DAILY PRESS BRIEFING OF OFFICE OF SPOKESMAN FOR SECRETARY-GENERAL
Press Briefing
DAILY PRESS BRIEFING OF OFFICE OF SPOKESMAN FOR SECRETARY-GENERAL
19960311
FOR INFORMATION OF UNITED NATIONS SECRETARIAT ONLY
Sylvana Foa, Spokesman for Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, began today's noon briefing by announcing that the Secretary-General this morning met with the senior advisory group for the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) (Istanbul, 1996). Early this afternoon, he would be meeting with three non-governmental organizations which made a $38,100 contribution to the World Food Programme (WFP) to buy food for the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea. He would be accepting the check in that amount from the three organizations.
At 3 p.m., the Secretary-General would address the high-level working group on the strengthening of the United Nations system, she said.
Tonight, the Secretary-General would leave for the Summit of Peacemakers in Sharm El-Sheik, Ms. Foa said. He felt that it was very important that leaders get together and act because terrorism had a global dimension, and only a global approach would stop it in its tracks.
"When he leaves Egypt, he will fly on to Geneva where he is going to meet with the team working on a the comprehensive disarmament talks", Ms. Foa said.
She said that Ismat Kittani, the Secretary-General's Special Adviser, reported over the weekend that he had met with the leadership of the United Tajik Opposition. The Opposition had agreed to extend the existing cease-fire unconditionally for another three months. However, the Opposition declined to accept the Government's invitation to attend the special session of the Tajik Parliament, which had been scheduled for today, in accordance with the agreement reached at the most recent round of Inter-Tajik talks held in Ashkhabad. Mr. Kittani was currently in Dushanbe. He addressed the Parliament's special session this morning and informed it of the Opposition's agreement to extend the cease-fire. He said that, given a similar statement made earlier by the President of Tajikistan, he considered that the extension of the cease-fire had now been agreed to by both sides. "So let's keep our fingers crossed", Ms. Foa said.
"We've had some bad news from Georgia", Ms. Foa said. A member of the United Nations Observer Mission from Bangladesh was killed when his vehicle hit a mine on Saturday. He was killed instantly by the explosion, and two others, a Hungarian military observer and an interpreter, were injured, but their injuries were not considered life-threatening. The United Nations vehicle hit the mine on a road north of the village of Retchki in the Gali Sector.
"Field reports from the suburbs of Sarajevo are distressing to say the least", she went on. "They say that law and order has further deteriorated in the suburbs of Ilidza and Grbavica over the weekend. The vacuum of authority created by the rapid departure of Serb police authorities without the existence of effective Federation control has resulted in lawlessness characterized by robbery, arson, intimidation and, in a couple of cases, murder. The two suburbs have no police force to maintain law and order. Most of the Serb police officers have already been evacuated, and the few remaining are unwilling or incapable of discharging police functions. The residents who remain there have no fire protection since all the fire-fighting equipment has been withdrawn."
She said that the consequent condition of terror was forcing the few Serbs who might want to remain to join the exodus. The heads of the Implementation Force (IFOR) contingent and the International Police Task Force (IPTF) met with about 100 mostly elderly Ilidza residents on Saturday trying to allay their fears and to persuade them to stay. The frightened residents turned the meeting into a frantic appeal for intervention by IFOR.
Ms. Foa said that the situation was not good, and that buildings were being set ablaze.
"In that regard, I can tell you that we now have 563 IPTF monitors deployed in Bosnia, and 358 of them are in the Sarajevo region. We have another 181 awaiting deployment in Zagreb", she went on.
On Rwanda, Ms. Foa said that Shahryar Khan would remain the Special Representative of the Secretary-General in the post-United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) operation, which would be called the United Nations Operation in Rwanda (UNOR).
She informed correspondents that the World Chronicle television interview with Thomas Johansen, Director of the United Nations Development Programme's energy and atmosphere programme, would be shown on in-house channels 6, 23 and 38 at 2:30 p.m.
