The organization warns that if its fund does not continue to be replenished, the region will sink into a “humanitarian catastrophe”.
More than 5,000 million dollars are urgently needed to save half of the Afghan population from death. It is, as UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Wednesday, “a race against the clock,” in the largest fundraising campaign for a single country ever launched by the organization in its 77-year history. While Afghans sell their newborns to feed the rest of their children and burn their belongings to keep from freezing, the US and other allies have frozen Afghan Central Bank accounts worth 9.5 billion dollars. Could they thereby save the lives of the people he abruptly abandoned to the Taliban in August?
Asked if Washington has a “moral obligation” to deliver that money, the head of international diplomacy replied that “obviously the US has a very important role to play.” It seems easy, but the matter is delicate. That is why his person in charge of Humanitarian Affairs, Martin Griffths and the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer, met yesterday virtually with the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, whom they pressured to find a way out. “It is absolutely essential to prevent the collapse of the Afghan economy,” Guterres insisted.
On the other side, 150 relatives of victims of 9/11, who sued Osama Bin Laden, Mulah Omar, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Afghan government and even the republics of Iran and Iraq, have been waiting for two decades the seven billion dollars in compensation awarded to them by US courts. Precisely the amount frozen in the New York Federal Reserve, at a time when the Taliban are once again in control of the Executive they sued.
moral decisions
Many analysts believe that the money would not serve to alleviate the needs of the Afghan people, where doctors, teachers and other essential officials have not been paid since at least August, but that it would go to the jihadists, who have not been paid since then.
The Joe Biden administration has political and moral decisions to make. If the fund that the UN has created does not continue to be replenished, the
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