Associated Press
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The United Nations told its Afghan staffers to give up any attempt to defend U.N. aid offices in Afghanistan, saying increasing looting and attacks made it too dangerous.
"There is a decline in law and order, less and less contact with staff, and almost daily reports of offices looted … and staff beaten," Antonio Donini, a U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Afghanistan, told reporters.
U.N. officials were trying urgently to get word to local staffers in Afghanistan not to resist any future raids on U.N. property.
U.N. relief agencies and other international aid groups have reported escalating looting by soldiers of the Taliban regime and other armed bands in the two weeks since U.S.-led airstrikes began.
Foreign aid workers pulled out of Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. The United States blames the terror attacks on Osama bin Laden and his Taliban hosts in Afghanistan.
U.N. agencies previously had told local staffers to try to safeguard U.N. operations if they could do so safely, Donini said. Now, he said, the directive had changed to simply protecting their own lives.
Donini detailed attacks on aid operations in much of Taliban territory. In Kunduz province in the north, reports filtering out indicated all U.N. offices and almost all private humanitarian operations had been looted, he said.
A U.N. mine-removal organization in Afghanistan had seen about half of its 80 vehicles stolen, he said.
In Mazar-e-Sharif, the Taliban headquarters in the north, the local Taliban governor was reported to be trying to restrain attacks on aid operations, Donini said. The situation was less dire in Kabul, where a convoy of donated wheat got through last week, and in the eastern city of Jalalabad, officials said.
Last week, the Taliban commandeered two warehouses run by the U.N. World Food Program that contained almost half of its wheat stores in Afghanistan. One warehouse in Kabul was returned, but there was no word of the other, in the southern city of Kandahar.
Medecins sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, ceased medical relief programs in Mazar-e-Sharif and Kandahar last week after offices there were sacked of medicine, medical equipment and vehicles.
New York-based Human Rights Watch said the looting posed an increasing threat to aid workers and the Afghan civilians they were trying to help. The rights group also urged greater care in the U.S.-led air campaign after a U.S. bomb hit two International Red Cross warehouses in Kabul.
Copyright ©2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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