adminThe news, based on information from persons directly involved with the conservation of the historic texts, came as a relief to the world’s cultural community which had been dismayed by varying media reports of widespread destruction of the priceless manuscripts.
After French and Malian troops on Sunday retook Timbuktu, a Unesco World Heritage site and ancient seat of Islamic learning, from Islamist insurgent occupiers, the city’s mayor reported the fleeing rebels had set fire to a major manuscript library.
But experts said that while up to 2 000 manuscripts may have been lost at the South African-funded Ahmed Baba Institute ransacked by the rebels, the bulk of the around 300 000 texts existing in Timbuktu and its surrounding region were believed to be safe.
“I can say that the vast majority of the collections appear from our reports not to have been destroyed, damaged or harmed in any way,” Cape Town University’s Professor Shamil Jeppie, an expert on the Saharan city’s manuscripts, said.
A Malian source also directly involved with the conservation of the Timbuktu manuscripts said 95 percent of the total documents were “safe and sound”.
The two sources said that soon after Tuareg rebel fighters swept into Timbuktu on April 1 in a rebellion later hijacked by sharia-observing Islamist radicals, curators and collectors of the manuscripts had hidden the texts away for safety. “They had shipped them out and distributed them around,” Jeppie said. The Malian source, asking not to be named, said the manuscripts had been concealed “a little bit everywhere”.
Some of the manuscripts that constitute Timbuktu’s “treasure of learning” date back to the 13th century.
Brittle, written in ornate calligraphy, and ranging from scholarly treatises to old commercial invoices, the documents represent a compendium of human knowledge on everything from law, sciences and medicine to history and politics. Some experts compare them in importance to the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Ahmed Baba Institute, a Malian state library, is named after a Timbuktu-born contemporary of William Shakespeare and housed more than 20 000 ancient scholarly manuscripts.
Timbuktu was liberated by French and Malian forces as part of a rapid French-led military offensive launched on 11 January that drove fighters from the Islamist alliance occupying Mali’s north back into the desert and mountains near the Algeria border.
Meanewhile, French troops have taken control of the airport in the northern Malian town of Kidal, the last rebel stronghold in the north, according to the French army and a local official.
Thierry Burkhard, the French armed forces spokesman, confirmed yesterday that French troops were in Kidal and had taken control of the airport.
“The operation is ongoing,” he said, declining to give further details.
Separately, Haminy Belco Maiga, president of the regional assembly of Kidal, speaking to Reuters news agency, said: “They arrived late last night and they deployed in four planes and some helicopters.”
He said there were no immediate reports of resistance.
Kidal would be the last of northern Mali’s major towns to be retaken by French forces after they reached Gao and Timbuktu earlier this week in a campaign to drive al-Qaeda-linked fighters from Mali’s north.
France said the area had become a safe haven for fighters.
Kidal is the capital of a desert region with the same name that the fighters are believed to have retreated to during nearly three weeks of French air attacks and an advance by hundreds of ground troops.
Haminy Maiga, the interim president of the Kidal regional assembly, said French forces met no resistance when they arrived late Tuesday.
“The French arrived at 9:30pm aboard four planes, which landed one after another. Afterwards they took the airport and then entered the town, and there was no combat,” said Maiga, who had been in touch with people in the town by satellite phone as all the normal phone networks were down.
On Tuesday, a secular Tuareg rebel group had asserted that they were in control of Kidal and other small towns in northern Mali. Maiga said those fighters had left Kidal and were at the entry posts on the roads from Gao and Tessalit. — Al Jazeera
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