San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Taliban urged to drop ban on female workers
UNITED NATIONS — A strong majority of the U.N. Security Council urged Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers to reverse all “oppressive” restrictions on girls and women including the latest ban on women working for aid organizations that is exacerbating the already critical humanitarian crisis in the country.
The joint statement Friday from 11 of the 15 council members said female aid workers are crucial to addressing Afghanistan’s “dire humanitarian situation” because they provide “critical life-saving support to women and girls” who men can’t reach. It reiterated the council’s demand for “unhindered access for humanitarian actors regardless of gender.”
Japanese Ambassador Kimihiro Ishikane, the current council president, delivered the statement to reporters before a closed council meeting, surrounded by diplomats from the 10 other countries — Albania, Brazil, Ecuador, France, Gabon,
Malta, Switzerland, Britain, United States and United Arab Emirates. The four council nations that didn’t support the statement were Russia, China, Ghana and Mozambique.
U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the U.N. special envoy for Afghanistan, Roza Otunbayeva, told the council in a video briefing that the Taliban’s restrictions on women and girls violate fundamental human rights and “contradict assurances that the Taliban gave prior to taking power about the role of women in their country.”
She outlined the potential negative impact of such decisions, including immediately on the delivery of humanitarian assistance, Dujarric said.
The 11 council members also urged the immediate reversal of the Taliban’s ban on girls attending secondary school and girls and women attending university as well as restrictions on women’s human rights and freedoms.
Britain’s U.N. ambassador, Barbara Woodward, tweeted that as a result of the ban on
women working for humanitarian groups, as of Thursday, “15% of NGOs had paused all work in Afghanistan, 68% had significantly reduced operations.” She added: “Humanitarian aid can’t happen without women.”
David Miliband, CEO of the International Rescue Committee, a group that has worked in Afghanistan since 1988, said last year its 8,000 staff, including 3,000 women, served 5.3 million Afghans across the country, including
2.7 million women and girls. But the group has been forced to pause most operations because of the decree banning female NGO staff from working, Miliband said in a prepared briefing to the council obtained by the Associated Press.
He outlined a twin-track approach for getting women back to work, saying: “We have a chance of preventing further calamity for the Afghan people, but only if the international
community is decisive, practical and disciplined.”
On one track, he said, it must be made clear to the Taliban that there can be no business as usual without women workers.
On another track, Miliband said, when Taliban decisionmakers in ministries or localities support reopening services “we will quickly move to restart services and build momentum for a return to our operating model.”