| |
Afghanistan aid workers cry for help
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Aid
workers are increasingly being targeted in the ongoing
"war on terrorism" between United States-led forces and
Islamic radicals, as the killing of a United Nations
refugee worker Sunday in Afghanistan demonstrates.
Bettina Goislard, a French citizen, was gunned
down while riding in a car of the UN High Commissioner
for Refugees in the provincial city of Ghazni, located
about 70 miles south of Kabul along the highway to
Kandahar, when two men on a motorcycle opened fire on
the vehicle, killing her and injuring her driver.
The attackers were arrested, and Afghan
authorities identified them as supporters of the
Taliban, who have re-established a presence in much of
the southeastern part of the country, close to the
border with Pakistan.
In a statement, UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan condemned the attack as a
"cold-blooded killing ... outrageous and contemptible".
All UN operations in central Afghanistan were suspended
in the wake of the killing.
Sunday's attack came
less than a week after a bombing in front of UN offices
in Kandahar and three months after a truck bomb attack
on the UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed 22 people,
including the world body's chief envoy to Iraq, Sergio
Vieira de Mello. The latter was one of the deadliest
attacks on UN personnel in the history of the world
body.
Two people were injured in the Kandahar
blast, which took place as a delegation from the UN
Security Council visited Afghanistan to assess
conditions.
Goislard was the first UN staff
member to be killed since the August bombing. Annan's
statement on Sunday stressed that the latest incident
"underscores the urgent need for the international
community to provide stronger security in areas outside
the capital, Kabul".
Security remains a major
and growing challenge to stabilizing and reconstructing
the war-torn country. In addition to the threat by the
resurgent Taliban in mainly Pashtun areas in the south
and along the border with Pakistan, much of the
countryside is ruled by tribal leaders and warlords
whose loyalty to the central government headed by
President Hamid Karzai is variable at best.
The
Security Council recently approved a new resolution
authorizing deployment of the International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF) beyond Kabul, to which it had
been confined since just after the Taliban's ouster by
US-backed forces two years ago, but the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization, which is leading ISAF, has failed
to persuade member countries to add to the 5,500-strong
force.
Norway and Germany have volunteered to
begin sending troops to specific trouble spots outside
of Kabul, but the Karzai government will continue to
rely mainly on the 11,000 US-led combat troops currently
deployed in Afghanistan as the main offensive force
against Taliban concentrations.
Still, as even
US military commanders have begun to acknowledge, the
Taliban and its allies have made gains in recent months.
Last week, the head of the US Central Command, General
John Abizaid, described daily combat operations in
Afghanistan as "every bit as difficult as those that go
on in Iraq".
Eleven US servicemen have been
killed by hostile fire in the country since August,
almost one-third of the 35 killed since the US first
began military operations in Afghanistan in October
2001. On Friday, a US special forces soldier was killed
when his vehicle was hit by a bomb, while a Romanian
soldier who was part of the US-led force died of wounds
received the week before.
"The situation is much
more serious than a year ago," Vikram Parekh, a
Kabul-based expert with the International Crisis Group,
told the Washington Post this weekend. "The cross-border
infiltration is better financed, armed and equipped. The
Taliban's military leadership has been reconstituted,
and in several provinces there is a more or less
permanent presence of anti-government forces."
A
major target of the Taliban strategy, at least since
last summer, has been international aid workers, both
expatriates and native Afghans, who are apparently seen
by the insurgent movement as key allies of the US and
other Western nations trying to rebuild the country.
In recent months, a number of humanitarian
relief groups have withdrawn their workers from
provinces where the Taliban have carried out attacks
against them or where security has broken down due to
fighting between different factions.
A recent
survey of 10 major aid groups estimated that security
concerns have resulted in the cancellation or delay of
aid projects that are supposed to benefit more than
600,000 Afghans. It also found that more and more Afghan
communities are afraid to accept help, and some are even
returning reconstruction assistance for fear that any
relationship to the government or aid agencies might
result in reprisals against them by the Taliban,
warlords or drug traffickers, who have become
increasingly powerful due to the record opium crops
harvested over the past year.
When the Security
Council delegation visited Kabul 10 days ago, a group of
28 international aid agencies, including ActionAid,
Oxfam, Save the Children and CARE, handed it a letter
calling on the international community to "redouble" its
efforts to extend security around the country. In need
of particular protection, it said, are those sectors
most vulnerable to abuse - women, children, returning
refugees and displaced people.
The letter was
delivered just one day after a bomb attack just outside
the Kabul office of Save the Children, the first direct
attack on the international aid community in the
capital, according to the Afghan Non-Governmental
Organization Security Office.
Since last March,
more than a dozen aid workers, mostly Afghan employees,
have been killed. In most cases, resurgent Taliban
forces or their allies have been blamed. As a result,
the relief groups have lobbied hard for months for ISAF
to move into the countryside and secure key areas. "What
Afghanistan needs is something which might be more
appropriately named ISAF Security Support Teams,"
according to Paul Barker, CARE's country director for
Afghanistan.
Assuming that ISAF will not be
enlarged, "These teams would be deployed to the more
insecure areas of the country, [and] their core
responsibility would be to promote Afghan capacity to
establish and ensure improved security", he added in a
recent statement. This would be done by training and
conducting joint operations with the Afghan National
Police Force and the Afghan National Army, which are
being trained and equipped by US and other Western
forces.
(Inter Press Service)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
