(Kabul) The Afghan Taliban want “good relations” with all other countries and will never interfere in their affairs, their prime minister said in his first address to the nation on Saturday evening.
Mohammad Hassan Akhund spoke in an audio message of almost half an hour broadcast on public television RTA, a few days before the resumption of negotiations between his government and American representatives in Doha (Qatar).
The Taliban prime minister has still not appeared in public since he was appointed prime minister on September 7, as has the movement’s supreme leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, invisible since the Islamists took over the country in mid -August.
“I want to assure all (foreign) countries that we will never interfere in their internal affairs” and that “we want good relations with them”, including at the economic level, declared in his message Mullah Akhund, criticized these recent times on local social networks for his prolonged silence as the country grapples with a serious economic crisis.
The Taliban returned to power in mid-August following the military withdrawal of the West, and the collapse of the Afghan government supported by the latter, after twenty years of bloody war.
Fundamentalist Islamists were ousted from power at the end of 2001 by an international military coalition led by the United States which had punished them for harboring leaders of Al-Qaeda, perpetrators of the September 11 attacks a few months earlier. .
After the Taliban returned to power last August, Washington froze the assets of the Afghan central bank, and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund suspended aid to Kabul.
The Afghan economy, already one of the poorest in the world, undermined by 40 years of war, more recent droughts, and so far carried at arm’s length by international aid, is in free fall, and the country in edge of humanitarian disaster according to the UN.
In Doha, the Taliban should again demand the lifting of these sanctions, and the resumption of international aid to prevent an outbreak of poverty and famine this winter among the 40 million Afghans.
Washington, for its part, calls on Afghan Islamists to fight terrorism firmly, and therefore no longer host groups likely to attack America as in 2001.
Americans also want them to diversify their government and better respect the rights of minorities and those of women and girls, partly deprived of education and jobs since their return to power.