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U.N. to tackle refugee crisis

UNITED NATIONS -- French President Jacques Chirac says the U.N. has agreed to hold a global conference to resolve the "intolerable" plight of Afghan refugees.

Up to 7.5 million Afghans face hunger this winter, their plight worsened by harsh weather conditions and continued U.S. bombing.

Chirac, during his visit to the U.S. for talks with President George W. Bush and a U.N. General Assembly meeting, said: "It is not just refugees but all the Afghan people who are in a precarious situation, a situation of great distress, which is intolerable."

Chirac said the security council will also shortly hold a debate on Afghanistan's political future.

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The proposed conference will look at how aid can be deployed far quicker to the region. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has agreed on the need to create a co-ordinator for humanitarian relief in Afghanistan to give "impetus and organisation" to the aid effort, Chirac added.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in aid is available, but the weather and a lack of security for aid workers is hindering delivery.

"It is not a question of money, because there is about $700 million available. It is a question of energy and organisation," Chirac told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York.

It has been difficult to find trucks and drivers willing to enter a war zone and hard to keep aid programmes operating in an environment in which staff are regularly harassed by the ruling Taliban and occasionally struck by stray bombs.

About a third of Afghanistan's population faces starvation or homelessness this winter, the U.N. estimates.

Even before the U.S. bombing campaign began on October 7, about six million Afghans depended on outside aid for food or shelter, the body said.

Chirac did not say whether a goal of the conference would be to provide special security for the relief trucks and aid workers.

The French president said he had consulted with his European partners and the U.S. president before asking Annan to organise a conference.

On the political side of the conflict, Chirac said Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born dissident blamed by Washington for masterminding the September 11 attacks on the United States, had in recent statements "revealed his true colours, as a man of fanaticism, hatred and deceit -- in truth, a raving madman."

The French leader said Paris and London were drafting a resolution for the U.N.'s Security Council that would back up the work in the region of Lakhdar Brahimi, Annan's special envoy for Afghanistan.

The resolution, which he predicted would be approved next week, will stress that a post-Taliban Afghanistan "will need a broad-based interim government in Kabul which reflects the diversity of the Afghan people, to which all Afghans have access and which governs responsibly the whole of Afghanistan," a draft obtained by Reuters says.

Chirac said he would carefully study a request made on Sunday by U.S. military leaders that Paris send special forces to Afghanistan, supplementing the 2,000 French troops already involved in U.S. military operations there.