Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/UNITED NATIONS: The highest-ranking woman in the United Nations (UN) has said that she used everything in her “toolbox” during her meetings with Taliban authorities to try to stop them from a crackdown on Afghan girls and women, urging Muslims to help the hardliners to move from the “13th century to the 21st century.”
UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, who was also a former Nigerian cabinet minister, said at a news conference that four Taliban ministers, including the foreign minister and the deputy prime minister, spoke “off one script” during their meetings with her delegation the previous week.
She said that the Taliban officials sought to stress things that they say they had done and not gotten recognition for and what they called their effort to create an environment that ensures the protection of women.
Amina said that the Taliban definition of protection would be “ours of oppression.”
United Nation’s stance
Those meetings in Kabul and Kandahar were followed by a visit this week by UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths and heads of the main aid groups. They pressed the Taliban to reverse their decision of banning Afghan women from working for national and global non-governmental groups.
Griffiths said that the focus of the visit was to get the Taliban to understand that getting fund operations up and running and allowing women and girls to work in them was critical. He said the delegation’s message was simple: the ban makes the groups’ work more difficult.
Griffiths said that what he heard from all those he met was that they understood the need and the right for Afghan women to work and that they would be working on a set of guidelines that they would see to be issued in due course.
