Outgoing Minister Ernst Kuipers (Public Health, Welfare and Sport, D66) has apologized for the photo of him with a representative of the Taliban at the beginning of this month. In a statement on X on Saturday he wrote: “I didn’t know who this person was at that moment. This was a mistake, it absolutely should not have happened and I regret it.”
The meeting took place at the World Local Production Forum in The Hague, a meeting of member states of the World Health Organization (WHO), where access to medicines was discussed. Kuipers is in the photo next to Abdul Bari Omar, a senior official of the Taliban government. Omar shared the photo last week itself on X and wrote that he had discussed “a number of topics” with Kuipers.
“I can imagine that this is hurtful to many,” Kuipers writes. “It goes without saying that I do not want to associate myself in any way with this terrible regime: I stand for human rights and women’s rights in particular.” How Omar came to be at the conference in The Hague is being investigated. In return for The Telegraph a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Omar should not have received a visa.
Speech in Cologne
Omar is still in Europe, he writes Saturday on X. “During this trip we met with Afghan brothers in the Netherlands, Belgium, Slovakia and Germany and a number of Afghan ambassadors and diplomats.”
The Taliban representative also gave a speech in a mosque in Cologne, German media report. According to a Taliban spokesman, Omar encouraged spectators to come to Afghanistan. The German Foreign Ministry takes over there a statement on X distance from: “The trip was not announced to us. We do not recognize the Taliban. As long as the Taliban in Afghanistan continue to violate human rights, especially the rights of women and girls, there will be no normalization with the Taliban regime.”