KABUL — Afghanistan risks becoming a forgotten
crisis unless the Taliban reopens schools for girls, a top UN official warned
on Tuesday.
The hardline Islamists sparked outrage last
week after ordering girls’ secondary schools to shut down just hours after
allowing them to reopen for the first time since seizing power seven months
ago.
اضافة اعلان
On Tuesday Achim Steiner, head of the UN
Development Program (UNDP), warned further delays in starting classes not only
harmed the girls’ future, but risks Afghanistan being ignored.
“For us and the UN, this is a critical moment
in which the world needs to understand Afghanistan,” he told reporters in Kabul
at the end of a two-day visit.
“But the leadership of Afghanistan must also
recognize that the world can very easily turn to other crises.”
If there were any “technical constraints” in
reopening the schools the UN will make it a “top priority” to resolve them,
Steiner said.
“But if it were to signal a more fundamental reversal on this
principle, it would indeed create I think a crisis in the way that both the
international community and the country could relate to one another,” he said.
The Taliban have not explained the reason for
their dramatic U-turn, but senior leader Suhail Shaheen told AFP there were
“practical issues” that needed to be resolved.
The international community has made women’s
right to work and education a key condition for any foreign aid to be offered
to Afghanistan, and for recognizing the Taliban government.
Despite promising a softer version of their
previous harsh regime, from 1996 until 2001, the Taliban restrictions have
crept in.
Women are effectively shut out of most
government jobs, and ordered to dress according to the Taliban’s strict
interpretation of the Quran.
Earlier this week, the Taliban also ordered
Afghanistan’s airlines to stop women from boarding flights unless they were
escorted by a “mahram”, or adult male relative.
The Taliban have already banned women from
solo inter-city travel.
During the previous Western-backed regimes
that ruled Afghanistan for nearly 20 years, international aid represented 40
percent of Afghanistan’s GDP and financed 75 to 80 percent of its budget.
But that has now stopped since Afghanistan’s
takeover by the Taliban, plunging the country into a deep humanitarian and
economic crisis.
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