Martin Griffiths, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, speaks during an interview with Reuters in Kabul
Wed, January 25, 2023
By Charlotte Greenfield and Michelle Nichols
KABUL/UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) -The United Nations is pushing the Taliban administration in Afghanistan for more exemptions to its ban on most female aid workers, top U.N. officials said on Wednesday, while also expressing concern that foreign women working for international organizations and embassies could next be targeted.
Speaking to Reuters during a visit to Kabul, U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths said that his message during meetings with Taliban officials had been: "If you can't help us rescind the ban, give us the exemptions to allow women to operate."
Last month, the Taliban authorities - who seized power in August 2021 - banned most female aid workers and stopped women from attending university after stopping girls from attending high school in March. Griffiths traveled to Afghanistan after a visit last week by U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed.
Griffiths said some exemptions to the female aid worker ban had been granted in health and education and that there were indications there could be a possible exemption in agriculture. But he said much more was needed, with nutrition and water and sanitation services a priority to prevent severe illnesses and malnutrition during a severe humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.
"We have not seen the history of the Taliban reversing any edict. What we have seen is exemptions that, hopefully, if we keep pushing them, they will water down those edicts to a point where we will get women and girls back into school and into the workplace," Mohammed told reporters in New York on Wednesday.
ANOTHER BAN?
Griffiths told Reuters that, following his recent discussions with the Taliban authorities, he was hopeful they would create a set of written guidelines to allow aid groups to operate with female staff in more areas with certainty in coming weeks.
"The next few weeks are absolutely crucial to see if the humanitarian community ... can stay and deliver," he said, while cautioning: "I don't want to speculate as to whether we're going to come out of this in the right place."
The Taliban administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its plans over guidelines.
During her visit last week, Mohammed met with the Shura - the leadership council that issues the bans - in the southern Taliban heartland of Kandahar. She said there is a concern that they may next prohibit "international women from international organizations and embassies."
"It hasn't happened so far," said Mohammed, adding that they had been expecting a possible announcement all month. "I don't say that it won't, but clearly the pressure that we're putting on has stopped that rollback as quickly."
Griffiths said the United Nations would continue operating in Afghanistan wherever it could, but there was a concern that international donors might not want to commit to the huge financial cost of aid at around $4.6 billion a year.
"I lose sleep about this, I really do," Griffiths said, adding that he would meet with donors in coming weeks to make the case for why Afghanistan needed help during an intense humanitarian crisis in which 28 million people were in need of aid, including 6 million on the brink of famine.
(Reporting by Charlotte Greenfield and Michelle Nichols; Editing by Andrew Heavens, Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan Oatis)
UN presses Taliban for 'clarity' on women's role in aid delivery
Jay DESHMUKH
Wed, January 25, 2023
Two senior UN leaders said Wednesday they were pressing the Taliban to reverse its restrictions on Afghan women, particularly a ban on working in aid delivery, with one official warning that "famine is looming" during the harsh winter.
Speaking in New York, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed said she pushed "pretty hard" on women's issues during a visit last week to Afghanistan and sometimes "the reaction wasn't pleasant."
Since returning to power in August 2021, the Taliban government has rapidly squeezed women out of public life, banning them also from secondary education, public sector work, as well as parks and baths.
The country is facing one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, aid agencies say, with more than half of Afghanistan's 38 million population facing hunger and nearly four million children suffering from malnutrition.
The crisis was compounded when Taliban leadership banned Afghan women from working with NGOs, forcing several aid agencies to suspend their vital work.
In recent weeks, the authorities have allowed women to work in the health sector only.
UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, Martin Griffiths, said he hoped that more humanitarian sectors would be reopened for women workers.
"I have been told by a number of Taliban leaders that the Taliban, as an administration, is working on guidelines which will provide more clarity about the role and possibility and hopefully the freedom of women to work in humanitarian work," Griffiths told AFP in an interview at a UN office in Kabul.
"I think it's really important that we keep the light shining on the process to lead to those guidelines," he said, wrapping up a visit to Afghanistan.
Griffiths led a delegation of senior NGO officials to meet several Taliban leaders this week in a bid to push them to further relax the ban on women aid workers.
- 'Protection' or 'oppression'? -
Griffiths's delegation came days after Mohammed concluded a visit, stopping in Kandahar, in which she urged the Taliban government to reverse two recent decrees that have severely restricted women's rights.
Apart from banning women from working in NGOs, the Taliban authorities have also barred them from university education.
"I used everything that I know, that I have in my toolbox, to try to defend and to recover women's rights," Mohammed said in an extensive news conference in New York.
She said the Taliban told her they were seeking to protect women but "their definition of protection would be, I would say, ours of oppression."
She added: "A lot of what we have to deal with is how we travel the Taliban from the 13th century to the 21st. And that's, that's a journey. So it is not just, overnight."
"This is going to be tough to get them back into the space we need them, and women's and girls' rights protected and upheld," Mohammed said.
Griffiths vowed that when it comes to delivering aid in the poverty-stricken country, the global humanitarian community will insist on deploying women workers.
"Wherever there are chances for us to deliver humanitarian assistance and protection in a principled way, which means with women, we will do so," he said, adding that at the moment, exemptions for women workers was paramount.
