednesday.

Overcoming initial difficulty, the Taliban eventually toppled the 120-feet and 170-feet tall statues ― some of the tallest in the world ― with anti-aircraft canons, tanks and dynamite in March 2001.

The statues were hewn out of the side of a mountain in Bamiyan, about 100 miles west of Kabul. Their destruction exemplified the single-minded barbarism of the reign of the black-clad Taliban over Afghanistan in the 1990s.

“I am not sure there was enough international pressure to prevent the Taliban from destroying the Buddhist statues. Maybe some requests were made but no real pressure,” said Afghan Minister of Culture and Information Sayed Makhdoom Raheen.

Raheen, sat down for a one-on-one interview with The Korea Herald at a hotel in downtown Seoul on Wednesday as he finished a four-day trip here.

He visited South Korea with a group of young musicians from the Afghan National Institute of Music who held a special performance at the Suncheon Garden Exposition on Monday. Raheen returned to Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul on Thursday.

“It was a sign of barbarism at the end of the 20th century. It means human beings need to learn and become more cultured,” he said. “During the Taliban, Afghanistan was a culture-free country.”

Raheen said he was in Rome at the time to meet the former Afghan monarch to work out a way to stop the Taliban from destroying the statues.

During his visit here, Raheen met with National Museum of Korea director Kim Young-na on Tuesday and, on Wednesday, the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Yoo Jinryong to discuss ways South Korea can help boost Afghan archival technology, cultural preservation and cooperation in archeology.

Raheen said a great deal was accomplished rebuilding the cultural fabric of his country from years of war, chaos and misrule, but described the last 30 years of Afghan history as a “nightmare.”

He served in the ministry of culture before the Soviet Union invaded in 1979. He worked with the Afghan resistance throughout the 1980s, only to leave the resistance in 1991 two years after the Soviets were forced out of the country. He returned with the U.S. invasion in 2002 when he re-joined the ministry. Raheen said the single greatest accomplishment of the ministry over the last 10 years was in securing freedom of expression.

Since the Taliban were pushed out of the country in 2002, Afghanistan has built 150 radio transmitters, 50 TV transmitters and helped establish over 1,000 newspapers and magazines.

Raheen’s attention is now focused on preserving 1,200 historical monuments in danger of collapse, including buildings, minarets, ancient statues and mosques.

By Philip Iglauer (ephilip2011@heraldcorp.com)