After talks in Washington on Afghanistan, Brahimi meets Islamic delegates at UN

The United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special envoy for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, returned to New York today after visiting Washington, D.C., over the weekend for talks with United States government officials.

As the Secretary-General's Special Representative for Afghanistan, Mr. Brahimi met on Monday with the ambassadors of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a UN spokesman said today.

On Saturday, speaking at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, Mr. Brahimi said that his talks with American officials focussed on the UN's role in Afghanistan and that various options were discussed. "We agreed with them, as we have with a lot of other people, that whatever arrangements are going to be made, [they] need to be owned by the people of Afghanistan," he said. "Otherwise, it's not going to work."

The envoy noted that the UN had been asked by Member States to do a number of things in connection with the situation in Afghanistan, among them to provide humanitarian relief to the people of Afghanistan and to try to help the Afghans come together and solve their political problems and unrelenting conflicts.

"The third area in which we are going to be working, slightly at a later stage, but we are going to start preparing for it now, is the rehabilitation, reconstruction and, ultimately, the economic and social development of Afghanistan, post conflict," he said.

Mr. Brahimi stressed that although it was too early to say what kind of government Afghanistan would have, a new regime would need to be acceptable to a broad spectrum of Afghan society.

"We very much hope that it will be an Afghanistan where all the Afghans, all the communities in Afghanistan will be comfortable, where the culture, the tradition of Afghanistan will be fully respected," he said. "I'm sure that this culture and this tradition is not incompatible with the necessity of respecting the rights of both individuals and communities, and that form of government needs to be acceptable to all Afghans."