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Yet again NGOs cite serious security concerns

Following the murder of an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegate in the southern province of Kandahar last Thursday, some international aid agencies have suspended work in southern provinces. “The NGOs suspended their movements in all provinces outside Kandahar for 72 hours right after the killing of the ICRC staff member,” Diane Johnson, a programme director for Mercy Corps in southern Afghanistan, told IRIN in the Afghan capital, Kabul, noting that on Sunday the suspension had been extended for another 72 hours as the situation was still fragile. Ricardo Munguia, a Swiss citizen of Salvadorian origin, was travelling with Afghan colleagues on an assignment to improve the water supply to Tarin Kowt District in the southern province of Oruzgan. He was shot in cold blood by a group of unidentified assailants, who stopped the vehicles transporting the team. According to an ICRC statement, no further information about the circumstances of his death was available. Mercy Corps has 500 local staff in the south. It describes insecurity now prevailing in the region as putting at risk the ICRC’s long-term development projects, because staff may be unable to travel to monitor them. There have been a number of incidents in recent days blamed on suspected members of the former Taliban regime and Al-Qaeda. The killing of the ICRC staff member was followed by a rocket attack on the compound of the multinational peacekeeping force in Kabul on Sunday, and the circulation of leaflets in some parts of the country threatening both government and aid agency staff. The US military said its soldiers had come under rocket attack in southeastern Afghanistan on Sunday. The announcement came the day after two members of US special forces were killed in an ambush in the southern province of Helmand. The Kabul-based NGO coordination body, the Agency for Coordination of Afghan Relief (ACBAR), is very concerned about Thursday’s shooting. “It is deeply saddening that incidents such as Ricardo’s death have to happen for the world to be alerted to the fragility of the political situation in Afghanistan today,” an advocacy coordinator for ACBAR, Barbara Stapleton, told IRIN in Kabul. She added that the UN had warned for months that a war in Iraq would provide an opportunity for the destabilisation of Afghanistan by elements seeking to overthrow the central government as international attention focused elsewhere. “Despite repeated calls since mid-2002 from senior members of the government, the UN and the NGO community for the international community to take concrete steps to meaningfully address the security vacuum in Afghanistan, this has not happened,” Stapleton said, noting that reforms designed to enhance security under the Bonn Agreement had been delayed, and the security situation was now paralysing the delivery of aid and reconstruction materials to vulnerable parts of the country. Sally Austin, an assistant country director for Care International, told IRIN that if the murder of the ICRC delegate was the start of a new campaign, then it would considerably compromise the ability of NGOs and the UN to operate in Afghanistan and affect the delivery of services. “For example, the National Solidarity Programme, which is designed to operate in every province, delivering money to communities, will be incredibly difficult,” she told IRIN, pointing out that NGOs would be unwilling to undertake projects in parts of the south. “It would put staff and the community at risk,” Austin said. The UN in Kabul has also conceded that the murder was an indication that the situation was unstable. “We have been talking for months about security conditions in this country,” the spokesman for the UN Assistance Mission for Afghanistan, Manoel de Almeida e Silva, told IRIN, adding that the most recent report of the UN secretary-general, which was issued a week ago, had highlighted security conditions in Afghanistan. “We are reviewing the security conditions in that region [the south] from the highest levels both of UN and the Afghan administration,” the spokesman said. The Afghan deputy interior minister has called for one last push against the remnants of Taliban and Al-Qaeda country-wide. “Enough is enough, the terrorists are not worth [engaging in] reconciliation [with]. A wide clear-up operation is direly needed,” Gen Qutbuddin Hellal emphasised.

This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions

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