BAMIAN, Afghanistan -- The pair of majestic Buddha cliff-carvings are still disfigured, vandalized three years ago by Afghanistan's Taliban rulers. But little by little, what remains of the ancient treasures is being restored, with iron rods shoring up their niches and concrete being pumped into cracks across the crumbling stone.
Below, in the lush but impoverished valley that stretches along the cliffs, a political, economic and cultural revival is unfolding among the ethnic Hazara populace that was overrun and driven into the frozen mountains by Taliban forces during the late 1990s.
Hazara children tend cows in a field near Bamian's famed giant statues of Buddha, which were vandalized by the Taliban three years ago.
(Pamela Constable -- The Washington Post)
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"This was a ruined place, but now everything is being rebuilt," said Azizullah, 31, a policeman who fled the fighting in 1999. He returned two years ago and has constructed a solid mud house by a stream that rushes past the Buddhas, irrigates acres of golden wheat and quenches flocks of goats festooned with bright ribbons.
"The militias have put down their guns and gone home to their fields," he said. "We have the best security in Afghanistan, and we welcome everyone who wants to visit and help. Our people want only unity and peace, and they ask only for their rightful share in national life."
The ravages of the Taliban are only one chapter in the long, bleak history of discrimination, abuse and slaughter that has afflicted the Hazara ethnic group. Shiite Muslims with distinctive Asiatic features, Hazaras are estimated to account for about 20 percent of Afghanistan's population.
A century ago, a rapacious ethnic Pashtun ruler, Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, drove the Hazaras from their homeland, a vast and remote region in Afghanistan's central highlands known as Hazarajat. Several Hazara uprisings were crushed without mercy: Men were tortured and killed, religious leaders were imprisoned and women were carried off as slaves and concubines.
According to a recent history of the Hazaras, Rahman Khan's soldiers were encouraged to devise fiendish punishments. They used horses to draw and quarter Hazara victims, threw them to packs of wild dogs, put red-hot stones inside their clothes and severed their heads and hung them on poles as a warning to other would-be rebels.
For most of the 20th century, the Hazaras languished in poverty and humiliation. In the rural highlands, they were scattered and isolated among inaccessible hills; in urban centers, they were confined to menial servitude and insulted as donkeys.
"The Hazaras were always economically weak and politically excluded," said Qasim Aghar, 53, a Hazara intellectual and educator in Kabul, the Afghan capital, 80 miles west of Bamian. "We were separated by religion and geography. No one ever even tried to build a road to Hazarajat."
During the civil war of the early 1990s, the Hazaras staged a brief comeback, uniting behind a charismatic but ruthless militia leader, Abdul Ali Mazari. But Mazari was killed in 1995 and the Taliban -- a repressive Sunni Muslim movement that abhorred Shiism -- turned against the Hazaras with a vengeance.
Taliban fighters repeatedly attacked Bamian and other towns, driving many poor families to hide in the nearby mountains while more affluent Hazaras fled to Iran or Pakistan. The onslaught culminated in March 2001 with the Taliban's destruction of the Buddha statues, which researchers believe were created between the 5th and 7th centuries. The act shocked the world.
The collapse of Taliban rule in late 2001 gave the Hazaras a new lease on life. In the Bamian area, international aid groups built schools, clinics and houses, drawing waves of displaced families home. This year, Italy began building the first paved road to Kabul, while the U.S. military rebuilt a regional university that its forces had bombed as a Taliban outpost in 2001.
Although Hazarajat is still one of Afghanistan's poorest and most underdeveloped areas, it has several unique factors in its favor. One is security. Unlike many other regions, there are no armed feuds between rival militia bosses and no attacks by revived Taliban forces to deter foreign aid projects and disrupt preparations for the presidential elections scheduled for Oct. 9.
"Extremist and anti-government elements are not at all welcome here," said Peter Maxwell, the senior U.N. official in Bamian. "This has a very beneficial effect on all sorts of activities. People are eager to rebuild their lives, they support the government and they have no time for the kinds of extremism found in other areas."
