POLITICS: U.N. Development Assistance to Afghans in Jeopardy

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 19 1998 (IPS) - The myriads of U.N. aid agencies actively involved in Afghanistan have given the Taliban government an ultimatum: either it removes all its edicts restricting the movement of women or forego U.N. development assistance in the long run.

“We have sent a clear and strong message expressing a common United Nations position,” says Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), who just returned from a trip to the politically-troubled South Asian country.

Bellamy, the first high-ranking woman to meet Taliban authorities, said she was sent to Afghanistan to prepare the groundwork for a U.N. negotiating team visiting Kabul beginning April 20. She said she laid out the common U.N. position on basic minimum working conditions: the Taliban government has to respect the privileges and immunities of U.N. personnel and lift all restrictions on the movement of women working in Afghanistan.

Bellamy, who met Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, chairman of the Taliban Supreme Shura, said high-ranking Afghan officials asked for understanding of their customs, and had stressed that Western ideas could not be imposed upon them.

“I told them I was representing the United Nations, and was’nt advocating a Western model, or any particular model they should adopt,” Bellamy told IPS. “The U.N. message was not a Western message.”

The UNICEF head told Taliban authorities that she knew of no other country, including Islamic nations, where the official position was that girls be denied access to education.

The radical changes announced by the conservative and strongly Islamic government in Kabul restricting the movement of women have been misleadingly– and erroneously– attributed to the teachings of the Koran and the Islamic religion.

Bellamy said that while UNICEF and other agencies – including the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) – continue with their humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan, UNICEF has suspended its education assistance programme.

“It would be re-started should there be any move on the part of the Taliban authorities to include the participation of girls in formal schools,” she added. Currently, UNICEF has a 12 million dollar programme in Afghanistan.

Bellamy said the United Nations was also concerned over a recent edict which allowed non-Afghan Muslim women to work only if they are accompanied by their husbands or a male blood relative.

Following a trip to Afghanistan last week, U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson said Friday that he had received assurances from the Taliban government that it would allow Afghan female doctors to provide care for women and girls, as well as allow the United Nations to hire Afghan women to deliver humanitarian assistance to women and girls.

The Taliban had also agreed to “discuss ways to ease restrictions on non-Afghan female U.N. employees.” One of UNICEF’s Jalalabad offices is currently headed by a woman. UNICEF has been working with a number of Afghan women, but under Taliban law they are not permitted to be in the same office with men.

Richardson said Taliban authorities had told him they favour expansion of education opportunities for Afghan women at the university level. Towards this end, the government is seeking international assistance. The U.S. envoy told reporters that President Bill Clinton had sent him halfway around the world “to advance the cause of peace in Afghanistan.”

“I saw with my own eyes the destruction and human tragedy borne of 20 years of war. The thing the Afghan people need most is peace,” he said.

Afghanistan has also reached a point of no return – politically. In November Secretary-General Kofi Annan, visibly frustrated over the escalation of the civil war in Afghanistan, said that “it has become increasingly difficult to justify the continuation of U.N. peace efforts and the attendant costs in the absence of any positive signs”of a peaceful solution to the conflict raging since the early 1990s.

The Afghan conflict is “a seemingly endless tragedy of epic proportions,” the Secretary-General said, portraying a rather grim picture of the ongoing large-scale fighting in that country.

In a report to the Security Council, Annan said that a peaceful settlement in Afghanistan “remains elusive” notwithstanding the “untiring efforts” of the United Nations to broker peace among the country’s warring factions.

The people’s yearning for peace in Afghanistan “is being systematically and continually betrayed by leaders and warlords driven by selfish ambitions and thirst for power,” he said in one of the most pessimisstic reports on the situation in Afghanistan.

Annan faulted the international community which “has shown only limited interest in adopting tangible measures to discourage the Afghan parties and their outside supporters from pursuing their bellicose aims and objectives.” He implicitly blamed a number of governments – both inside and outside the region – who are refusing to use their political clout to help resolve the problem.

Currently, only three countries, namely Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, recognise the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. The rest of the U.N.’s 182 member states have withheld their decision to extend de jure recognition.