KABUL, Afghanistan – Impoverished Afghans flocked to receive allotments of subsidized bread Friday from bakeries run by the United Nations that face imminent closure because of a dispute with the ruling Taliban.
The closure of most of the World Food Program bakeries in Kabul, the capital, would deprive at least 282,000 people of a crucial, cheap food supply and be a setback for relief efforts in the war- and drought-torn country, U.N. officials said.
In Geneva, food program spokeswoman Christiane Berthiaume told reporters Friday that the Taliban had asked to continue negotiations in the impasse, and in the meantime the food program will keep the bakeries open.
But they may not have the flour needed to produce bread.
Ms. Berthiaume said there would be no flour – and therefore no bread – for Saturday since the bakeries, expecting to be closed by then, had not brought in supplies. Gerard van Dijk, the World Food Program’s representative for Afghanistan, said the program would replenish the flour to the bakeries only when talks with the Taliban succeed.
“We already get little food. … We will starve to death if they shut this bakery,” said Royia Bibi, a 70-year-old Afghan women, wiping away tears with her wrinkled hand. Barefoot and clad in dirty clothes, Ms. Bibi is among 358 cardholders who receive bread at a bakery in Bagh-e-Qazi, a poor neighborhood in the center of Kabul.
“I don’t know what we will eat tomorrow,” she said.
The World Food Program Is threatening to close the bakeries in a dispute over a poverty survey needed for a new list of eligible bread recipients in Kabul. Women must conduct the survey because only they can enter people’s homes to assess their poverty – since Taliban-enforced laws forbid men from viewing women to whom they are not related.
The Taliban wants women employed in the militia’s Health Ministry to conduct the survey. The World Food Program wants its own employees to conduct the survey, in the interest of impartiality.
On Thursday, the Taliban rejected the food program’s offer of forming joint teams consisting of both women hired by the World Food Program and the Taliban. The Taliban accused the United Nations of being rigid.
The militia’s reclusive leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, on Friday said the United Nations has to abide by the laws and traditions of Afghanistan.
The Taliban won’t allow the “dignity and honor of Afghan women be compromised,” he said in a statement from the southern city of Kandahar.
The bakeries are the single largest WFP project in Afghanistan, with an annual budget of $8 million.
The bakery impasse has underscored rapidly worsening relations between the Taliban and international aid organizations, which have accused the militia of harassing aid workers and hampering relief operations.
