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UN asks Taliban to be more liberal |
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July 13, 2000
ISLAMABAD (AP) - A senior U.N. official was in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar Wednesday to try to get the ruling Taliban to rescind a new edict barring Afghan women from working for international relief agencies. Eric de Mul, the U.N. coordinator for Afghanistan based in neighboring Pakistan, arrived in Kandahar after spending much of Tuesday meeting with Afghan officials in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, U.N. officials said. A letter apparently signed by the Taliban's radical minister for vice and virtue, Mullah Mohammed Turabi, was circulated last week warning international humanitarian groups, including the United Nations, to stop employing Afghan women. U.N. officials are trying to determine whether the Taliban ordered the crackdown or whether the edict was the work of a single Taliban minister acting independently. The new edict resulted in the arrest of an American aid worker, Mary Mackmakin, who has been in Taliban custody in the Afghan capital of Kabul since Sunday. On Wednesday, a foreign ministry official said Mackmakin's visa had been revoked and she would have to leave the country within 24 hours. There was no immediate explanation for why her visa was revoked. The Taliban earlier said they had freed Mackmakin, who is in her late 60s, but she has refused to leave the detention center until her Afghan women employees who were arrested with her also are freed. U.N. officials have visited her and say her health and spirits are good. In Kabul, several family members of the arrested Afghan women continued a vigil Wednesday outside the detention center, pleading with the Taliban authorities for permission to see their relatives inside. But so far the Taliban have refused. "They are not allowing me to see my mother," said Abdul Ghaffar, 28, who wept. Ghaffar's mother, who is a cook, is the only wage earner in a family of seven. Mackmakin's organization, Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation Support For Afghanistan, based in Bisbee, Arizona, provides home-based crafts and cooking work for Afghan women, particularly widows. There are an estimated 28,000 widows in the Afghan capital. Devastated by relentless fighting between rival Islamic factions, most of the 750,000 people living in Kabul survive on international assistance. The Taliban, who have imposed their harsh brand of Islamic rule in the 90 percent of Afghanistan under its control, have opposed women working since 1996 when they took control of Kabul. But concessions have been made in some areas, such as health care and emergency social services. Women wearing the all-encompassing burqa had quietly gone to work for several international organizations. However, last week's crackdown, apparently instigated by Turabi, appears to have revoked concessions made by the Taliban since 1996. A rigidly orthodox minister who lost one leg and an eye fighting in the 1980s war against invading Soviet soldiers, Turabi is considered among the most rigid of the Taliban leaders. He swept into Kabul in 1996 and launched the campaign to beat women who did not wear a burqa or who ventured from their home without a male relative. It was also Turabi who ordered residents to paint their first floor windows black to ensure passers by do not catch a glimpse of women inside. His squad of vice and virtue police roam the streets of Kabul searching for offenders. They haul taxi drivers from their cars for carrying only female passengers, and publicly beat women who defy the strict dress code. The Taliban have imposed a harsh brand of Islamic law in the areas they control. Many of their edicts are directed against women, whom they say should neither work nor go to school. |