Coordinator: Taliban Still Refuses to Allow UN to Hire Afghan Women

The United Nations Coordinator for Afghanistan Wednesday stressed the urgent need for breaking a stalemate over the issue of hiring Afghan women, warning that without a breakthrough on that point the UN will be forced to suspend a key food project in the country.

A spokesman for the U.N. secretary-general told a noon briefing at the U.N. headquarters in New York that Erick de Mul, the U.N. coordinator, reported the stalemate Wednesday following three days of talks with the Taliban in Kabul.

De Mul said that the Taliban still had not accepted the U.N.'s need to rely on Afghan women to assist the most vulnerable in Afghanistan. "On this issue, we are stuck," he said.

De Mul said this is a general problem and a problem specifically for a bakery project of the World Food Program. The U. N. agency has to hire Afghan women to survey beneficiaries -- some 40,000 households -- to ensure that those in need are receiving help.

De Mul said that the Taliban had presented three proposals to find a way to survey the households benefiting from the bakeries, but none of them proved workable because the United Nations had to ensure that the surveyors could interview women and could work impartially and independently.

A Taliban refusal to allow Afghan women to help re-survey households enrolled in the bakery project would force the WFP to suspend the Kabul general bakery indefinitely as of June 15.

"We are trying to help lessen the suffering of the Afghan people, but there are new obstacles put in the way of our work every day -- we are now back to square one," he said, adding that "the ball is in the Taliban's court."

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