The UN will seek legal advice on the implications of the Taliban Islamic militia's harsh new code of conduct for foreigners in Afghanistan, a spokeswoman said yesterday.
The Irish agency Concern says 23 years of civil war and two years of drought have produced a crisis of "almost unimaginable proportions", threatening to engulf nearly four million Afghans.
The ruling Taliban, announcing the code, said foreigners working in Afghanistan would have to give a written undertaking to abide by its terms.
It prohibits "illicit relations with women", public obscenity, public drinking, loud music, proselytising, the public consumption of pork, "walking naked" and the distribution of anti-Taliban material.
A Taliban statement said the militia would expel offenders or jail them for three days to a month. It also said adulterers would be punished according to Sharia law. Adulterers are stoned to death in Afghanistan.
The Taliban, which seized Kabul in 1996, has enforced a fundamentalist form of Islam in the 90 per cent of the country it controls. Squads of religious police patrol the major cities and deliver on-the-spot punishments.
"With the performance of these crimes in public, it causes society to become used to such evils which are very far from our people's beliefs," the Taliban Culture Minister, Mr Qudratullah Jamal, said.
The foreign aid community, which is struggling to avert a humanitarian disaster, has expressed dismay at the implications of the document.
"I just hope that the UN will come up with some arrangement and it will be possible for us to keep working in Afghanistan," said the representative of a European non-governmental organisation who wished to remain anonymous.
The UN co-ordinator's office spokeswoman, Ms Stephanie Bunker, who is based in neighbouring Pakistan, said the code would be sent to New York for a legal opinion. "It is an attempt to control the aid community more and it's combined with other attempts to harass the aid community at a time when the people of the country can ill afford this kind of interference."
More than a million Afghans could face famine this year, the UN estimates, while another four million have been badly affected by the drought out of a population of around 21 million.
The Taliban has put a range of obstacles before foreign aid groups in recent months, from bans on the employment of Afghan women to increasing incidents of abuse, harassment and even arrests. Last month the militia banned foreign women from driving cars, saying it was against Afghan "tradition" and the environment.
The Irish Red Cross has announced it is sending a Tipperary truck driver to aid the starving in Afghanistan. Mr Seamus Meagher will be responsible for planning the transport of relief goods from Pakistan into Afghanistan. Donations to the Irish Red Cross on Callsave 1850 50 70 70.