The New York Times

Thursday, September 21, 2000

Taliban Open a Campaign to Gain Status at the U.N.

By BARBARA CROSSETTE

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 20 - Four years after taking control of most of Afghanistan, the Islamic Taliban movement sent a high-level team to New York this week to lobby for the Afghan United Nations seat.

"We're here to challenge the United Nations on their reason for not recognizing us," the delegaton leader, Deputy Foreign Minister Abdur Rahman Zahid, said in an interview. "How can they recognize that band of thugs sitting beyond our borders?"

Mr. Zahid, taking the Taliban on the diplomatic offensive for the first time, was referring to the loose coalition of mostly exiled holy warriors whom the United States once supported in their war against the Soviet Union. For the last few weeks, in a succession of speeches and in important meetings affecting Afghanistan here, the mujahedeen have been the sole representatives of a country that they no longer rule.

The mujahedeen alliance controls less than 10 percent of Afghanistan. Its president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, is in exile, and its legacy to the country, United Nations officials say, was the destruction of the capital, Kabul, and much of the nation's public works in interfactional war.

Throughout the recent summit meeting here, the Taliban have had no opportunity to speak officially, even though they have been excoriated from the General Assembly podium for supporting terrorism, exporting opium and abusing human rights, especially those of women. Yet the United Nations is the organization, Mr. Zahid said, that is trying to teach the Taliban cooperation, tolerance and democracy.

"This is the world that we live in," he said. "A government is recognized that does not exist. Its president does not have an address. But they have the U.N. seat, all the Afghanistan embassies, everything."

The Taliban government - largely isolated at the behest of Iran, Russia and the United States, if for different reasons - is recognized by three nations: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, speaking on Monday at a program sponsored by the White House Project, an organization that supports women in politics, repeated Clinton administration demands that the Taliban agree to a broad-based democratic government. To the Taliban, that amounts to giving part of the country back to the armed opposition and rekindling the war, Mr. Zahid said, adding, "If the U.N. at least vacated the seat, the opposition would have an incentive to talk."

Meanwhile, weapons flow in. "We are up to our necks in arms," Mr. Zahid said. "What we need are pencils and books."

The Taliban recently banned the cultivation of opium poppies. Echoing warnings last week from Pino Arlacchi, the top anticrime official for the United Nations, he said that crop-substitution projects were failing because help in building sugar and cotton mills had not materialized and that the Taliban have no other incentives to offer poppy growers.

Mr. Zahid said outsiders often forgot that some opium trade originated in the opposition-controlled areas, where Russian and Central Asian crime figures operate. Gemstones - rubies, emeralds and lapis lazuli - are also smuggled and sold in Europe by the opposition, including diplomats of the defunct government, who still control embassies, he said.

Although the Taliban government is not recognized by United Nations members who will again consider what do with the Afghanistan next month, it is treated as the de facto government by United Nations agencies, which run programs there. Afghanistan is also under Security Council sanctions for refusing to turn over Osama bin Laden, the Saudi- born militant, to American courts.

On human rights, Mr. Zahid, who is meeting United Nations officials and other diplomats, said Taliban officials now let women work in health services, the Interior Ministry, at airports and for certain United Nations agencies like the World Food Program. But he said demands for a representative government and elections were unrealistic in a country destroyed by two decades of war, a drought and almost no foreign aid.

"How do they expect us to be in a position to hold elections?" he asked. "In all of Afghan history, there has never been an election. After 20 years of war, when we are only beginning to create institutions, when we are the first Afghan government to try to stop opium production, how can they expect us to do this now? They are demanding of us what they never before expected of this country."