Taliban impose Islamic law on foreigners

Foreign aid workers in Afghanistan may be subjected to corporal and capital punishment, if new regulations announced by the ruling Taliban are implemented.

This could mean death by stoning, if any married foreigner is found guilty of adultery.

The new ruling, outlined in an announcement by Taliban Information Minister Mowlawi Qodratollah Jamal, on Tuesday, says that foreigners must sign a contract agreeing to abide by Islamic Emirate (Taliban) rules before they can be issued with a work visa.

The contract bans them from eating pork, drinking alcohol, meeting Afghan women, and taking photographs without permission. It also forbids the playing of musical instruments, the wearing of “immoral” clothes, and illicit relations between opposite sexes.

Foreigners found guilty of breaking the contract will be subjected to strict Shari’ah (Islamic) law. One of the more draconian of these laws dictates that married men or women caught committing adultery must be stoned to death in a public stadium, while unmarried offenders will receive 100 lashes.

The decision to introduce this new-style contract is the latest in a series of retaliatory moves by the Taliban, angered by United Nations sanctions and the US government’s decision to close down the Taliban office in New York. Some aid workers see the contract as further confirmation that a small faction of the Taliban are trying to engineer the complete withdrawal of foreigners from Afghanistan.

In the capital, Kabul, relief workers have been increasingly harassed since UN sanctions were tightened in January. UN staff told IRIN that Arab “guests” of the Taliban had stopped western aid workers in the bazaar and ordered them to return to their own country.

Females had been subjected to taunts and ordered to “cover your face”. In May, tension between aid workers and the Taliban deteriorated when a new Italian-funded hospital in Kabul was raided by baton-wielding religious police after reports that male and female staff were socialising together in the canteen.

Foreign doctors temporarily closed the hospital in protest against the intrusion. On 1 June, the campaign of harassment against aid workers intensified when the Taliban issued a new edict banning foreign women from driving alone, “in defiance” of Islamic custom.

Aid workers were further incensed when talks between the Taliban and the World Food Programme (WFP) broke down due to the Taliban’s refusal to allow the UN to recruit local women to identify the capital’s “most needy” recipients of subsidised bread. The UN has given the Taliban a deadline of 15 June to reverse their decision, otherwise the five-year-old bakeries will close. The clampdown on “anti-Islamic behaviour” was extended to Afghan medical staff on 3 June, when Herat hospital in western Afghanistan was raided by religious police.

Armed soldiers stormed the hospital to check the hair and beards of medical staff and patients. Under Taliban laws, beards must be kept untrimmed and hair clipped short. Erick de Mul, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Afghanistan, has advised aid workers to “keep a low profile” until the Taliban can guarantee the security and protection of foreign workers. The latest attacks indicated a “breakdown in discipline in the movement [Taliban], which makes the whole operating environment for the UN and NGOs extremely difficult”, de Mul said on Tuesday.

The Taliban needed to “come to terms with reality and start accepting that the UN and NGOs were bound by certain principles set by the international community”, de Mul said at a press conference in Islamabad on 30 May. Unless the Taliban were willing to agree to UN terms, the world body “will have to stop or suspend programmes”.

Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Motawakkil appears unruffled by the deadlock with the UN. The matter of women drivers was “not a big issue”, he told AFP, inasmuch as the UN protocol had already agreed to abide by “all enforced regulations of the Islamic Emirate”. Motawakkil also expressed confidence that the verbal harassment issue was under control. “The Islamic Emirate will never permit any of our guests to harass the others,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Taliban’s rejection of the UN’s political arm, and the closure of four out of six of the UN’s political offices in Afghanistan, were reinforced by their deputy foreign minister’s refusal on 4 June to participate in UN-led peace talks in Germany.

The UN had “lost its neutral status by imposing sanctions against the Taliban”, said Mulla Abdul Rahman Zahid. Motawakkil, however, has established a back-up plan. In a letter to the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which currently has 56 member- and four observer-states, he personally requested that Islamic countries which wished to donate money to Afghanistan should send their aid directly to the Taliban government, rather than through the United Nations.