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UN envoy stresses better
efforts to help Afghanistan
United Nations— Improving coordination of international efforts to
help bring peace and development to Afghanistan will be a key
priority for the U.N., the new Special Representative of the
Secretary-General in the strife-torn nation pledged
Kai Eide, who is also head of the UN Assistance Mission in
Afghanistan (UNAMA), told his first press conference in Kabul that
he wants to “create a new sense of momentum and a new sense of
urgency” in the way international efforts are coordinated, according
to a transcript issued at UN Headquarters in New York. Eide just
returned from Bucharest, Romania, where he joined Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon, President Hamid Karzai and other leaders at last week’s
high-level meeting on Afghanistan, held as part of the summit of the
member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
In Bucharest, Ban acknowledged that the UN has not been as effective
as it needs to be in coordinating the international community,
adding that the new Security Council mandate will allow the world
body to take a more assertive role in coordination. “We have to get
away from a situation where an Afghan administration which is still
in need of capacity-building is faced with a too fragmented
international community,” Eide stated.
“And we have to make sure that the agenda that we pursue is the
Afghan agenda and not a number of national agendas. Among the
coordination structures in place is the Joint Coordination and
Monitoring Board (JCMB), co-chaired by the UN and set up in 2006 to
monitor implementation of the Afghanistan Compact- a five-year
blueprint for the country’s reconstruction. Related to the issue of
better coordination is the question of aid efficiency, the Special
Representative noted.
“We have to ask ourselves, do we have adequate resources, do we
spend them well enough, do we spend them sufficiently through Afghan
channels and budgets, and can we eliminate duplication,” he said.
Eide added that the Bucharest meeting was “very encouraging” for the
UN, since it reaffirmed that the international community wants a
stronger and more prominent role for the Organization in the
country. —APP
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