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UN Examines Humanitarian Impact

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Agence France Presse
May 17, 2001

The United Nations will release a report in June on the humanitarian impact of the Security Council's sanctions against the ruling Taliban militia in Afghanistan, UN officials said Thursday.


A three-member UN delegation left Kabul Thursday morning after talks with the Taliban, the civilian population and international aid workers to assess the effect of the curbs on the humanitarian crisis. "This mission is looking at a report to be presented in June which will inform the Security Council of the humanitarian implications of sanctions in Afghanistan," said Andrew Cox, a member of the delegation. "The report will simply look in an independent way if there are humanitarian consequences to the sanctions and will make recommendations how these humanitarian consequences should be addressed."

Fresh sanctions were slapped on the fundamentalist Islamic militia in January for their refusal to hand over indicted terrorist Osama bin Laden. The first round of similar curbs were imposed in 1999.

Manuel Bessler said the June report would be a mid-year review of the humanitarian impact of the sanctions, which the Security Council approved despite protests from foreign relief workers.

Ongoing civil war and the worst drought in years have forced hundreds of thousands of Afghans to flee their homes since mid-2000, and the UN estimates a million people could face famine this year without massive aid. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries to face UN sanctions.

The latest curbs bar Taliban leaders from overseas travel, close their foreign diplomatic missions and ban the sale of arms and military assistance to the militia, among other things. They are carefully tailored to avoid humanitarian impact, but the Taliban have bitterly complained that they are worsening the effects of the drought and damaging the fragile economy. Bessler said a UN sanctions assessment in March underlined "some very limited impacts" on the humantitarian situation in Afghanistan.

"Our report will be looking to see if those impacts are still present and will also be looking if there are any new impacts that we should report to the Security Council," he said.


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