Taliban's Man in Queens Wants the U.N. to Listen

September 30, 1998

Taliban's Man in Queens Wants the U.N. to Listen

By BARBARA CROSSETTE

NITED NATIONS -- Someone from the delegation with the sign that says "Afghanistan" made a speech in the General Assembly Tuesday. But he wasn't a representative of the people who run the country.

Miles away in his small office in a third-floor walkup in Queens, N.Y., the representative of the Taliban, which now controls all but one corner of one province of Afghanistan -- and has ruled the capital, Kabul, for two years -- was still waiting to be heard.

"The United Nations is using the seat of Afghanistan as a tool of pressure on an Islamic emirate to change its policies and to impose on it a kind of coalition government that will be consequently a secular government," said Abdul Hakeen Mujahid, the Taliban's most important diplomat. "This is their goal."

It won't work, said Mujahid, 41, who was born under an Afghan monarchy, fled a Communist takeover and joined one of the more moderate movements that sent holy warriors to fight the Soviet army before joining the radical Islamic movement and became its ambassador-in-waiting here.

"One of the particularities of Afghan people is that no one can impose their will upon them," he said, in an understatement of several hundred years of history. "The people of Afghanistan are very free people and they are making their decisions by themselves."

Other nations will come around, he added, "once they realize that the Taliban Islamic movement, a grass roots movement, arose from the people of Afghanistan."

"Our priority is that we bring peace and security inside Afghanistan," he said, adding that the defeat of the remaining forces of the American-backed Mujahedin armies was the movement's first priority. "After that there will be very little need for bargaining with the outside powers."

The Taliban will not negotiate its beliefs away for outside recognition, Mujahid said over green tea and sugared almonds, an Afghan specialty.

He was reading through his overnight faxes from Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual capital. Religious scholars there researched the holy books to consider how much of a woman's head must be covered -- they did not rule out an uncovered face. They also examined whether one Islamic nation, in this case Afghanistan, had the right to defend itself against another Islamic nation, Iran, and with the help of non-Islamic outsiders. The answer was an unambiguous yes.

By the side of his desk, Mujahid keeps his small pile of reference books, one the Koran and another a guide to the New York Public Library. On his second tour in New York -- he was the Taliban's ambassador in Pakistan for about six months this year -- Mujahid has brought his family.

His wife, Khatoon, was a village girl, he said, representative of the very conservative society that dominated rural Afghanistan before the Taliban existed, and where the movement finds its deepest support. To illustrate his point, he said he recently spent days trying to find a female ear specialist for her because she refused to see a male doctor, although she was in great pain.

They have five children, only one a daughter, Zakira, a 10-year-old. He is searching for an Islamic school for her that is not coeducational. The boys will go to American public schools.

The Taliban has been unpopular with women's groups, human rights organizations and many governments and international organizations for its efforts to impose its puritan vision of society on Afghans, and it has been reviled even by the Iranians for giving Islam an out-of-date image, if not a bad name. It has not been able to budge either the General Assembly credentials committee, which decides who holds U.N. seats, or the powerful governments behind it, most of all the United States.

U.N. officials are in a bind. They find it hard to work in Afghanistan within the confines of the Taliban's discriminatory rules against women, and agree with much of the criticism of the movement. Yet officials say that they believe that international recognition might change the movement's distrust and hostility toward the outside world.

Mujahid, who has graduate degrees in both religion and political science, has watched as Laurent Kabila, now fighting for the survival of his government in a widening African war, won Congo's seat almost overnight after the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko in May 1997. Mujahid also saw Cambodia's seat declared vacant after a July 1997 coup. It remains vacant.

Afghanistan, however, continues to be represented officially here by the remains of the defeated and largely exiled government of Burhanuddin Rabbini, whose deputy foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, spoke Tuesday. Mujahid called the situation ridiculous.

"To keep the seat of Afghanistan in the hands of the personal representatives of Rabbini is not justice," he said. "It is not fair. It is not according to the rules or the principles of the United Nations."

"They killed this nation," he said. "They killed more than 60,000 people. They destroyed the country, ruined the country. They divided it into fiefdoms and ruled them with independent governments."

They shot at each other's aircraft and amassed fortunes, building palatial homes and businesses, he added. Now they exist on the support of outside powers -- Iran, Tajikistan, and Russia, among others, he said. Their last stronghold is now the Panjsher valley of Parvan province.

"These realities will be accepted one day, once people realize that these warlords couldn't represent the people of Afghanistan," Mujahid said.

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