Taliban government representatives meet with UN, Afghan envoys in Doha

Representatives of the Afghan Taliban government began meetings with UN officials on Sunday as they took part in talks in Doha for the first time with special envoys to the Central Asian country, a spokesperson said of ONU.

The two-day meeting hosted by the UN in Qatar is the third of its kind in the gas-rich emirate in just over a year, but the first to include Taliban officials who seized power in Afghanistan in 2021.

“Preparatory discussions began with a separate UN meeting with many special envoys present and with representatives of the Taliban,” the UN spokesperson, who requested anonymity, told AFP.

U.N. officials and more than 20 envoys, including the U.S. special representative to Afghanistan, were expected to meet the Taliban government delegation led by the spokesperson. Zabihullah Mujahid.

Discussions in Doha were expected to focus on increased engagement with Afghanistan and a more coordinated response to the country, including on economic issues and efforts to combat drug trafficking.

Following the return to power of the Taliban, the international community is questioning its approach towards the new leaders of Afghanistan.

The Taliban government in Kabul has not been officially recognized by any other government since it took power, and the administration has imposed a strict interpretation of Islam, with women subject to laws the UN has called “gender apartheid.”

The Taliban authorities had been excluded from the first round of UN talks in May 2023 and refused to participate in the second round in February, demanding that their delegation be the only Afghan representative.

In order to include representatives of the Taliban government, this condition was met by the exclusion of civil society groups who will meet with their representatives on Tuesday instead.

-‘Potholing’-

Ahead of the UN event, Taliban Foreign Ministry official Zakir Jalaly said on Sunday that any meeting taking place after Monday would have “no relation” to the official agenda.

The sidelining of civil society organisations has sparked an outcry among these groups, including women’s rights activists.

“Giving in to the conditions imposed by the Taliban to secure their participation in the talks would risk legitimising their system of institutionalised and gender-based oppression,” Amnesty International’s director Agnès Callamard said in a statement ahead of the talks.

Yesterday, Mujahid told a news conference in Kabul that Taliban authorities “recognize the problems concerning women” but said they were “Afghanistan’s problems” to be solved.

Hameed Hakimi, an expert on Afghanistan, told AFP the international community was “genuinely” concerned about women’s rights and the role of civil society in the country.

But he explained that international policymakers, “while admitting that the Taliban are not perfect actors, also recognize that there is a void that has not been filled by the Afghans themselves.”

In recent years, many governments, international organizations and humanitarian agencies have halted or sharply reduced their funding to Afghanistan in response to the return to power of the Taliban authorities, dealing a major blow to an already struggling economy.

“On the one hand, there is a humanitarian situation that requires funding, on the other hand, you cannot improve the humanitarian situation without political commitment,” explained the Chatham House specialist based in Great Britain.

Before the UN-hosted talks, the Taliban government delegation held meetings in Doha with special envoys from Russia, India, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan, Mujahid said on X, formerly Twitter.

csp/jsa