QATAR: Taliban representatives won’t be present at Monday’s UN-sponsored negotiations in Qatar on how to approach Afghanistan’s leaders and pressure them to lift a ban on women working and girls attending school.
Representatives from roughly 25 nations and NGOs, including the US, China, and Russia as well as significant European aid contributors and important neighbours like Pakistan, have been invited to the two days of negotiations by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
Although the Taliban government has not been invited, the issue of whether to recognise the administration loomed large before the meeting.
A tiny group of Afghan women organised a protest march over the weekend in Kabul to reject any efforts to commemorate the leaders who took back control in August 2021.
A coalition of Afghan women’s organisations said they were “outraged” that any nation would explore official ties in an open letter to the Doha summit published on Sunday. They cited the government’s track record of treating women’s rights as “an internal social issue” and its record of doing so.
Recognition is not on the table, according to the United Nations and the US.
Rights’ groups fears had been fuelled by UN deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, who said earlier that the Doha talks could find “baby steps” that may lead to a “principled recognition” of the Afghan Taliban.
The UN said that the comments were misinterpreted. No country has established formal relations with the Taliban and UN membership could only be decided by the United Nations General Assembly.
Ahead of his arrival in Doha, Guterres’ office said that the talks were intended to achieve a common ground within the international community on how to engage with the Afghan Taliban” on women’s and girls’ rights, inclusive governance, countering terrorism and drug peddling.
UN dilemma
Last week, US State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said that any kind of recognition of the Afghan Taliban was completely off the table.
Since ousting a foreign-backed government in Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban have imposed a grim interpretation of sharia law that the United Nations had branded “gender-based apartheid”.
Women in Afghanistan had been barred from schools and universities and those who worked in most government jobs, UN agencies, and NGOs.
Though divided into many disputes, the UN Security Council powers united on Thursday to slat the curbs on Afghan women and girls and urge all world countries to seek “an urgent reversal” of the Taliban’s policies.
Diplomats and observers said that the Doha talks highlight the quandary faced by the international community in handling Afghanistan, which the UN considers its main humanitarian crisis with millions depending on food aid.
