Alex DiBranco at Change.org's Women's Rights blog recently wrote a post titled "Afghan Women Choose Suicide Over Facing Continued Violence" about a report released by the Canadian Government showing dozens of women are still
At an international conference in London this week, seventy countries pledged to back Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s plan to reach out to some members of the Taliban. Despite reassurances that reconciliation would not betray hard-won social and political freedoms, much of the rhetoric from power players at the summit gave civil society observers the impression human rights –especially the rights of women– could soon be on the negotiating table.
Activists also expressed anger at the exclusion of women and civil society from preparations for the conference itself.
The urgency and relevance of the ongoing debate over negotiations with the Taliban was underlined on Wednesday when the UN removed sanctions imposed in 2001 on five former Taliban leaders.
President Hamid Karzai has said Taliban who are not part of al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups "are welcome to come back to their country, lay down arms, and resume life,” and plans to seek international support for a new reintegration plan at the intergovernmental conference on Thursday.
In a keynote speech delivered at a major civil society conference in London Tuesday, former Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Afghanistan Lakhdar Brahimi reflected on the past eight years of international engagement in Afghanistan and called for a new peace process to bring an end to the long-running conflict.
“We must ensure that development does not falter in Afghanistan,” Mercy Corps UK director Mervlyn Lee said in his opening remarks to more than one hundred leading development experts, community leaders, civil society activists and government officials at a civil society conference in London Tuesday. Organized by the British and Irish Agencies Afghanistan Group (BAAG), the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief (ACBAR) and the High Commission of Canada in London, the conference kicked off four days of events around a UK Government hosted summit on the way forward in Afghanistan.
In an interview with the New York Times on Sunday, the UN's top official on Afghanistan, Kai Eide, expressed support for removing some Taliban and Al Qaeda members from targeted individual sanctions imposed by the Security Council. From the Times:
Mr. Eide said he did not believe that senior Taliban leaders like Mullah Omar should be removed from the list. It was Mullah Omar, after all, who provided sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, which launched the Sept. 11 attacks.
Afghanistan’s electoral body announced yesterday that parliamentary elections originally scheduled for May 22 will be delayed until September. The announcement was welcomed by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), whose head Kai Eide said the delay “provides time to make improvements to the electoral process based on lessons learned during the presidential and Provincial Council elections in 2009.”
Afghanistan is at a critical juncture. That sentence has become cliché, but it is no less true for being so.
Ed Note: UN Dispatch welcomes blogger Una Moore to our roster of contributors. Una is an international development specialist who focuses on security and governance in post-conflict settings. Follow her on Twitter.