October 17, 2001
A senior U.N. official has said the United Nations is actively engaged in getting massive humanitarian aid into Afghanistan and contacting various Afghan actors to create a broad-based government for the war-torn country, but conditions are not ripe now for U.N. peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan.
In an exclusive interview with Xinhua here on Tuesday afternoon, Danilo Turk, the U.N. assistant secretary-general for political affairs, said, the United Nations, based on lessons from its past experiences, has to be "very careful" in considering peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan.
The former Afghan king, Mohammad Zaher Shah who was deposed in 1973, sent a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on October 10 appealing to the U.N. Security Council to quickly deploy a U.N. peacekeeping force should the current U.S.-led military operations result in the sudden collapse of the Taliban regime.
"I personally believe that it is too early for action on this kind of letter and this kind of request," he said. "Because we have to figure out whether the conditions for peacekeeping can be created. There should be a kind of cease-fire first." "There should be other conditions which would allow the U.N. to play a role. Of course, there should be the demonstration of the readiness of member states to contribute troops. But now we don't have any offer in this regard," he said.
The conflicts between fighters of Taliban and the Northern Alliance, which controls some 10 percent of the Afghan territory, are under way and so are the discussions in Afghanistan and at the United Nations headquarters in New York on how to create a new government to fill a possible power vacuum in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taliban regime, which holds some 90 percent of the nation's soil.
"I think we have to be very careful, we have to keep in mind the experience of the United Nations in the past, one of them is about Somalia," he said. "The United Nations should be very careful not to go to a country where it is not wanted."
The United Nations was heavily involved in Somalia from 1993 to 1995, when it took over from a United States-led multinational force to protect relief aid for the famine-stricken country, help restore order and promote national reconciliation.
But Somalia has remained mired in factional fighting, and the United Nations pulled out its peacekeepers in 1995 after attacks by warlords.
"But as far as the peacekeeping is concerned, we have to be very careful because there have be an environment adequate for peacekeeping. We don't send peacekeepers to a place where there is no peace to keep," he said.
At present, the United Nations is playing an important role in two fields in Afghanistan -- humanitarianism and politics, Turk said.
In the humanitarian field, Turk said that the U.N. is taking care of 5 million Afghan people, which is about 20 to 25 percent. On the political front, the United Nations has been talking with various Afghan parties, including recent contacts with Taliban, on the issue of the establishment of a new government in Afghanistan, he said.
"The new government should be home-grown, accepted by the people of Afghanistan," he said. "The creation of such a government requires a lot of work and a lot of patience because Afghanistan is a very complicated country."
"So it is not easy to create a government in Afghanistan that everybody in the country would respect and accept," he said.
After the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, Annan appointed Lakhdar Brahimi as the U.N. special envoy for Afghanistan. Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister and veteran U.N. trouble-shooter, has the primary role in shaping a future government from the factions of the Afghan resistance and probably some mild elements of the Taliban.
The new government should be composed of "neutral political personality respected by the people of Afghanistan, and also in the region," Turk said.
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