TALKING POINTS

Tension in the North
On 30 April the Special Representative of the Secretary-General Lakhdar Brahimi was informed by the UNAMA office in Mazar-I-Sharif of tensions in that city and of fighting in Sholgarah district (outside Mazar), and Sari Pul (a province west of Mazar). UNAMA personnel on the ground are in frequent contact with those concerned, mainly the leaders of Jamiat, Jumbish and Hizb-e-Wahdat. Also on 30 April, the Special Representative to the Secretary-General discussed the situation with Chairman Hamid Karzai and Interior Minister Mohammad Qanouni. UNAMA is following developments very closely and is in contact with all concerned at the regional and national levels.

Yesterday on 1 May, he reviewed the situation with Defense Minister Mohammad Fahim. All three said they will do all that is possible to bring the situation under control. Yesterday evening, the UNAMA office in Mazar met with General Dostum and General Atta Mohammad. They agreed to set up a Security Commission for Mazar. Back in February, as a result of tensions in the area, there was an agreement between the parties and a security commission was established, but it did not work out. This time, with lessons learnt, the key leaders are agreed on setting up a new Commission and this time it will have a higher level of representation. The Commission will deal with several aspects of security in a comprehensive approach, such as troop deployment, official and unofficial basis etc. One aspect of the earlier agreement which has been retained in the new agreement is that a 600 strong police force will be established. That police force will include individuals from all three parties.

This morning, UNAMA Mazar officials went to Sari Pul with representatives of the three parties, Jamiat, Jumbish and Hizb-e-Wahdat.

Update on the Graves in Bamiyan
The forensics team that went to Bamiyan to investigate the graves concluded its work yesterday. The team went from Bamiyan to Mazar-I-Sharif where they are now. They are determining their exact itinerary, depending on the security situation and on technical requirements relating to mine clearance. They will visit a number of sites.

They are expected to return to Kabul on Sunday to finalise their report.

National Workshop on Human Rights Education, Kabul
Today is the opening day of the National Workshop on Human Rights Education. It is organised by the Afghan Working Group on Human Rights Education. This is one of four Working Groups that were established at the National Workshop on Human Rights, held on 9 March 2002 in Kabul. This event brought Afghans from all sectors of civil society and NGOs, and was opened by Chairman Hamid Karzai and attended by the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson.

Today's National Workshop will address activities relating to human rights education to be undertaken nationwide over the next 24 months. It is the intention that these activities will form the basis of a project proposal which will be presented to donors for funding in the near future.

The Working Group is composed of approximately 30-35 Afghans, including educators, NGO activists and Government representatives. There will be approximately 10-15 women present. Afghans have traveled from outside Kabul to participate in this Workshop, including Peshawar and Kandahar.

Other National Workshops convened by the other three Working Groups:
(1) establishment of the Independent Human Rights Commission (2) monitoring, investigating and transitional justice and (3) advancement of women's rights, will take place in the coming weeks.

Later in the afternoon, SRSG Brahimi joined the workshop participants. He expressed his happiness at witnessing Afghans working to solve their own problems, " you know what the problems are better than we do and given a chance you will be better at solving them than us." The SRSG thanked UNHCHR Mary Robinson for finding the seed money to set up the workshops which are only the beginning of a long process he said. He pledged UNAMA's continued support but reiterated that the Afghan people have to take charge of their own problems. He looked ahead to the time when the results of the Working Group's discussions will be translated into action on the ground, "please remember this is only the beginning and I look forward to seeing you implementing what you have discussed today in the Ministries, villages and provinces."

Update on the Loya Jirga Process
As of yesterday and since 15 April when the selection process started in the north in Jowzjan province, there have been 46 district assemblies and 1,872 people have been selected. They are selected to go onto the second phase at the regional level where the final delegates to the Loya Jirga are elected.

There are district assemblies planned for today in Khost and Paktika.

UNICEF Update on the Water Conference in Kabul
Further to the announcement of the Conference on Water Resources Management and Development in Afghanistan in the briefing of 25 April, a number of key recommendations have been made.

