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UN relocating up to 600 staff from Afghan danger zones
Published in Saudi Press Agency on 05 - 11 - 2009


The United Nations began to relocate up to 600 of
its foreign personnel in Afghanistan from danger zones in the country
in the face of mounting Taliban attacks, officials said Thursday, , according to dpa.
The decision to temporarily move up to 12 per cent of the UN staff
there to safer locations inside the country and abroad came eight
days after Taliban militants attacked a UN guesthouse in Kabul,
killing five of its international staff and three Afghan nationals.
"The UN is putting in place immediate additional security measures
for its national and international staff in Afghanistan," Kai Eide,
special representative in Afghanistan for the UN secretary general,
said at a press conference in Kabul.
"There will be a short-term relocation of up to 12 per cent of our
staff while this is going on," he said while insisting that the
relocation would not affect the UN"s work in Afghanistan because
"most of the staff are support staff, or what I call non-front-line
staff."
Eide did not provide any figures for the number of UN staff
affected by the decision, but Aleem Siddique, a UN spokesman, said up
to 600 international staff would be relocated inside Afghanistan and
to other countries for a few weeks.
The move would also bring together the remaining UN workers from
around 93 guesthouses in Kabul, mostly run by private businessmen in
civilian houses, to larger compounds on the eastern edge of the
capital city, he said.
About 5,500 UN workers, including around 1,000 foreign staff, are
currently in Afghanistan.
Eide said the relocation would include sending staff outside the
country but said, "We are not talking about pulling out, and we are
not talking about evacuation."
Eide said he had asked UN headquarters for additional funding to
boost security for the UN employees in Afghanistan.
The UN chief envoy said the decision was taken in light of the
October 28 attack on a UN guesthouse in downtown Kabul, in which
three militants carrying automatic rifles and wearing suicide vests
stormed the building.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying the
targeted members were helping the Afghan government mount a
presidential runoff that the militants vowed to disrupt.
The new security measures were put in place days after UN
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon visited Kabul to express his solidarity
with the UN workers after last week"s attack.
Ban criticized the slow response of Afghan and NATO security
forces after the attack. He asked President Hamid Karzai"s government
to provide more security for UN installations in the country.
Afghan security forces arrested six militants in connection with
the attack. Intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh said last week that the
attackers were from Pakistan, where the plan for the assault was
drawn up by an Afghan insurgent group with close ties to the al-Qaeda
network.
The latest UN move underlines the deteriorating security situation
in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has increased its attacks on Afghan
and more than 100,000 NATO soldiers eight years after the ouster of
their regime in a US-led invasion.


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