The Communists instituted and enforced Soviet style music and dance, and promptly executed at least one high profile musician, the legendary Afghan composer Nainawas. Popular singer Ahmad Zahir died in a suspicious car accident a year later. The Taliban's attack on culture appears, to Western eyes, absurd in the extreme. In 1995 they lynched television sets, destroying them and then hanging them in public from utility poles. They search vehicles to find and destroy musical cassettes.
Weddings take place without music.
Radio stations broadcast only Taliban-approved religious or military songs. Three weeks ago Taliban paramilitary squads seized instruments from a group of more than 80 men protesting Taliban rule. The men had also cut their beards, violating Taliban code. The squads burned the instruments and 'punished' the men according to state radio, who the same week reported that the Taliban had 'detained' 41 prople for possessing music cassettes. In 1998, Naim Majrooh, director of the Afghan Information Center and editor in chief for the USA publication Afghanistan Quarterly, delivered a speech to the first world conference on music and censorship in Copenhagen, alerting the world to the extent of human rights violations being committed in his home country.