Information You Can Use: A Bi-monthly Service for the UN and Civil Society
Volume 1, Issue 4, August-September 2004

Afghan Minister's Remarks Anger UN and NGOs

10 September 2004
Source: PakTribune (Pakistan)

KABUL: Non-governmental organisations and the United Nations reacted angrily the other day after the Afghan planning minister was quoted as saying that corrupt practices by aid agencies were to blame for violence against their staff.

The Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief called the remarks from Planning Minister Ramazan Bachardoust, quoted in a foreign news agency report on Tuesday, "highly damaging".

They came the same day that 10 foreign and local NGO workers were injured in mob attacks on several foreign aid agency offices in the northern province of Badakhshan.

"These ill-founded, unsubstantiated and generalised attacks, from a government minister, are creating a climate in which the government is seen to be legitimising attacks on NGOs," said Paul Barker, the country director of the aid agency CARE.

"This is putting us in an increasingly untenable position."

Bachardoust could not be reached for comment on Thursday.

In the interview with the French news agency AFP, he was quoted as saying that violence against NGOs was "inevitable" as they were behaving like private firms and using 80 percent of their budgets for administrative costs and staff salaries.

He also hailed the withdrawal from Afghanistan in July of Nobel Peace prize winning agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) after five of its foreign staff were killed in the northern province of Badghis.

"Afghans pray for them to leave. We don't want that kind of NGO here," he was quoted as saying.

The government has long complained that hundreds of millions of dollars of crucial international humanitarian and reconstruction assistance is channelled through foreign aid agencies rather than through its ministries.

Nick Downie, security officer for NGOs in Afghanistan, said remarks like Bachardoust's increased risks to agencies already threatened by attack by the Taliban and other militants. At least 23 aid workers have been killed in such attacks this year.

The United Nations said it was contacting the minister to obtain verification of his remarks, which it viewed with "great concern".

"Justification of violence in general, and against NGOs in particular, is unacceptable," U.N. spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva told a news briefing. "The government has a paramount duty to uphold law and order and it cannot be involved in legitimising or condoning physical aggression in any way."

He said the government should adopt without further delay already drawn up rules to regulate NGOs, something the NGO community had been demanding for months.

"The government has so far neglected to adopt proper regulations that would ensure that genuine NGOs are not mixed with commercial organisations and that their obligations are clarified," he said.

The U.N. spokesman condemned the attack by hundreds of Afghans against the offices of several NGOs in the northern town of Faizabad on Tuesday in which at least 10 foreign and local NGO workers were hurt as "incomprehensible".

"Based on preliminary discussions, it seems quite clear the the provincial authorities failed to provide security to the international organisations and to the population in general."

Almeida e Silva said the U.N. understood the rumours that provoked the violence -- that three female staff of one of the NGOs had been assaulted -- were unfounded.

BACK