UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on February 19 told a press conference at a two-day UN-sponsored meeting of more than two dozen nations but not including Taliban representatives in the Qatari capital to discuss the “evolving situation” in Afghanistan that he is starting consultations toward appointing a UN envoy to coordinate engagement between Kabul and the international community.
The Doha gathering is also aimed at discussing possible international engagement since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in mid-2021.
Guterres held closed-door sessions with the representatives of several nations and organizations on the meeting’s first day.
Mahbouba Seraj, a civil-society and women’s rights representative who is in Doha along with a number of other Afghan participants not affiliated with the Taliban-led government, told Radio Azadi that priority topics on day two would include the plight of women and girls under the Taliban.
She expressed hope that hers and other women’s voices will “finally be heard, that this issue will be followed up on, and indeed someone” will take up the cause of Afghan women, who are routinely discriminated against and isolated under the hard-line fundamentalist Taliban.
Girls above the sixth grade have been barred from attending school, universities are closed to women, and work in the nongovernmental sector and among most government bodies has been banned for women, in addition to other restrictions.
The Taliban leadership declined the invitation from the UN Department of Political Affairs and Peacebuilding (DPPA) to attend the gathering.
Russia also said via its embassy in Afghanistan that it wouldn’t send a delegation to the Qatari meeting.
Moscow said it was acting “at the request of the Afghan authorities” and would not join “so-called Afghan civil activists, whose selection, by the way, was conducted nontransparently behind Kabul’s back.”
Organizers said participants from 25 nations and groups would include those from “Afghanistan, the wider region, and beyond.”
“Other regional organizations working actively on Afghanistan such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the European Union, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization” were also expected to be there.
The Taliban-led government remains overwhelmingly unrecognized internationally since taking over following the withdrawal in mid-2021 of the U.S.-led international coalition that spent two decades in Afghanistan after the events of 9/11.
The Taliban’s Foreign Ministry on February 17 said that due to the nonacceptance of its demands, it did not consider participation in the Doha meeting to be fruitful, expressing anger over the planned appearance of non-Taliban Afghan representatives at the sessions. The Taliban has long had a representative office in Qatar.
The DPPA said the current session would “take place in the context of Security Council resolution 2721 (2023), which encourages member states to consider increasing international engagement in the country, with the objective of a ‘clear end state of an Afghanistan at peace with itself and its neighbors, fully reintegrated into the international community, and meeting international obligations.’”
The gathering is the second such meeting organized by the UN in the past year following a session in May 2023.
Source : Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty