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Taliban Arrest ICRC Hospital Staff
KABUL, June 1 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia has raided a hospital run by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and arrested several local staff, ICRC officials said Friday.
Soldiers from the Islamic militia's religious police raided the hospital in the Taliban's southern stronghold of Kandahar late Sunday night or early Monday morning, they said.
The ICRC's deputy head of delegation in neighboring Pakistan, Anton Bieler, told AFP the reasons for the arrests were unclear and he did not know exactly how many staff had been detained or whether they were still in custody.
He said hospital workers were "frightened" and went on strike the following day to protest against the arrests. The expatriate staff had left Kandahar to discuss the issue with the ICRC's main office in Kabul.
ICRC staff here confirmed the arrests Friday but could not provide more details.
"They arrested some staff in the middle of the night and after that the people working in the hospital went on strike," Bieler said.
He said the hospital was set up in 1992 and treated mostly Taliban soldiers wounded in battles against opposition forces in the north of the country.
Last month, the Taliban violently raided a new Italian-funded hospital in the capital because local staff of different sexes were allegedly being allowed to mix in breach of the Islamic militia's rules on gender segregation.
About 20-armed men of the Taliban's religious police forced their way into the 120-bed Emergency Surgical Hospital, beat staff and arrested three local workers.
The hospital, which had been open for less than a month, later discharged its patients and sent its foreign doctors to Pakistan in protest.
Taliban Health Minister Mullah Mohammad Abbas accused the hospital's foreign management of persuading local female staff to wear western outfits, to dine on the same tables as men and work alongside them in the wards.
The European Commission later said it was "greatly alarmed" by the raid and voiced concern about the future of humanitarian operations in Afghanistan.
On Monday, U.N. Coordinator for Afghanistan Erick de Mul said the world body had protested strongly to the Taliban about growing incidents of harassment and abuse of foreign aid workers in the strife-torn country.
He said the "operational environment" was narrowing and warned that vital humanitarian projects might have to be shut down unless the situation improved.
Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Mutawakel, in an interview with AFP late Thursday, played down the latest hiccups in the militia's often testy relations with the U.N. and foreign non-governmental organizations.
But he said all foreigners working in Afghanistan were obliged to abide by the Taliban's interpretation of Islamic law.
"We don't have any problem with the humanitarian section of the U.N. - we are still sticking by our commitments," Mutawakel said, defending the regime's human rights record and playing down U.N. threats to close its humanitarian projects due to harassment.
In the interview Thursday, Mutawakel also claimed the United Nations' relations with the militia were being poisoned by a U.S.-based women's rights groups.
The militia, which rules most of Afghanistan, was condemned in an annual human rights report from the London-based Amnesty International on Wednesday.
Amnesty said abuses from torture to kidnapping continued unabated in areas under Taliban control.
Women in particular were subject to forced marriage and abduction, while the Taliban continued to deny them their rights to employment, education and freedom of movement.
"The organization of Amnesty International has lost its credibility and effectiveness," the foreign minister retorted.
"It has only become the tool of superpowers. It's only fond of Asia, but I wish it would pay a little bit of attention to Europe too."
The militia's insistence that Afghan women must not work for foreign aid groups has become a major sticking point in its rocky relations with the United Nations in recent weeks.
Last week it ordered foreign women, mostly aid workers trying to help ordinary Afghans during a time of severe drought and relentless war, to stop driving vehicles out of respect for local "tradition" and the environment.
In response to criticism from Amnesty and the U.N., and referring to the unnamed U.S. women's group, Mutawakel said, "there are possibilities ... that the U.N. could have been influenced by some of those women's organizations which in the U.S. are against the [Taliban].
"These are organizations which consist of American women, including Jews, and possibly some Afghan women with links to the opposition."
The minister said the order for foreign women to stop driving was "not a big issue," and was covered in a protocol with the U.N. that guaranteed that, "all enforced regulations of the Islamic Emirate [Taliban] should be abided by."
He acknowledged that some of the Taliban's foreign "guests" - namely Arab Islamists who want to help create a pure Islamic state in Afghanistan - thought relief workers were Western spies.
"There are two kinds of guests in Afghanistan who suspect each other. The aid workers think the Muslim guests are terrorists and our Muslim guests think the aid workers are spies," he said.
"But the Islamic Emirate will never permit any of our guests to harass the others."
The U.N. has pulled out or scaled down its operations in Afghanistan several times in the past, notably in 1998 following U.S. missile strikes against suspected training camps.
But hiccups in its relations with the militia came to the surface again following the imposition of fresh Security Council sanctions in January over the Taliban's alleged support for "terrorists".
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