The decision, on Friday February 11, of the American president, Joe Biden, to seize the assets of the Afghan central bank, deposited in the United States and frozen since the return to power of the Taliban, in August 2021, did not cause that the ire of the Islamist regime. International NGOs and certain UN executives have since expressed their deep concern at an initiative which, according to them, raises “heavy legal questions”, put the humanitarians “in grave danger” and mortgages the chances of getting the country out of a serious economic crisis. More broadly, it is the attitude of the international community towards Afghanistan that is the subject of criticism.
Mr. Biden has planned to devote half of the seven billion dollars blocked in the coffers of American banks to the compensation of the families of victims of the attacks of September 11, 2001, in the United States. It provides for the other half to be reserved for humanitarian aid to Afghanistan without these funds falling into the hands of the Taliban leaders. To do this, the American president relies on the “extraordinary economic powers” conferred on it by a law of 1977 and intends to have this money transferred to a blocked account of the Federal Reserve of New York.
“Accomplices in a theft”
Reached in Kabul, the head of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) for Afghanistan has not taken off since this announcement, which he describes as“unfair, legally weak and ineffective”. Filipe Ribeiro believes that she “makes NGOs potentially guilty of receiving stolen goods” since these reserves belong to Afghanistan. “On the legal level and on its feasibility, nothing says that the United States will be able to carry out this project”, because, according to him, to do so is to risk sinking the country into chaos. “The reserves of a central bank are used to support the currency, the economy and the banking system, to deprive it of them, when Afghanistan is already suffering from a serious liquidity crisis, is to bring it down. »
The Director General of Action Against Hunger, Jean-François Riffaud, passing through Kabul, assures him that his organization “will never finance [ses] operations on the basis of this manna, because it is [les] put them in an extremely dangerous situation vis-à-vis the Taliban authorities and the Afghans themselves who could [les] consider, rightly, as accomplices in a theft”. Feminist NGOs, however, hostile to the Afghan Islamist regime, he adds, demonstrated against the American initiative, considering that it served above all the interests of the Afghan people.
You have 54.33% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.