Dupree Foundation News
Afghan Government Careless About its Cultural Heritage
Written by Quqnoos.com • Tuesday, 03 February 2009 17:39
Nancy Dupree criticizes the Afghan authorities for being careless about their cultural heritage
Nancy Hatch Dupree, a well-known American archeologist, who has been researching the cultural heritage of Afghanistan for 59 years, said the Afghan authorities do not give priority for their cultural heritage, and even in schools cultural studies are not taught.
The 81 year old Nancy Dupree said she and her late husband, Louis Hatch Dupree, along with other Afghan researchers, have written numerous books about Afghanistan during these years.
She says although she has made efforts to gain the attention of the Afghan authorities and the people for the cultural preservation of Afghanistan in the last 20 years, but the Afghan authorities still neglect to this issue.
She said: "Afghanistan's cultural heritage is severely damaged, and no serious attention is paid to it. Even in Afghan schools any subject regarding cultural studies is also not taught. We are making our efforts to gain the attention of Afghan authorities in this issue, which is not given a priority by the government."
"Most of the historical monuments looted in Afghanistan were not due to the war, but because they were not kept well." She added
One of Mrs. Dupree's books about the cultural heritage of Afghanistan is the "Kabul Guide".
She has also opened an information center in Kabul University, which contains 45,000 scripts about Afghanistan.
Rare Afghan collection gets Kabul home
Published: February 3,2009
Kabul , Feb 2 (AFP) A rare collection of thousands of documents from 20 years of turbulent modern Afghan history will be permanently housed at Kabul University, leading authority Nancy Hatch Dupree said today.
Dupree, a respected author on Afghanistan, said the collection of 45,000 papers, newspapers and other documents was a valuable resource that could help the war-shattered, fractured country forge a national identity.
US national Dupree, 81, and her late husband, eminent archaeologist Louis Dupree, started the collection in 1989 after moving to Peshawar, Pakistan, as the Soviet occupation was drawing to an end and Afghan civil war loomed.
She began moving the papers into Afghanistan in 2003, after the 2001 fall of the Taliban regime, which imposed five years of harsh Islamic rule, and the collection has since been stored in the Kabul Library.
Now the documents -- which cover topics as diverse as health to agriculture, economics and politics -- have been allocated land at Kabul University and bids opened to construct a purpose-built facility, Dupree told reporters.
"So maybe in about a month we will start building and perhaps hopefully by the beginning of next year we will have a new building where we can initiate many new projects,"she said.
She hoped the Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University would give Afghans knowledge about their society and help them"acquire a sense of identity".
" When a nation has a sense of its own identity they can solve their problems peacefully rather than confrontationally with conflict,"said Dupree, who arrived in Afghanistan in 1962 to become a global authority on the country.
