In a country where women are barred from university and secondary schools, and banned from many workplaces, the world’s biggest aid operation is now at risk of failing those who need it most. .
And this is happening in the cruelest depths of winter when famine and frost are knocking at the door.
Amid a deepening crisis, the most senior UN delegation to visit Afghanistan since the Taliban took power in 2021 has arrived in Kabul.
The UN Secretary-General sent his deputy, Amina Mohammed, the most senior woman at the UN, along with a team that also included UN Women chief Seema Bahous.
He has been tasked with talking to senior Taliban leaders at the highest possible level about changing the restrictions, including a new ban on female aid workers, which is now seen as an immediate threat to life-saving humanitarian operations. .
“People are freezing and time is running out,” Ramiz al-Kabarov, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan, stressed in a statement that emphasized much clarity.
“We need to build shelters now but, in this conservative society, if we don’t have female aid workers to talk to women in families, we can’t do it.”
It is not just that the UN has sent a senior delegation, but they have sent a delegation led by women with decades of experience.
“If there are women in the room, it’s more likely to have uncomfortable conversations about women,” said an aid official who often sits in the room during efforts to bring the Taliban government’s demands into line with international human rights norms. I am sitting.
It has often been criticized that foreign delegations often send male-only teams that reinforce the conservative Taliban’s view of the world.
The world’s top table, the UN Security Council, recently condemned the “increasing erosion of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms” with a rare consensus.
The first Taliban official to meet the delegation in Kabul was Acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi.
On social media, his spokesperson said the meeting began with the minister expressing hope that “this delegation will present the true picture of Afghanistan to the world”.
He also reiterated the Taliban’s argument that sanctions, along with international non-recognition of their rule, hindered their ability to govern effectively.
Across Afghanistan, temperatures are dropping to minus 17 degrees Celsius and even lower in the highlands.
Electricity is erratic or absent, and millions of families struggle to make it through the night. Hard Scrabble’s life in one of the world’s poorest countries has always been tough – but not as tough as this.
“We cannot provide humanitarian aid in Afghanistan without the participation of half of society,” is the urgent mantra of aid agencies struggling to respond to the Taliban government’s new order banning Afghan female aid workers.
Some aid agencies have temporarily suspended their operations. The order is the latest in a raft of laws in recent months banning women from attending universities, socializing in public parks or even going to women’s gyms.
Taliban leaders say the terms must be worked out first, according to their interpretation of Islamic Sharia and Afghanistan’s conservative traditions.