On press conferences, she said that tomorrow at 11 a.m., there would be a presentation by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Rwanda Evaluation Report. That report was a study that evaluated international response to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. It was prepared by an international team under the auspices of the Danish office handling development assistance. It was going to be released worldwide tomorrow. She believed that copies of the synthesis were available for correspondents at the documents counter.
The Spokesman said that the United Nations welcomed any initiative to improve the capacity to provide humanitarian assistance which, of course, depended on the support of Member States. "I am sure that the various
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proposals in this report will be reviewed carefully by the agencies concerned."
Regarding the press conference, she recalled a question asked by a correspondent several weeks ago, which, she said, had haunted her ever since. That correspondent had asked if the Secretariat did not have the moral responsibility to uphold the credibility of the United Nations and whether it was not abrogating that responsibility by allowing the United Nations to take blame, to be the scapegoat all the time. Should not the United Nations stand up and say "no" when it was asked to fulfil a mandate without the necessary resources? The Rwanda report, which cost $1.7 million, with funding from 37 countries, was something that the United Nations had to take a stand about -- it contained some serious inaccuracies that lent an almost revisionist flavour to the study.
In particular, she said, in study Number Two entitled "Early Warning and Conflict Management", the authors made several blithe, misguided and unfounded assertions about the actions, or lack thereof, of the Secretary-General and the Secretariat. Those assertions did not reflect reality. It was a matter of public record that the Secretary-General had appealed time and time again to Member States to increase the force and to strengthen the mandate of the United Nations force in Rwanda. It was ironic that, at the time those allegations were coming out, the Secretary-General was once again urging the international community to respond to the signals and make contingency plans to avoid a recurrence of such a tragedy in Burundi.
"It might be helpful to go through what actually happened on Rwanda", she said. What the United Nations Secretariat was basically being accused of was standing by, not taking any action, misreading the conflict and letting the whole thing go into a black file which was circulated very quietly, and not keeping the Security Council well enough informed. She then gave the following chronology of the events in Rwanda:
On 24 September 1993, the Secretary-General reported to the Security Council on the implementation of the Arusha Accord which had been signed on 4 August. He recommended the establishment of UNAMIR and asked for 2,500 troops, including two infantry battalions of 800 troops each.
On 5 October, the Security Council passed resolution 872 establishing UNAMIR for a period of six months and authorizing the Secretary-General to deploy one battalion.
On 30 December, the Secretary-General went back to the Security Council and said, "It doesn't look good. Let's deploy the second battalion". Despite the Council's request to him in an earlier message to consider ways to reduce the maximum troop strength, he argued that, under the existing circumstances, reduction of resources could jeopardize the peace process.
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On 6 January 1994, the Security Council agreed to deployment of the second battalion.
On 11 January 1994, there was an exchange of cables. Four communications were exchanged between the force commander in Kigali and the Department of Peace-Keeping Operations which basically resulted in the force commander being given permission on an ad hoc basis to assist the Government in securing areas so that illegal arms could be seized. This responded to the part of the report which said that his communications were ignored and put in a black file.
On 10 February, Chinmaya Gharekhan, the Secretary-General's Senior Political Adviser, briefed the Security Council about the tension and the deterioration of the situation in Rwanda. He again briefed the Council on 16 February on the same subject.
On 30 March, in his second report to the Security Council, the Secretary-General registered alarm over the deterioration of the security situation, the resurgence of violence, the insecurity engendered by the political impasse, the rapid and dramatic deterioration of security in Kigali, the distribution of arms to civilians and the increase in ethnically motivated crimes and murders.
On 6 April, the plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi crashed near Kigali airport killing all on board.
On 7 April, the interim Prime Minister was executed, and 10 Belgian soldiers serving with UNAMIR were killed. On the same day, there was an oral report to the Security Council by Mr. Gharekhan talking about the serious implications for the civilian population.
Iqbal Riza, then of the Department of Peace-Keeping Operations, briefed the Council on 9 April, talking about widespread fighting and disorder.
On 11 April, Mr. Riza again briefed the Council on the rapidly deteriorating situation throughout Rwanda.
