UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres will meet from this Monday, May 1 in Doha the special envoys for Afghanistan. Objective: to examine the approach to be adopted with regard to the Taliban government, at a time when the United Nations mission is becoming more complicated in this country.
In Doha, talks with representatives of around 25 countries and international organizations will be held at an undisclosed location in the absence of the Taliban government, which took power in August 2021. So far, the United Nations has given little items on the meeting agenda. The goal is to ” reinvigorate international engagement around common goals towards a sustainable path regarding the situation in Afghanistan “Said Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for the UN Secretary General, on Friday.
Ahead of the May Day meeting, a women’s group demonstrated in Kabul on Saturday to oppose any international recognition of the Taliban government. The UN and the Western powers are categorical: this issue is not on the agenda. But the United Nations and other parties have been engaged in increasingly intense discussions about how to engage with the Taliban and possibly offer incentives for change.
During the meeting, the UN Secretary-General will also take stock of his organisation’s crucial humanitarian operations in Afghanistan, after ban on Afghan women to work with UN agencies, diplomats said. The UN, which considers women essential to its work in Afghanistan, claims to have been condemned to a ” awful choice » : that of continuing or not its operations in this country of 38 million inhabitants. The United Nations also wishes to bring together the positions of the international community on human rights, women’s rights, the fight against terrorism and drug trafficking.
The fifteen members of the Security Council voted on Thursday unanimously a resolution condemning in particular the decision taken at the beginning of April by the Taliban authorities to extend to the United Nations a ban preventing NGOs from employing female Afghan personnel, which “ compromises human rights and humanitarian principles “. The Taliban government rejected this resolution. For him, it was a Afghanistan’s internal social issue “.
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