Thursday, October 29, 2009

UN evacuates non-essential staff after deadly attack on Kabul guesthouse

The United Nations started evacuating “non-essential” staff from Kabul today after the Taleban killed five of its foreign employees at an international guesthouse in the deadliest attack yet on the UN in Afghanistan.

Following an emergency meeting to review security, the UN stopped short of withdrawing completely from Afghanistan, as it did from Iraq after a massive truck bomb killed 22 people at its headquarters in Baghdad in 2003.

Kai Eide, the UN chief in Afghanistan, had pledged after the attack on Wednesday that the UN would not be deterred from its work in the country, which includes funding and helping to organise a presidential election run-off on November 7.

The official decision at today’s meeting was that individual UN agencies should decide whether to advise “non-essential” staff not involved in the run-off to take leave, according to two participants.

But UN officials told The Times that many of the roughly 1,000 foreign UN staff not working directly on the election had been instructed to return to their home countries for the next three weeks because of the security threat in Kabul.

“The problem is the places where we live,” one said. “No one feels safe.” Most of the foreign UN staff in Kabul live in small hotels and guesthouses like the one that was attacked by a Taleban suicide squad on Wednesday, and security arrangements at all of them are now under review.

UN staff were particularly concerned that the Taleban appeared to have such detailed information about the guesthouse, many of whose residents were directly involved in organising the election.

They are also concerned about further attacks, as a Taleban spokesman vowed today to intensify violence in the coming days, saying: “We’ll disrupt the elections.”

It was not clear precisely how many of the 1,200 foreign UN staff in Afghanistan were leaving, but only about 200 of them are directly involved in the election, which the UN is funding.

Aleem Siddique, a UN spokesman, said staff not involved in the poll were simply being encouraged to take leave if they had any outstanding, just as they were during the first round of the poll.

“We are not evacuating,” he said. “We’ve been here for half a century, and we’re not going any time soon.” He said Mr Eide had specifically avoided using the term “evacuate” and left it up to individual UN agencies to decide whether their staff should leave the country.

In practice, however, almost all UN agencies have told all of their staff to leave regardless of whether they have any holiday allowance left, according to UN sources.

“There’s real concern among the UN agencies that they’re going to be exposed to many risks because there’s an unclear decision on whether they should stay or go,” one UN insider told The Times.

Another UN insider criticised Mr Eide for not making a clear decision on whether or not to evacuate staff, and not arranging for a UN flight to take out those who wished to leave.

Travel agents reported a massive spike in demand for flights to Dubai and other foreign destinations as UN workers and other foreigners rushed to book their tickets.

Several aid agencies and non-governmental organizations have followed the UN’s lead, hampering the international aid operation in Afghanistan less than a month before winter snows paralyse much of the country.

Most declined to discuss their security arrangements, but one large NGO said that about 15 of its 20 foreign staff in Kabul had left the city. ACTED, the French aid agency, said it had withdrawn four out of eight foreigners based in Kabul.

“It’s been building up for a while with recent anti-Western demonstrations in Kabul, and now this attack on the UN,” said Ziggy Garewal, ACTED’s country director.

“It’s really exposed our vulnerability, and opened up a big debate within the NGO community.” Many foreign organistaions in Afghanistan choose not to have armed guards and to maintain a low profile, but the attack on the UN guesthouse has forced them to consider changing that policy.

According to ACBAR, an umbrella organisation for more than 100 NGOs, 23 workers for aid organisations have been killed this year in 115 violent incidents.

Several other NGOs said their staff were under lockdown, like the UN, preventing them from leaving their hotels or guesthouses in Kabul.

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