UN split over aid crisis in Afghan capital



Wed 15 Jul 98 - 12:17 GMT

KABUL, July 15 (AFP) - Despite condemning fresh Taliban restrictions on aid workers in the Afghan capital, a United Nations report leaked to AFP exposes confusion in the world body on how to react to a major aid crisis.

Although the UN special envoy to Afghanistan opened up a fresh round of condemnation of the Taliban in a briefing delivered to the Security Council on Tuesday, a senior official visiting attempted to play down the crisis.

Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi told the Security Council a Taliban rule ordering aid workers to shift to a dilapidated and isolated compound was "unacceptable."

In the briefing Brahimi also warned that the UN could pull out of Afghanistan if working conditions did not improve.

"The Taliban must know that there is a limit to what we can stand," he asserted.

But in a report to the UN's under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs in New York, Sergio Vieira de Mello, the acting UN coordinator for Afghanistan Bronek Szynalski dismissed Brahimi's concerns.

"Regarding Ambassador Brahimi's statement to the Security Council ... we do not see anything has happened on the humanitarian front to provoke such reaction," Szynalski noted.

"However, we assume that frustration on the political front, especially in negotiating peace, give grounds for such concerns and justify statements of losing patience," he added.

The report despatched on Wednesday also noted that progress was expected in a Taliban-aid group health commission, set up to discuss issues including the employment of female health workers.

The commission was supposed to settle the provision of identity cards enabling local female health workers to work and avoid beatings and arrests by religious police from the powerful ministry for the fostering of virtue and prevention of vice.

However the aid workers say the health commission was shut down on Tuedsay, a fact pointed out to the visiting UN team.

"The minister of health has shut down the health commission until medical NGO's sign a protocol that gives the Taliban control over our budgets, projects and staff," said Charles MacFadden, head of the foreign aid coordination body ACBAR.

"It is now basically illegal to get female health staff to work," he added.

In his report, the Pakistan-based Szynalski also dismissed a report criticising the Taliban ban on women receiving medical treatment without the presence of a male relative.

Aid workers say the ruling on female access to health, announced on Taliban radio on June 25, has been enforced in several major hospitals.

UN spokeswoman Sarah Russel refused to comment on the apparent division in UN opinion, but said the situation for aid delivery in Kabul was serious.

"Clearly the situation is serious and we will have to watch developments closely," said Russell.

The UN has come in for regular criticism over their aid policy in the Afghan capital.

Last year the World Health Organisation was forced to withdraw its promise to support a Taliban policy to deny female health access in major hospitals and set up a female-only center in a run-down building.

The UN also signed a memorandum of understanding with the Taliban in May, in which the world body agreed with the militia that female access to health and education "will need to be gradual."

The agreement invited a storm of criticism from human rights groups who accused the UN of abandoning the principles of the universality of gender rights.

 

 

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