UN relocating up to 600 staff from Afghan danger zones (2nd Lead)

Nov 5, 2009, 11:04 GMT

   Kabul - 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.

   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.