![]() ![]() One of my relatives' sons was the first guy to have his hand cut off." Dara fled soon after, along with an estimated two-thirds of Timbuktu's citizens. "My drum player was caught and put in jail. "One of my cousins was beaten in front of me, given 100 lashes from the jihadis," she says. "When entered the city, people said if you were an artist they would cut out your tongue, because they hate music and want to ban it," Bintu Dara, a singer, tells me in the Malian capital, Bamako. The largely moderate Muslims of Timbuktu were terrified. Suspected thieves had their hands or feet chopped off after summary trials. Music, a vibrant part of Malian culture that has been exported all over the world, was banned. Women were beaten for walking in the company of men. It was a time of devastation in northern Mali: first the rebels pillaged the town, then the jihadis imposed a brutal form of sharia law on the population. So began the 10-month occupation of Timbuktu, first by Tuareg separatist rebels, then by their fellow-travellers Ansar Dine (Defenders of the Faith), a jihadist affiliate of al-Qaida. Before noon, a convoy of rebel pick-ups swept into the undefended town. Bok! Bok! Bok," Diagayeté, an archivist, remembers. Shortly afterwards, the first gunshots rang out over the city. The soldier ran off to ditch his uniform and returned a few minutes later in civvies, intent on taking refuge in Diagayeté's house. It was a friend from the army: a heavily armed group of rebels had arrived at the city boundary, he told him he'd done everything he could and must leave the city immediately. Cultural artefacts are exposed to crises and need to be protected," Bandarin said.At 5am on a Sunday morning, Mohamed Diagayeté was disturbed by an urgent banging on the door of his house in Timbuktu, on the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Staff at a museum in Bamako now storing some of the Malian manuscripts for safekeeping will attend the 18 February meeting and receive training in keeping the texts safe. ![]() He said Mali’s ancient artefacts also needed protection from international trafficking gangs, who run a trade worth some $6-8 billion a year and have taken advantage of recent chaos in countries like Libya to loot items. “We have the basis of a plan of action and we will expand on this at a round table on the 18th," she said.īandarin said 11 mausoleums and tombs had been destroyed during the rebel occupation of northern Mali, but UNESCO planned to rebuild them using photographs and local experts. “We will send a mission of experts to assess the damage once security conditions allow so we can make an estimate of what we need," said Bokova, who visited Timbuktu, a UNESCO world heritage site, with French President Francois Hollande last week. ![]() The damage to Mali’s tangible heritage wrought by the rebels is likely to be around $4-5 million, but the cost of rebuilding mausoleums and digitising tens of thousands of manuscripts was harder to estimate, she told a news conference. The Paris-based agency will chair the 18 February meeting, send experts to Mali to assess the damage and try to raise funding to scan and preserve surviving texts, its director-general Irina Bokova said on Friday. Equipment installed at a library in Timbuktu to start digitising them was smashed by the rebels, and computers holding data were burned, as they fled the ancient city last month ahead of its liberation by French forces, said UNESCO’s assistant director-general for culture, Francesco Bandarin. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |