Geneva, Tuesday

United Nations agencies voiced mounting concern today, over the suppression of women's rights by Afghanistan's Taleban Islamic movement, and a growing tide of refugees fleeing conflict in the country.

The UN Children's Fund UNICEF and the refugee agency UNHCR said the two developments were causing increasingly serious social problems across the war-devastated country and especially in the capital, Kabul.

''The exclusion of girls and women from the public sphere has disastrous consequences for the entire nation, as well as being an affront to basic human rights,'' UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said.

''Not only are they shut out of educational opportunities, but they are denied the right to contribute to their families' welfare and the country's economy.''

Bellamy said the Taleban's education minister in Kabul had gone back on a promise to UN officials last month, that girls up to the age of nine would be allowed to attend school when they re-opened at the end of March.

Only boys were being allowed to go to school in the two thirds of the country controlled by the Taleban, which captured Kabul last September, ousting a more moderate Islamic administration whose forces it is still fighting.

Kabul University, where women accounted for 4000 of a 10,000-strong student body when it was closed by the Taleban last September, re-opened last week without female teachers or students, UNICEF said.

''Afghanistan is a nation of widows. Women are not only vital members of the workforce, but are frequently the only breadwinners in the family,'' Bellamy declared.

''If they cannot earn a living they will not be able to feed their children. The consequences will be catastrophic.''

UNHCR spokeswoman Pam O'Toole said here today, that the already ''debilitated and impoverished population'' of Kabul had been swollen by up to 15% since January, by the arrival of displaced people from farming areas to the north.

Kabul, a city of around 1,000,000 people of a total Afghan population of 15,000,000, had had to accomodate a total of around 140,000 more since early January.

Over the past three weeks, an average of 800 people a day had been passing through the UNHCR checkpoint on the northern edge of the city.