In the global race to save Afghanistan's giant Buddhist statues from destruction, artist Ikuo Hirayama thinks he has found a solution. One of Japan's best-known painters, Hirayama has offered to pay the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist rulers of most of Afghanistan, to let him dismantle the Bamiyan valley statues some 90 miles from Kabul, carry them out of the country and reassemble them abroad.
Japan supplies the bulk of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan.
About two-thirds of Japan's population, including Hirayama, is Buddhist. The statues, popularly known as Big Buddha and Little Buddha, long have been a target. Superstitious people damaged the faces centuries ago, believing it was a way to steal the statues' spiritual powers. In the 1980s, during the war with the Soviets, an unexploded rocket-propelled grenade became embedded in the chest of the larger Buddha. Hirayama thinks cutting the statues into blocks and removing them from Afghanistan would allow the Taliban to keep its promise to rid the country of non-Islamic images and still obtain badly needed funds.