The United Nations apologized Friday for photographs posted on-line of a senior delegation’s safety element posing in entrance of the Taliban flag throughout a go to to Afghanistan this week. But U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq instructed CBS News the photographs “should never have been taken.”
The awkward incident highlights the tightrope the worldwide neighborhood is attempting to stroll as Afghans endure by means of a harsh winter with their long-vital worldwide assist lifeline all however severed as a result of Taliban’s draconian crackdown on human rights.
Unknown
Neither the U.N. nor the overwhelming majority of governments around the globe have formally acknowledged the Taliban regime that retook energy within the nation with the U.S. navy coalition’s swift withdrawal in August 2021. Most governments, together with that of the U.S., are detest to supply any monetary help that would bolster the hardline Islamic group’s energy, and so they have frozen thousands and thousands of {dollars} in Afghan authorities money reserves held abroad.
But the dearth of incoming aide is just half of the issue for Afghanistan this winter. Since taking again energy, the Taliban has methodically erased nearly all the fundamental human rights gained by Afghan ladies and women in the course of the two-decade U.S.-led warfare that drove them from energy within the nation. Women have been barred from attending universities and most excessive colleges, and from working for non-governmental organizations.
After a world uproar, that edict was revised barely to permit ladies to work within the well being care business, the place there’s an pressing want for feminine docs and nurses. But the opposite bans on ladies and women stay in place.
Losing such an enormous portion of the workforce has crippled assist companies, together with the U.N.’s personal, which for greater than 20 years had propped up Afghanistan’s weak economic system and fundamental meals and well being infrastructures.
The Taliban has not wavered within the face of large worldwide strain to ease its restrictions on ladies, dismissing the calls as a “politicization” of human rights. The group’s leaders have repeatedly insisted that they are going to rule Afghanistan in line with their harsh interpretation of Islamic regulation, with out compromise.
“A good thing,” however no breakthrough
In a bid to strain the Taliban to ease its restrictions on ladies, the United Nations despatched a delegation led by two of its most senior feminine — and pointedly, Muslim — leaders to the nation this week.
Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohammed led the mission, together with Sima Bahous, the top of the U.N. Women company. After visiting various different Muslim majority nations and assembly the leaders of Islamic organizations to construct solidarity and current a united voice in opposition to the Taliban’s anti-women insurance policies — which have been condemned for months as anti-Islamic — the delegation arrived in Kabul in the course of this week.
ANGELA WEISS/AFP/Getty
They have been there to satisfy Taliban leaders and ladies’s teams for discussions on “women’s and girls’ rights and coexistence,” in line with the U.N.
After the mission, Mohammed instructed BBC News on Friday that a lot of the senior Taliban officers she’d met appeared prepared to have interaction in a dialogue on ladies’s rights, however she indicated no critical breakthroughs, and even main progress, on getting the nation’s rulers to again down on their insurance policies.
“I think there are many voices we heard, which are progressive in the way that we would like to go,” Mohammed instructed BBC. “But there are others that really are not.”
“I think the pressure we put in, the support we give to those that are thinking more progressively, is a good thing,” she stated. “This visit, I think, gives them more voice and pressure to help the argument internally.”
In an announcement supplied by the U.N. later Friday, Mohammed stated the restrictions reintroduced by the Taliban “present Afghan women and girls with a future that confines them in their own homes, violating their rights and depriving the communities of their services… Right now, Afghanistan is isolating itself, in the midst of a terrible humanitarian crisis and one of the most vulnerable nations on earth to climate change.”
“We must do everything we can to bridge this gap,” she stated.
The U.N. leaders met with the Taliban deputy prime minister in Kabul, and a senior regional official within the group’s heartland within the province of Kandahar, nevertheless it was not clear whether or not the prime minister had met the ladies, and a gathering with the Taliban’s supreme chief, Hibatullah Akhundzada, was by no means on the playing cards.
“Afghan women left us no doubt of their courage and refusal to be erased from public life. They will continue to advocate and fight for their rights, and we are duty bound to support them in doing so,” Bahous stated within the assertion from the U.N., calling the final yr and a half in Afghanistan “a grave women’s right crisis and a wakeup call for the international community. It shows how quickly decades of progress on women´s rights can be reversed in a matter of days.”
A “mistake”
Haq, the U.N. deputy spokesman in New York, stated the sequence of photographs that emerged of the delegation’s safety element smiling beneath the Taliban’s white flag had been taken “while the Deputy Secretary-General was meeting the de facto leaders in Afghanistan.”
“The photo should never have been taken. It was a mistake, and we apologize for it,” stated Haq.
In one of many photographs, one of many safety staff is seen pointing on the Taliban flag on a wall behind the group. Similar variations of the identical flag, a plain black or white banner with Arabic script studying: “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his messenger,” are used not solely by the Taliban, however steadily in ISIS propaganda photographs after one of many group’s members carries out an assault or pledges allegiance.
“Foreign men with UN badges pose in photos in front of Taliban’s flag as they smile. Under this same flag, women are erased and the people of Afghanistan are starved and deprived of basic rights and dignity,” stated one of many many critics of the photographs, which have been shared broadly on social media, on Twitter. “Well done UN.”