Author: Evelyn Leopold
Publication: The Asian Age
Date: November 30, 2000
Despite UN efforts to start peace
talks in Afghanistan, the United States and Russia want to impose an arms
embargo against Afghanistan's Taliban rulers but not ban weapons reaching
fighters opposing them.
The two nations, which expect the
resolution to be discussed in the Security Council next week, aim to pressure
the Taliban to close alleged terrorist training camps and surrender Osama
bin Laden, the exiled Saudi Arabian charged by Washington with plotting
the August 1998 bombings of US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es
Salaam, Tanzania.
The measure would also tighten an
existing flight embargo and a freeze on the Taliban's assets abroad.
And it would ban the sale of chemicals used to convert opium to heroin,
US officials said.
But the most unusual section of
the resolution is the one-sided weapons ban on the Taliban, which diplomats
admit would be difficult to enforce but hope it will prevent some arms,
mainly from Pakistan, from reaching Afghanistan. The arms embargo,
if enforced, would benefit the opposition United Front, led by General
Ahmed Shah Massoud, a former Afghan defence minister. He controls
a swath in the north near Tajikistan, one of several former Soviet republics
believed to be facilitating his access to weapons along with Russia.
The Soviet Union was involved in
more than nine Years of military conflict in Afghanistan before its troops
were driven out of the country in 1989, with help from the US, which supported
anti-Soviet rebels.
In the ensuing civil war, the Taliban
captured Kabul in September 1996 and now control 90 per cent of the country.
The northern Opposition is still
recognised by the United Nations and occupies Afghanistan's UN seat.
Only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have formal ties
to the Taliban.
The proposed sanctions coincide
with a new and complicated UN peace effort by a senior UN envoy, Frances
Vendrell, to restart talks between Afghanistan's warring parties.
Asked whether a Security Council arms embargo might affect Mr Vendrell's
mission, UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said, "They are all working together,
in theory, towards the same goal."
Last year, the Security Council
froze Taliban assets and imposed an air embargo on the Taliban-run Ariana
Afghan Airlines to force the country's strict Islamist rulers to deliver
bin Laden for trial. Russia, at that time also co-sponsored the resolution
along with the United States, Britain, Canada and the Netherlands.
But the Taliban has refused to give
up bin Laden, saying he was their guest and that Washington had not produced
proof of his role in the embassy bombings that lolled at least 225 people
and wounded more than 4,000, most of them in Kenya.
Some council members have raised
fears that a tightened flight ban would have a negative impact on the lives
of ordinary Afghans in the impoverished nation as well as international
relief workers. (Reuters)
