PRESS BRIEFING BY HEAD OF UNITED NATIONS SPECIAL MISSION TO AFGHANISTAN
Press Briefing
PRESS BRIEFING BY HEAD OF UNITED NATIONS SPECIAL MISSION TO AFGHANISTAN
19961119
FOR INFORMATION OF UNITED NATIONS SECRETARIAT ONLY
The Head of the United Nations Special Mission to Afghanistan, Norbert Heinrich Holl, told correspondents at a Headquarters briefing today that "the Afghanistan meeting" had been held yesterday.
(The idea of a closed meeting on Afghanistan, convened by the Secretary- General, was to bring together countries of the region and those countries with influence on Afghanistan due to geographical proximity, their roles in the region, their wealth, their commitment to humanitarian assistance, as well as their commitment to help that country find peace. The participants at the meeting discussed steps that the United Nations could take to achieve peace in Afghanistan. The following 19 countries had attended the meeting: China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Kazakstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Pakistan, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and United Kingdom, United States and Uzbekistan. The Organization of the Islamic Conference also participated.)
Mr. Holl said earlier he had referred to the meeting as the "Afghanistan conference". However, he had been informed that the Secretariat preferred the more modest term "meeting". "I think it was a great event and it certainly deserved to be called a conference", he added.
At the meeting, he had told Ambassadors, Foreign Ministers, Deputy Foreign Ministers and the Secretary-General, who was the Chairman, that he was the one who would have to go back to the area and sell the meeting. He would have to go back and explain to the Taliban the sense of the meeting. In his view, it was a good commodity to be sold.
"I want to demonstrate to the Afghans that we have a strong political dynamic in this part of the world", he said. The Afghans had the impression that the political situation in their country depended a great deal on what was going on just 10 kilometres away. They had to be convinced that important decisions were being taken by an organization that many of them had not heard of and that was the United Nations. They were not used to "talking to the United Nations". After taking over Kabul, the Taliban were now involved in the learning process. He had witnessed the Taliban's difficulty in drafting a note verbale. In fact, he had to tell them how to draft such a note, which they needed in order to introduce themselves to the Credentials Committee.
The meeting in itself was not as important as the three-step process which had been initiated, he said. That involved the first ever resolution on Afghanistan adopted by the Security Council on 22 October this year, the
meeting held yesterday and the Afghanistan forum, to be held on 2 and 3 December, which had originally been scheduled to be held in Peshawar, a Pakistani city close to the Afghan border. He stressed that the three-step process would be used by him to convince the Afghans that he was "not a solo player" and that he had a "very powerful organization behind" him.
Speaking on the present state of affairs in Afghanistan, he said that after the fall of Kabul on 27 September this, there had been a completely new situation which had taken everybody by surprise. When he had left for Afghanistan just four-and-a-half months ago, there had been a kind of political and military stalemate. There had been three different groups and a few smaller groups which had kept each other in balance. However, all of a sudden, there had been an explosion of military energy and it emerged that the ousted Afghan President, Burhanuddin Rabbani, and his Commander Ahmad Shah Masood were unable to defend the capital. That meant that the same Taliban who had suffered defeat in trying to capture Kabul in March 1995, were now able to move in with ease.
Since then the situation had changed completely, he said. Comparatively speaking, there was strong military activity. The armies in Afghanistan were small and a man who had 20,000 soldiers was considered a great warrior. Fortunately it was on low scale. However, there was definitely an outbreak of new military confrontation. The most visible one was to the north of Kabul, but there was a second one in the western province of Badghis. Therefore, before the implementation of any United Nations peace plan, the first step was to cease the bloodshed and reach a cease-fire. He had been shuttling between the parties to that end for the last five weeks.
He had been able to bring the parties together for the first time since the United Nations had been working on the peace mission in Afghanistan, he said. Delegations from the Taliban and the Supreme Council, a combination of the Rabbani-Masood and the Abdul Rashid Dostum factions, had met on 7 November this year in his office. They had discussed the elements of the cease-fire. However, many open questions remained. Therefore, he would have to hasten back to Afghanistan.
For the time being, there was an agreement in principle on three important points, he said. The first point of agreement was the demilitarization of Kabul. For the Taliban, which held Kabul, it was an important step to agree to that demilitarization. On the other hand, the members of the Supreme Council had agreed not to step in once the other side pulled back. The second point of agreement was that the vacuum created by the demilitarization of the capital would be filled by a neutral force. However, there was a disagreement on how that group would be composed. That point had still to be negotiated. The third point of agreement was the recognition that a cease-fire only preceded the more important step of political dialogue. The cease-fire had to be the beginning of such a dialogue, he stressed.
Afghanistan Press Conference - 3 - 19 November 1996
Mr. Holl added that as a moderator in Afghanistan, he had been welcomed in all the camps. "We sit together on the floor, there are no tables, we have lunch together, we joke but we all know that this is very serious business", he said.
A correspondent wanted to know the likely composition of the neutral force. Mr. Holl said that everybody tended to think of the "blue helmets". However, the neutral force would not be composed of "blue helmets". He emphasized that the question of the neutral force had emerged in an unforeseen manner. As a matter of fact, he had no specific instructions on the issue when it came up. Therefore, he had called up Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Marrack Goulding in the middle of the night to discuss the composition of the force. There had been 30 Afghans in his office at the time awaiting an answer. Later, it had emerged that the Taliban did not want the blue helmets. So it would not be blue helmets. Where there was a consensus was that "it should be a neutral Afghan police force".
Responding to a question on the status of women in Kabul, he said the gender issue was important and had been so even before the fall of Kabul. When he had travelled through Afghanistan in July and gone to Kandahar, which at the time had been the spiritual and political headquarters of the Taliban movement, the gender question had been discussed. A copy of the United Nations Charter in Arabic had been handed to the Taliban. After the fall of Kabul, the issue had been discussed at great length. Emphasizing that one should avoid looking at things in black and white, he said very soon after the fall of Kabul, the Taliban had allowed female staff to go back to work in three big hospitals. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had been able to get permission for their female staff to get back to work.
The next group of women workers who had been allowed to get back to work had included women involved in the "bakery project", he said. The project, which was organized by the World Food Programme (WFP) had created 30 "widow bakeries". Those bakeries were run by women only and they sold bread only to those who had ration cards. Only families headed by widows were eligible for receiving such cards. An average of one bread for 1,000 widows meant that altogether the bakeries supplied bread to 30,000 widows. An average of five to six people were dependant on those 30,000 widows, which meant that about 150,000 people were dependent on the bakeries. Sometimes the women went to receive the bread themselves, sometimes they sent their children. All of that was done in a grey zone of acceptance but not in a formal legitimate sense.
Yesterday the Taliban had issued a statement not recognizing the meeting organized by the United Nations because it did not take the Taliban into account as players in Afghanistan, a correspondent said. How would the measures be implemented in that climate, she asked. Mr. Holl said the question of recognition was a big issue. It played out itself in the Credentials Committee and he had told the Taliban as much. They were aware that they had to accommodate the international community. However, the
Afghanistan Press Conference - 4 - 19 November 1996
question of the cease-fire had nothing to do with recognition, which was a long-term target of the Taliban and he had no idea if they would achieve that.
Commenting on arms cut-off, he said there was no arms embargo imposed by the Security Council as of now.
Had the Taliban used chemical weapons in Afghanistan with Pakistan's help? a correspondent asked. Mr. Holl said he had checked and had found no information to that effect.
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