DAIKUNDI - A delegation of Dai Kundi elders trooped to the UNAMA compound here over the weekend and submitted a petition for UNAMA’s continued stay in the remote central highlands province of Afghanistan.

Accompanied by Provincial Council Member Hadi Rahimizada, the elders met with the leadership of UNAMA in Dai Kundi on 28 June.

With their written petition, they called on UNAMA headquarters to consider a long-term presence of UNAMA in the province. UNAMA’s provincial office in Dai Kundi started announcing its drawdown to local officials a week ago.

The elders expressed their gratitude to UNAMA for helping make Dai Kundi visible at the national level over the last couple of years with the establishment of the UNAMA office in the capital, Nili. They stressed the continued need for a permanent UNAMA presence in the province.

UNAMA Dai Kundi assured the delegation of UNAMA’s continued commitment to fulfilling its mandate within the province through actively encouraging other UN agencies and the international community to implement programmes there.

The evening before the elders’ visit to UNAMA, a local radio station announced and discussed UNAMA’s impending closure of its provincial office. The live hour-long discussion had several residents calling Radio Nasim to decry the imminent closure of UNAMA in Nili city.

Among the callers was an 80-year-old woman who lamented that with UNAMA soon gone from their midst, the warlords will once again take over the province, according to Mahdy Mehraeen, a local journalism trainer of the Netherlands-based Free Press Unlimited (FPU) that was then conducting a two-week journalism training for budding journalists of Dai Kundi.

Most callers cited the advances in development and governance in the province ever since the establishment UNAMA in Dai Kundi, and insisted on the need for UNAMA’s continued stay in the province.

Dai Kundi Provincial Governor Qurban Ali Uruzgani said the imminent pull-out of UNAMA from the province was “too fast” and said it is tantamount to a “punishment” as the US forces completed the closure of their base in Nili city on 29 June, in line with security transition.

Governor Uruzgani said he was flying to Kabul today to have a meeting with the Independent Directorate of Local Governance (IDLG) and with presidential advisers regarding the scheduled closure of the UNAMA office in Dai Kundi