On 12 April, the Secretary-General met with the Belgian Foreign Minister very late at night in Bonn and they discussed withdrawal of certain contingents. He immediately, the next day, sent a letter to the Security Council saying, "We need to reinforce".
On 20 April, in his third report to the Council, the Secretary-General gave the Council three options. He said that the first option was the one he wanted. The second option was less desirable, and the third, he considered out. The first option was for an immediate and massive reinforcement of UNAMIR troops to stop the fighting and the massacres. That would require several thousand additional troops and would also require that UNAMIR be given
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enforcement powers under Chapter VII. Option B was that it would be downsized and only a small contingent would remain there as an intermediary between the powers. The third option, which he said he did not recommend at all, was that UNAMIR be completely withdrawn.
On 21 April, the Security Council adopted resolution 912 authorizing the reduction of the force level to 270 troops.
On 29 April, the Secretary-General again wrote a letter to the Security Council saying that downsizing was not the answer and that it was getting worse. "We must consider more forceful means." He said that the scale of human suffering and its implications for neighbouring countries left the Security Council with no alternative but to examine that possibility.
On 4 May, contrary to what the report said, the Secretary-General went on Nightline and called the situation genocide, and said, "Something must be done or we will all be accused of genocide".
"Well, we are all being accused of complicity in genocide but I don't think it is useful for the United Nations to take it sitting down anymore", Ms. Foa said.
Ms. Foa said that the Security Council met this morning on the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) set up under Security Council resolution 687 (1991) in connection with the disposal of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
She announced that at 11 a.m. on Thursday, 14 March, there would a press briefing on the United Nations System-wide Special Initiative on Africa. The Initiative would be formally launched by the President of the World Bank and heads of other United Nations agenciess on Friday, 15 March, in the Economic and Social Council Chamber. The press briefing would be by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Assistant Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); Stephen Lewis, Deputy Executive Director, External Relations of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF); and Djibril Diallo, Director of the Division of Public Affairs of the UNDP.
In response to a correspondent's question on whether the United Nations was doing anything "to cool down the tensions between mainland China and Taiwan", Ms. Foa recalled that, on Friday, she had told correspondents that the Secretary-General hoped that all concerned would exercise restraint so as not to interfere with the rights of other States under international law and to avoid tensions in the area. "The issue of Taiwan, province of China, is an internal one on which the General Assembly ruled unequivocally in resolution 2758. In this context, the Secretary-General notes China's firm and long- standing position that this issue would be resolved solely by peaceful means." Other than that, the normal contacts were under way as usual, she said.
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Another correspondent noted that two United States battleship groups were either off the coast or on their way to the area and asked whether, in the views of the Secretary-General, that situation was a threat to international peace and security. Ms. Foa responded that, "We are watching the situation very closely".
A correspondent referred to the Spokesman's earlier statement that Mr. Gharekhan had briefed the Security Council on two occasions on Rwanda and asked where the Secretary-General was at those times. She also said that Chapter VII referred to a breach of or a threat to international peace and asked whether it could have been proven at that time that the Rwandan massacres were, in fact, a danger to countries around it. Ms. Foa responded that the report of that day clearly spelt out that the situation was a threat to the stability of the countries of the region. "Since we now have 1.7 million refugees, this has been borne out."
Asked for the latest information on the second stand-off involving UNSCOM inspectors, Ms. Foa said that Mr. Buchanan, the spokesman for UNSCOM, would be briefing correspondents. "There is a stand-off. It is the same team that was involved in Friday and Saturday morning's stand-off. It is a site outside Baghdad about 50 kilometres south-east. They seemed to be negotiating it at the moment."
Asked if there was a special arrangement with regard to the oil talks with the Iraqis, Ms. Foa noted that correspondents had had a photo opportunity with them this morning. She said that her office would be talking to them throughout the afternoon to see if transparency could be increased a little bit. The talks were at such a sensitive stage that they really preferred to talk in quiet and to open the door on the whole thing later.
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