POLITICS: UN Staff to Return to Afghanistan

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 1999 (IPS) - The United Nations will begin sending its staff back to Afghanistan next week after spending six months seeking assurances that UN workers would be safe there, it was announced Friday.

UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Sergio Vieira de Mello said that Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban had pledged to ensure the safety of UN staff, and added that several UN assessments had yielded “satisfactory” results.

As a result, UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said, “the United Nations has deicded to initiate the gradual return of UN personnel to Afghanistan.”

At the same time, however, “the United Nations will continue to monitor closely the situation in Afghanistan”.

Vieira de Mello said, the United Nations would start rotating staff into the capital, Kabul, and the key cities of Kandehar and Herat, for two three-week periods, from March 15. After that, , further UN action “will depend upon security assessments.”

Although the numbers of staff for each area have yet to be determined, Vieira de Mello said that the “ideal” staff levels would be eight international workers in Kabul, eight in Kandehar and between 10 and 12 in Herat. Three international UN staffers have been in Kabul since an earthquake hit Afghanistan last month.

The return of UN personnel signalled a shift from Afghanistan’s isolation since last August, when the United Nations withdraw international workers after the murder of two Afghani members working with UN agencies and an Italian soldier, Lt. Col. Carmine Calo.

At the same time, tension grew between the Islamist Taliban and Western countries when the United States bombed a camp in Afghanistan on Aug 19 believed to house Saudi financier and vocal US opponent Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden was regarded by the Taliban as a “guest” in Afghanistan, although the Afghan leadership’s recent relationship with him became strained.

Since August, the Taliban has arrested several people for the killings, including a Pakistani blamed with Calo’s murder whom the Taliban claimed acted on his own authority.

Taliban officials, including the group’s UN representative, Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, meanwhile assured the United Nations that bin Laden and his followers would not be allowed to harm UN staff.

“We have raised the Osama bin Laden problem with the Taliban leadership … (and) we have received assurances that every step has been taken to ensure that that individual is not above the law in the areas that the Taliban controls,” Vieira de Mello said.

What steps actually had been taken to contain bin Laden and his supporters – including the shadowy Al-Qaeda group blamed by the United States for the August bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam – remained unclear.

Last month, Mujahid and others indicated that bin Laden had been placed under the protection of Taliban security rather than his own bodyguards – a situation the Taliban implied would block him from planning terrorist attacks.

Yet bin Laden’s status and whereabouts were not known by US officials who had sought his expulsion from Afghanistan.

“My guess is that you won’t hear from him for a while,” said Taliban spokeswoman Laili Helms. “He’ll just disappear.”

The United Nations does not recognise the Taliban government – despite its control over some 90 percent Afghanistan – and the leadership has been eager to win the favour of other nations by shedding at least some of its most radical aspects.

As a result, bin Laden – a hero to many Taliban fighters for his combat in the 1979-90 war against Soviet troops – became persona non grata after the August bombings but the Taliban’s shoddy record on women’s rights and human rights continued to keep the Islamist movement isolated.

(Only Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates recognise the group as Afghanistan’s government while the United Nations recognises the government of ousted President Berhanuddin Rabbani, whose allies control the small Panjshir Valley.)

The situation for women, who are excluded from almost all aspects of life in the Taliban-ruled zones, continues to be one of the worst cases of human rights abuse in the world, argued Zeiba Sarosh-Shamley, an Afghan rights activist. “I don’t see any hope for improvement,” she told IPS.

Vieira de Mello emphasised that the United Nations would try to push for “equal opportunities for men and women”, and noted that a project was being negotiated by the UN Development Programme and the Netherlands government to build 11 schools each for boys and for girls – the latter of whom have been denied education by the Taliban.

Other Taliban rulings, however, raised the spectre of more discrimination and women staffers with the United Nations still faced the challenge of a Taliban edict which forbids women from travelling in public without the company of a male relative, Vieira de Mello noted.