PAKISTAN: Annan due in Islamabad on
first official visit
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is due
to arrive in the capital Islamabad on 10 March as part of a week-long visit
to South Asia. Marking his first official visit to Pakistan, the Secretary-General
will meet with President Mohammad Rafiq Tarar and Chief Executive, General
Pervez Musharraf, on 11 March. He will also hold a series of discussions
at the Foreign Ministry, and with United Nations officials working in Pakistan
and Afghanistan.
On Monday Annan will visit the Shamshatoo refugee camp and makeshift settlement in Jalozai on the outskirts of Peshawar in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, before travelling to the Khyber Pass. The focus of Annan's mission will be on regional stability issues as well as the plight of Afghan refugees who have temporarily relocated to Pakistan. He will be fully supportive of a comprehensive Pakistan-India dialogue and will listen carefully to the concerns of his interlocutors, according to a statement by the UN Information Centre.
The Secretary-General is accompanied by a delegation including the Under-Secretary for Political Affairs, Kieran Prendergast. After Pakistan, the Secretary-General will travel to Nepal, Bangladesh and India, before returning to New York on 18 March.
AFGHANISTAN: Food gets through to Dar-e-Suf valley
Around 14,000 Afghans trapped by bad weather in Afghanistan's conflict-affected Dar-e-Suf valley, south of Mazar-i-Sharif, have received emergency food rations in an ICRC distribution operation. A convoy of some 800 donkeys each carrying up to 100 kg of supplies, travelled through the valley on a four-day operation in early March to reach the region's 250 remote villages. ICRC described the situation in the valley as "dramatic" with most villages inaccessible due to heavy mining of roads and deep snow cover.
"In most of the villages we visited, there was little or no food left. To make matters worse, there was no sign of winter wheat being grown," Reto Stocker, ICRC head in Mazar-i-Sharif said in a statement on Friday. The rations including rice, beans and oil were intended to help families survive until the summer. The Dar-e-Suf valley has been hit hard as a result of ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, and a recent severe drought which destroyed the harvest in most of the rain-fed areas.
AFGHANISTAN: French official prioritises 'people' before 'statues'
While international efforts for the preservation of the pre-Islamic buddha statues of Afghanistan continue, a French official told Agence-France-Presse in Paris on Thursday that world attention should be focused on the suffering of the Afghan people. The socialist chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee at the [National] Assembly, Francois Loncle, said that "however regrettable the loss of pre-Islamic cultural heritage may be" with the destruction of Buddhas in Afghanistan, "we must above all intervene and take action on behalf of the Afghan people, and in particular on behalf of women, among whom this is taking the heaviest toll every day".
UNESCO special envoy Pierre Lafrance told IRIN on Thursday that he still hoped to convince the Taliban leadership to halt the planned destruction of ancient Afghan shrines and statues, with a possible trip this weekend to the Afghan capital Kabul. According to Kyodo News Service, a three-member Japanese parliamentary delegation is on its way to Kandahar to meet the Taliban leaders and urge them to withdraw the destruction order. Meanwhile, protest rallies against the destruction of Buddhist statues were held in Kathmandu on Thursday, according to Nepalese media reports. About 5,000 people belonging to different Buddhist organisations and students from different schools participated in the rally.
TAJIKISTAN: President calls for small educated families
Tajik President Emomali Rahmonov on Thursday urged the country's women to plan their families so they would produce fewer but better educated children. Rahmonov's plea came during a speech in the capital Dushanbe to mark International Women's Day, according to a Tajik radio report.
Rahmonov called on women to give their children an education and a profession. "Let them be few, but healthy, good, educated and patriotic." He stressed that Tajik society must become a highly educated one so that Tajiks acquired a worthy place among the more advanced countries. "We must achieve comprehensive education of children in every family, and create conditions for them to demonstrate their skills and study at the universities they want." He added that the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Health and other organisations should bear in mind that as many girls, particularly from mountainous areas, should be attracted into medical institutes and colleges.
Rahmonov said the government was making every effort to raise women's position in society and that many women with specialist expertise had been appointed to government posts. More must be done, he added, to train women and girls to develop expertise that would meet current international standards.
KYRGYZSTAN: Kyrgyz general fears offensive by IMU militants
While Central Asia has been bracing itself for a spring offensive by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, (IMU), Kyrgyz general Askar Mameev warned a military campaign could be on a bigger scale than its actions in 1999 and 2000. According to the Institute of War and Peace Reporting on Thursday, Mameev issued the warning at a meeting of regional security officials in the capital Bishkek in February. He estimated the number of IMU militants in Tajikistan as being between 1,500 and 2,000 many of whom wintered in camps in the mountainous east of Tajikistan.
The IMU's territorial objective is the Fergana valley, which straddles Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The ramshackle border delineation of the valley sets it at the heart of disputes between the three countries, each of which wants control over this highly fertile region. At present, Uzbekistan controls the Fergana's central lowlands, Kyrgyzstan its upper reaches and Tajikistan its Western access point. The valley's infrastructure for transportation, energy, water management and commerce requires close inter-state cooperation. But in recent years the countries have found this increasingly difficult as they pursued separate economic development strategies, the IWPR said.
While the IMU threat is proving divisive is some areas, since the wave of terrorist attacks, which began in 1998, the Central Asian countries appear to have adopted a new level of cooperativeness. In the past year they have held a series of high-level meetings and agreements on joint security measures. Under the auspices of the "Shanghai Forum", Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have collaborated in countering terrorism and religious extremism. Another sign of the quickening cooperation is the planned establishment of an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Asia (OSCA).
UZBEKISTAN: Kazak minority abandons Uzbekistan
Unemployment, declining living standards and social injustice are driving thousands of ethnic Kazaks to abandon their homes in Uzbekistan and seek a new life in neighbouring Kazakhstan, according to the Institute of War and Peace Reporting [IWPR] on Thursday.
Over the past decade, more than 62,000 Kazaks have left Uzbekistan where they make up six per cent of the population of 25 million. It is the largest Kazak diaspora in the CIS and the second largest in the world after China. The Kazaks are the descendants of nomadic tribes who settled in Uzbekistan long the country became a nation in its own right.
Today, the Kazak diaspora is feeling the pinch of the harsh economic climate in Uzbekistan where unemployment has hit a record high and the average wage is between $8 and $15 a month, said IWPR. Most Kazaks agree that, while there is no overt racial discrimination in Uzbekistan, the government bureaucracy offers Uzbeks far better promotion prospects than other ethnic groups. A perfect knowledge of the Uzbek language is also mandatory in state-run institutions. The Kazaks have been hard hit by the education crisis in Uzbekistan. Despite six years of lobbying by teachers there are still few, if any, school-books printed in the Kazak language.
Against this backdrop, the average wage in Kazakhstan is around $90 a month while the national currency can be freely converted, offering greater opportunities for private enterprise.
[ENDS]
IRIN-Asia Phone:- +92-51-2211451 Ext 484 , Mobile +92-0300-8501-307, Fax No:- +92-51-2211450 or 475 E-mail:-irin@irin.org.pk
[This item is delivered in the "asia-english" service of the UN's IRIN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations. For further information, free subscriptions, or to change your keywords, contact e-mail: irin@ocha.unon.org or Web: http://www.reliefweb.int/IRIN . If you re-print, copy, archive or re-post this item, please retain this credit and disclaimer. Reposting by commercial sites requires written IRIN permission.]
Copyright (c) UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2001