"We don't have time. The winter is with us, people are dying, famine is looming," he said.
"We need decisions now, which is why I think these practical exceptions that we have been talking about are so important."
jd/abd/tjj/des
Afghanistan: Taliban to set new rules on women's aid work, UN says
Lyse Doucet - Chief international correspondent
Wed, January 25, 2023
Afghanistan is experiencing a cruel winter, with famine and frostbite knocking at the door
Taliban ministers have told a senior UN official they plan to draw up new guidelines to allow Afghan women to work in some humanitarian operations.
Martin Griffiths told the BBC he had received "encouraging responses" from a wide range of Taliban ministers during talks in Kabul, even if last month's edict banning Afghan women working for NGOs is not reversed.
With Afghan women playing a crucial role in delivering aid, there is concern the ban is endangering urgent life-saving humanitarian operations in the country.
"It's worth remembering that, this year, Afghanistan is the biggest humanitarian aid programme in the world ever," Mr Griffiths, the UN's Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, told me in Kabul.
The aid arithmetic is staggering. This year, agencies will try to reach 28 million Afghans, more than half the population, including six million who are, Mr Griffiths says, "knocking on famine's door".
This year is Afghanistan's coldest winter in a decade, and it's been cruel. In the past two weeks, more than 126 Afghans have perished in freezing temperatures, collapsing from hypothermia, or overcome by toxic fumes from gas heaters.
And winter's icy blast strikes a people already living, perilously, on the edge. Providing aid to Afghanistan is of epic proportions too.
In a mud-and-straw home perched perilously on a steeply-sloped hill blanketed in snow in Parwan province north of Kabul, we met one family whose complaints were as bitter as the cold.
"No aid agencies visit us here," lamented mother Qamar Gul, as the family huddled around a "sandali" - a traditional charcoal heater Afghans have relied on for centuries to keep warm. "No one came from the last government, no one from the Taliban government."
Qamar Gul says no aid agencies visit her family home in Parwan province
This week, as the government's military helicopters struggled to reach the most isolated communities completely cut off by colossal snowbanks and blinding storms, Mr Griffiths was holding back-to-back meetings in Kabul with senior Taliban government leaders about the new edict banning Afghan women from working with aid organisations.
"If women do not work in humanitarian operations, we do not reach, we do not count, the women and girls we need to listen to," Mr Griffiths underlines when we meet at the UN's sprawling compound at the end of his mission. "In all humanitarian operations around the world, women and girls are the most vulnerable."
An aid official with decades of experience in tough environments, including Afghanistan, he was cautious, but clear, about the results of his high-stakes mission.
"I think they're listening," he said of the Taliban ministers he had met, "and they told me they will be issuing new guidelines in due course which I hope will help us reinforce the role of women."
Mr Griffiths's visit comes on the heels of last week's flying visit by the UN's second-in-command Amina Mohammed, a British-Nigerian Muslim woman whose presence underlined the UN's growing alarm over a raft of Taliban edicts threatening to "erase women from public life".
She told us her conversations were "very tough". Some meetings were so candid, they were almost cut short. But she told us she was encouraged by a willingness to engage.
Mr Griffiths's mission - representing the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), the UN's highest-level forum to co-ordinate humanitarian aid - has been to delve into very specific details across a range of vital sectors from agriculture to sanitation and food deliveries.
No one realistically expects the ban, announced last month, to be reversed. But it seems to have many loopholes.
Mr Griffiths highlighted "a consistent pattern of Taliban leaders presenting us with exceptions, exemptions, and authorisations for women to work". So far, a green light has been given to crucial areas like health and community education where women's participation is essential.
The UN's Martin Griffiths pointed out that humanitarian access was significantly better now since the Taliban swept to power in 2021
But it's also clear the most conservative of Taliban leaders are not for turning.
"Men are already working with us in the rescue efforts and there is no need for women to work with us," insists the white-bearded cleric who heads the State Ministry for Disaster Management. When we sat down with him in his office, the acting minister Mullah Mohammad Abbas Akhund accused the UN and other aid agencies of speaking "against our religious beliefs".
"I'm sorry, I don't agree," was Mr Griffith's firm reply, emphasising that the UN and other aid agencies had been working in Afghanistan for decades. "We respect the customs and norms of Afghanistan, as we do in every country that we work."
The race to deliver urgently-needed relief has been slowed by this painstaking process of dealing with an authority ruled by the most senior, most strict Taliban leaders. Other senior figures question edicts but cannot quash them.
But Mr Griffiths pointed out that humanitarian access was significantly better now since the Taliban swept to power in 2021. Areas previously cut off by threats of Taliban attacks or US-led military operations were now much easier to reach. Last winter, 11th-hour humanitarian interventions in remote regions, including the central highlands of Ghor, pulled families back from the brink of famine.
It's a point Taliban officials constantly stress. The acting Minister of Foreign Affairs Amir Khan Muttaqi urged Mr Griffiths to share their "achievements and opportunities... instead of complaints and shortcomings".
But as the worst of winter closes in, the window is closing for an urgent relief effort. Several aid agencies, who rely enormously on their Afghan female staff have already suspended their operations.
"I cannot think of an international priority as high as this one to keep this extraordinarily important massive programme alive," is how the UN's top aid official summed up this moment.
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