These points, contained in the final declaration (the Kabul Understanding), include:

• Identifying universal access to adequate safe drinking water as a top priority;
• Rehabilitating traditional water harvesting and water management systems, such as the centuries-old, community-based Karez, as means of irrigation and drinking water supply; [Karez is an ancient method of exploiting ground water without any mechanical device]
• Investing in affordable and sustainable technologies;
• Ensuring that water quality testing is built into all projects;
• And preventing both surface and ground water pollution.

This gathering, organized jointly by the Ministry of Irrigation and Water Resources, and UNICEF (with technical help from the World Wide Fund for Nature], also recognized that there is considerable potential to develop hydropower for electricity generation in the country.

Stranded Afghans in Indonesia
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) will begin the voluntary repatriation of Afghan migrants stranded in Indonesia in mid-May, following a visit to the country by the Minister of Refugees and Repatriation, Enayatullah Nazeri last week.

IOM is currently helping the Indonesian authorities to provide care and maintenance to some 1,100 stranded migrants. The voluntary repatriation follows an Agreement reached between the Indonesian and Afghan authorities, IOM and UNHCR on procedures allowing for the voluntary return to Afghanistan of undocumented Afghan migrants stranded.

The migrants who asked to be repatriated, will fly from Indonesia to Dubai in groups of 30, where they will join a weekly IOM charter flight to Kabul.

The Minister of Refugees and Repatriation met with over 400 Afghans in three different locations during his week-long stay in Indonesia.

World Press Freedom Day - 3 May
UNESCO, with two NGOS AINA and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) will be holding roundtable discussions on 3 May, World Press Freedom Day, on the Afghan New Press Law, the role of print press versus broadcast media in the reconstruction of Afghanistan and international media support in rebuilding Afghan media.

Among the participants, Deputy Minister of Information and Culture, Mr. Abdul Mobarez will be attending. This will take place at the Afghan Media and Culture Centre, across from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

World Food Programme Update - Jennifer Abrahamson
The United Nations World Food Programme today warned that a new hunger crisis threatens millions of Afghans unless more donations are received soon.

Cash donations are needed immediately to buy food in the region that will help millions of extremely poor Afghans cross the most critical and difficult months of the year before the harvest starts in July.

About nine million Afghans, or 40 percent of the population, will need some 275,000 tons of food aid until the harvest in July. With all stocks and pledges received so far WFP still faces a staggering shortage of 75,000 tons of food, worth US$28 million. This is just for the next two months, one of the most important times of the year to deliver food aid to Afghanistan.

A break in the food pipeline could translate into an almost complete halt of life-saving food distributions to millions of people in the month of June. This could prove disastrous, as it would strike at the crucial pre-harvest time, also known as the 'hunger months'.

Although WFP succeeded in averting a famine in Afghanistan this winter with generous donor support, we are not out of the danger zone yet. In fact, the number of Afghans that WFP aims to feed has jumped by 50 percent from some 6 million people earlier this year, to about nine million people between now and the end of June. The risk of famine will undoubtedly increase if WFP is unable to provide the necessary support.

Rapid Emergency Food Needs Assessments in the Central Highlands
WFP has conducted over 60 rapid assessments in the rural areas of Afghanistan over the past couple of months, using helicopters to reach some of the most inaccessible areas in the rugged mountainous parts of the country. Findings indicate increasing need for food aid in this pre-harvest hunger period, and WFP has already begun moving larger amounts of food into many areas that have been assessed.

These critical missions have been ongoing in both the north and the west, out of Mazar-I-Sharif and Herat, for the past several weeks. And yesterday, the operation began in the Central Highlands out of a base in Bamiyan town. Although the Mazar assessments are now winding down, flights out of Herat and Bamiyan will continue through the end of May.

Yesterday, the helicopters' stationed in Bamiyan touched down in Daikundi District in northern Uruzgan Province and there will be more assessments in extremely isolated areas of the district throughout this week.

