The right to vote, record numbers of children in school, eradication of polio and a budding media, vouch for Afghanistan?s recovery from three decades of conflict, the UN?s chief spokesman said in a farewell yesterday.

Manoel de Almeida e Silva, whose weekly briefings over the last three years made him the face of the UN to those Afghans with televisions, said the role of the warlords in human rights abuses was an issue that the Security Council was well aware of.

Insecurity and economic depredation still bedevil the country more than three years after US-backed Afghan opposition forces ousted the Taliban militia for refusing to surrender Osama bin Laden following al Qaeda?s Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

?I think there is frustration of people of Afghanistan who do not see what they expected to see in immediate benefits today as a result of the peace process. (That) is a low?, Silva said, recalling highs and lows of his assignment. But the 52-year-old Brazilian, whose last job was as deputy spokesman for UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, said he saw enough to believe Afghans can overcome their brutal history.

Chronic unemployment

Arriving in Kabul in February 2002, Silva?s term covered a momentous period, culminating in last October?s presidential election, when President Hamid Karzai won 55 percent of the vote. Silva cited the demobilisation of more than 42,000 fighters from private militias and the virtual completion of a programme to collect and decommission heavy weapons as major steps forward.

He said the country badly needed an effective police and judicial system and that people in positions of power should be properly vetted to guard against human rights abuses. Unemployment is chronic, housing bad, public health facilities are grossly inadequate and infrastructure requirements are massive for the Central Asian nation of 28 million.

But Silva, who is returning to the UN headquarters in New York, reminded people how Afghanistan was after the Taliban was vanquished and the task of rebuilding began. ?One of the first things was to put furniture in the offices of ministers, to put glass in the windows, give a set of cars to government officials. Because there was nothing.? There were no phones. If you had to have a meeting you had to send a driver to the person you wanted to see, asking: Can you see me at such a date such a time? That?s how it was.

?Looking at back at these things, even though we are far away from what everyone expects, I think it is a high what Afghans are accomplishing.? Silva said Afghans should take heart from what they have done together with foreign help in these last few years. ?We have more than four million kids in schools...more than ever before. Thirty percent of them are girls. Polio has been eradicated?, Silva said.

And he praised the blossoming media, and a growing sense of freedom of expression after decades of rule under communists, warlords and Islamist hardliners. There are some 300 publications registered with the Ministry of Information, 50 radio stations and over 20 television stations, he said, adding that these had helped carry the UN?s message to the Afghan people.

Simon Cameron-MOORE