Tuesday May 12, 2015
Kabul (BNA) National Archive of Afghanistan has accommodated over one hundred thousand historical relics and more than 7,500 manuscripts, most of them dating back to centuries ago, an official said the other day.
In an interview with The Kabul Times, Chairwoman of the National Archive, Massuma Nazari who had worked for, since one and half a year, said that the entire Archive’s covered items are kept herein since its establishment of more than 40 years in the country. She called the main responsibility of her led Archive, well protection of historical relics and both state owned and national precious objects. According to her, historical relics are not protected well enough as needed, because there were no one employed professional for the protection. “No education field had been still included in the country’s university curriculum on how to protect national relics,” she said adding her office was trying to provide methods of shielding them well. Only seven of the National Archive are under training within a newly established department, and could protect professionally the historical relics after graduation, she continued, while complaining about lack of equipped laboratories and other needed modern devices. In September 25, a memorandum of cooperation was signed with the National Archive of India, under which, Indian instructors have been invited to use simple method of training up to 17 Afghan officials to professionally protect their historical relics, Nazari said adding the move would help the country’s historical relics resist for another 200 years.
Alongside India some other countries have promised to do more for revitalization of the National Archive, but they had not still practiced what they had assured, said the in charge who praised the Kabul based Czech Republic embassy for further cooperation in this field. She said there were manuscripts, with a background of reaching to third century (Islamic calendar), while some state and national documents, with 500 years of background are kept in the Archive, with no one, except those responsible allowed to enter the main relics stores. “They kept state and national historical documents indicate various types of our governance during centuries.” Visitors of the national Archive included school and university students, teachers and researchers and all fans, he said could visit the historical relics without tickets from morning 8 to 4 in the evening, according to the chairwoman who blamed lack of budget from the problems, she said to be behind her office failure to employ professional cadres for protection. She asked the government for allocating enough budgets for further improvement of the National Archive. Time has changed. Some visitors ask us for scanned image of the relics and we need modern electronic equipment to scan the documents and manuscripts and address the visitors’ requests and provide them with wide services. Suraya Raiszada
