FEATURE-As snows melt, Afghan hopes rise for Buddha statue

By Raju Gopalakrishnan

BAMIYAN, Afghanistan, April 15 (Reuters) - Snows are melting in central Afghanistan and roads to the town of Bamiyan have reopened after unseasonal rain -- and work on restoring the giant Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban can resume.

Piles of stone and rubble lie below two gaping niches in the red-brown cliff facing the town where the 6th-century statues had stood until the Taliban used dozens of explosive charges to bring them down in 2001, branding them un-Islamic.

The larger, identified chunks of stone from the standing Buddhas have been stored or tied down under white tarpaulin, but thousands of fragments and rubble lie in the open.

"It's impossible to work here for at least six months of the year," says Bamiyan Governor Habiba Sarabi. "We hope work will resume by June."

She says reconstruction of at least one of the statues, the larger one which stood 174 feet (52 metres) tall, will begin after a formal request from the federal government to UNESCO.

Reconstructed bits of the statue will be mixed with clay in a process called anastylosis and slowly pieced together and bonded back onto the cliff face.

It's an immense task -- some of the chunks of stone weigh tonnes, a lot of the statue has been reduced to unidentifiable rubble, and experts are divided on whether reconstruction is feasible or even necessary.

There are mines in the area, and a demining team has been clearing the site, but its work is still not complete, local officials say. Hundreds of poor people live in a honeycomb of caves on the cliffside, and preventing encroachment into the World Heritage Site is a key issue.

In the past two years, work has focused on recovering pieces of the statue and shoring up the face of the cliff to prevent more collapses.

Now, preliminary estimates of the cost to rebuild the larger statue are around $50 million, and it's debatable whether that sum can be better used elsewhere in the war-ravaged and impoverished nation.

And no plans have yet been made on what to do with the smaller of the demolished statues, which stood at 115 feet (35 metres).

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Whenever work starts, it will take years -- perhaps a decade -- to complete.

"It's a very delicate task," says Sarabi. "It won't happen very soon, there are at least 3,000 pieces of the larger Buddha and 1,500 from the smaller one."

Other plans are also proceeding apace to make the town a major tourist destination.

Work should begin this year to build an all-weather asphalt road from Kabul to Bamiyan -- now a bone-jolting eight-hour, 225-km (140-mile) drive mostly over a rough boulder-strewn track that snakes up the Gorband River valley, crosses the Shibar Pass at 3,000 metres (about 10,000 feet) and then descends to Bamiyan.

The proposed new road will take another route into Bamiyan, through the Hajigak Pass, currently another stone track snowbound until June.

Excavation is also going on in the area behind the Bamiyan cliff, and some experts believe they can uncover a third, prone statue of the Buddha, which could be as long as 300 feet (90 metres).

"Everything is a slow process, there are only a few months when work is possible and there don't seem to be enough experts for the amount of work to be done," says Abdul Wakeel Ahmadzai, the Bamiyan minister for culture and tourism.

But there is no doubt it needs to be done, he says, even if the statues are of Buddha and Afghanistan is now almost wholly Muslim.

And though Ahmadzai is a Sunni Pashtun, like most of the Taliban, he is at home in Bamiyan, peopled by the mostly Shi'ite Hazaras.

"What we have to do is clear to everyone," he said, standing on a hill opposite Bamiyan, as dusk fell. At night, the cliff-face is bathed in a dim reddish-orange glow, while surrounding hills are covered in darkness.

"The Taliban destroyed a golden symbol of Afghanistan."