A WFP team rushed to this area as soon as the helicopters were available, to follow up on recent reports made by local elders who have described a serious humanitarian situation in the area. WFP targeted Daikundi with some 4,000 tons of food over the past several months and plans to visit 10 vulnerable villages in the district to investigate the situation.

Update on Returnees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) - Yusuf Hassan
More than 435,000 Afghans have returned home from the neighbouring countries in the last eight weeks. In just the last three days, we have witnessed an average return of 15,000 Afghans a day.

By this morning, a staggering 400,000 refugees had made the homeward journey from Pakistan under a UNHCR-Afghan Interim Administration assisted return programme launched on 1 March, surpassing the planning figure for the whole of 2002.

The returns from Iran are also progressively increasing. Over 26,500 people have entered Afghanistan through the Dogharoun-Islam Qala border crossing since 9 April. UNHCR is opening later this week a second repatriation route from Iran to Afghanistan, through the Milak-Zaranj crossing. Clashes between armed groups in Zaranj in Nimroz province had forced UNHCR to suspend the use of this entry point from Iran's Sistan - Baluchistan province when UNHCR and Bureau for Aliens and Foreign Immigrant Affairs (BAFIA) started to facilitate returns from Iran on 9 April.

UNHCR, in coordination with the Afghan Ministry of Repatriation, IOM and GTZ (German Technical Assistance Agency), also is helping internally displaced people, estimated at 1.2 million, return to their homes in Afghanistan.

On Monday, UNHCR-IOM began moving the first IDPs from the suburbs of Kabul. More than 450 people have left for Bamyan, the first of some 150,000 IDPs who have expressed the desire to return to their towns and villages throughout Afghanistan.

UNHCR has moved more than 4,000 IDPs from Hesar Shahi camp near Jalalabad back to their villages in Nangarhar, Laghman and Kabul provinces. Hesari Shahi has been home to more than 24,000 IDPs for the last three years.

And in Bamyan, UNHCR-IOM last week completed the return of some 7,000 IDPs from Bamyan city to 13 villages in the Shaidan valley. Earlier, UNHCR helped 15,000 IDPs go back from the old Soviet compound in Kabul to the Shomali in central Afghanistan, joining 8,000 others UNHCR had transported from the Panjshir valley. A total of 35,000 IDPs have since been assisted to return home since December.

Questions and Answers

Q: What are the latest casualty figures from the fighting in the north?
Spokesman: I do not have any information on that.

Q: [Inaudible] Question on involvement of authorities in brokering Mazar deal.
Spokesman: We were in contact with the central authorities since two days ago, and as I said, they were doing all they could in order to keep the situation under control. Of course a meeting of that nature does not happen out of the blue, you have to have talks and preparations and that certainly involves the authorities. As you know, Marshall Fahim went to the north, but I do not have details to go beyond what I have just given you.

Q: [Inaudible]
Spokesman: They were the talks between Mr. Brahimi, Chairman Karzai, Minister Qanouni and Defence Minister Fahim, but it would not be appropriate to go into details of these talks. The result of the talks was the commitment to do all they could to get the situation under control.

Q: What impact is the fighting [in the north] having on aid distribution and repatriation?
UNHCR: We are not encouraging returns to Paktika, Paktia, Khost and until this week we were not encouraging people to return to Nimroz but after an assessment we will be assisting people to return to some parts of Nimroz. We have also been discouraging people from returning to Sholgarah because this is not the first time that this incident has happened there, it has always been a conflict area and we will continue to discourage people from going back there. Certainly the continued fighting has had a serious effect, in particular in Eastern Afghanistan; Paktika, Khost and Paktia have one of the largest numbers of refugees in Pakistan [who] are from those provinces, and so we would like to see a quick end to the problems and people can return back.

Q: On the South-East Iranian border, is there a free flow of movement of people now?
UNHCR: No, we will be starting. We had a security assessment meeting, and colleagues had visited Zaranj on Monday and Tuesday. We also had out staff who were withdrawn from Zaranj returning back. We are also hoping that transit centres and distribution points open in the whole province so we will be in a position to start repatriation on Saturday 4 May.