UN to Seek Legal Advice on New Taleban Code for Foreigners
The ruling militia announced the code late Tuesday, saying foreigners working in Afghanistan would have to give a written undertaking to abide by its terms.
It prohibits "illicit relations with women," public obscenity, public drinking, loud music, proselytizing, the public consumption of pork, "walking naked" and the distribution of anti-Taleban material.
A Taleban statement said the militia would expel offenders or jail them for three days to a month. However it also said adulterers would be punished according to sharia law.
Adulterers are publicly stoned to death in Afghanistan.
The Taleban, which seized Kabul in 1996, have enforced an ultra-strict form of Islam in the 90 percent of the country they hold. Squads of religious police patrol the major cities and deliver on-the-spot punishments.
"With the performance of these crimes in public, it causes society to become used to such evils which are very far from our people's beliefs," Taleban Culture Minister Qudratullah Jamal said.
The Foreign Aid Community, which is struggling to avert a humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan due to war and drought, has expressed serious concern at the implications of the document.
"I just hope that the UN will come up with some arrangement and it will be possible for us to keep working in Afghanistan," said the chief of a European nongovernmental organization who wished to remain anonymous.
Another senior European aid worker said: "Right off the bat I can tell you that I'm not happy about this."
The UN coordinator's office spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker, who is based here in neighboring Pakistan, said the code would be sent to New York for a legal opinion.
She said she could not comment on whether the UN would accept such an operating environment until the lawyers had offered their advice.
But she said the code was an unhelpful development at a time when the Foreign Aid Community was trying to assist Afghanistan
through its worst drought in memory and the ongoing ravages of civil war.
More than a million Afghans could face famine this year, the UN estimates, while another four million have been badly affected by the drought out of a population of around 21 million.
"It is an attempt to control the aid community more and it's combined with other attempts to harass the aid community at a time when the people of the country can ill afford this kind of interference," she said.
"It's quite unclear what the implications are and how it will be enforced -- that's why we need legal advice."
The Taleban have put a range of obstacles before foreign aid groups in recent months, from bans on the employment of female Afghans to increasing incidents of abuse, harassment and even arrests.
Last month the militia banned foreign women from driving cars, saying it was against Afghan "tradition" and the environment.
UN coordinator for Afghanistan Erick de Mul has said the world body could be forced to close its humanitarian operations unless the harassment of UN staff stopped.
Relations between the fundamentalist religious militia and the UN have deteriorated since January when the Security Council toughened sanctions against the regime for its alleged support of terrorism.
At the meantime, Afghan opposition forces are planning new attacks against the ruling Taleban militia, the son of an opposition military commander told AFP Wednesday.
Mirveiss Khan, speaking from the eastern Iranian city of Mashhad, said his father Ismail Khan, a former governor of the Afghan city of Herat, and other chiefs had left for Afghanistan to organize offensives in various provinces.
Fighting in the past few days has centered on the Chal district of northeastern Takhar Province and Bamiyan in the center, with both sides claiming successes.
The Taleban swept into Kabul in 1996 but now control some 75 percent of the country but still have to overcome opposition forces, mostly in the Panjshir valley north of Salang and the northeastern provinces of Takhar and Badakhshan.