| Abstract: | In March 2001, the Taliban government of Afghanistan destroyed two ancient Buddha statues carved into a cliff face in Bamyan, Afghanistan. The event received wide coverage in the international media. The local ethnic minority group that inhabits Bamyan, the Hazaras, received little or no attention in the reporting of this event. This article seeks to demonstrate that the Western media participated in the construction of a history of the statues and the region that excluded the Hazaras because of a narrative that was created that compared a cosmopolitan, tolerant West with the Silk Road era of the statues, and contrasted this with the intolerance and parochialism of the Taliban. The inclusion of the Hazaras would have upset this dichotomy, and as a result this minority group was excluded, despite evidence that they have their own beliefs about and relationship to the Buddha statues. |
