Advertisement

U.N. to Tighten Afghan Sanctions

Share
TIMES STAFF WRITER

The Security Council voted Tuesday to tighten sanctions on Afghanistan’s Taliban regime unless it closes “terrorist” training camps and hands over Osama bin Laden, suspected in the bombings of two U.S. embassies.

Russia and the United States joined forces to muscle the resolution through the 15-member council, despite some countries’ concern that the sanctions will only fuel Afghanistan’s civil war and worsen conditions for its people. The vote passed 13 to 0, winning the backing of France and Canada, which had expressed reservations but ultimately didn’t want to support the radical Islamic leadership. China and Malaysia abstained.

The U.N. imposed economic sanctions on Afghanistan in November 1999 to demand the arrest of Bin Laden.

Advertisement

The U.S. is concerned that the Taliban has created a haven for terrorists, including Saudi exile Bin Laden and perhaps suspects in the recent bombing of the U.S. guided-missile destroyer Cole in Yemen. Russia claims that military camps in Afghanistan are being used to train Chechen rebels, who are fighting for independence from Moscow.

The resolution gives the Taliban 30 days to shut down the camps and turn in Bin Laden, who is accused of masterminding the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. If the regime doesn’t comply, new sanctions will halt arms sales and military aid to the Taliban, impose a travel ban on its senior leaders and stop flights into Afghanistan for a year.

The measures will also freeze the Taliban’s assets abroad, close all its offices overseas and ban the export of a chemical used to manufacture heroin in a bid to deprive the regime of the illicit income.

The sanctions coincide with U.N. efforts to broker peace in--and bring aid to--the war-torn country. Anticipating a backlash against international aid workers, the U.N. withdrew all of its foreign staff Tuesday.

“It is not going to facilitate our peace efforts, nor is it going to facilitate our humanitarian work,” U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said of the resolution Tuesday.

Taliban Information Minister Qadratullah Jamal said that there is no evidence against Bin Laden and that the new sanctions won’t result in his extradition.

Advertisement

U.S. representatives said they carefully crafted the sanctions to target the leadership while sparing Afghanistan’s people. But critics say that the arms embargo should apply to both parties in the civil war; allowing the opposition to rearm will merely prolong the long-running civil war and worsen the country’s humanitarian crisis.

The Security Council is “abandoning the Afghan people to suffer . . . at home while focusing exclusively on the Afghan government’s role in attacks on foreigners,” said Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch.

The Taliban accuses the U.S. and Russia of trying to destabilize its regime, and it has vowed to boycott further U.N. efforts to start peace talks in the region.

“For 21 years, Afghanistan has been burning in the fires of war,” the Taliban’s deputy commerce minister, Faizl Mohammed Faizan, said Tuesday in Kabul, the Afghan capital. “If the United Nations imposes sanctions, then the United Nations with its own hand is putting people on fire.”

Advertisement