DAILY PRESS BRIEFING OF OFFICE OF SPOKESMAN FOR SECRETARY-GENERAL
Press Briefing
DAILY PRESS BRIEFING OF OFFICE OF SPOKESMAN FOR SECRETARY-GENERAL
19961127
FOR INFORMATION OF UNITED NATIONS SECRETARIAT ONLY
Sylvana Foa, Spokesman for the Secretary-General, told correspondents at today's noon briefing that the Secretary-General's interim report to the Security Council on the implementation of resolution 986 was now out. In the report, which contained a large number of annexes, the Secretary-General said that, from the outset, he had been committed to an early and comprehensive implementation of the resolution, and was pleased to be able to report that significant progress had been achieved.
Most of the arrangements required to bring resolution 986 into effect were today in place, the Spokesman went on. The oil overseers had been appointed; contracts had been signed with firms which will supply independent inspection agents to monitor the export of oil from Iraq and confirm the arrival of humanitarian supplies there; the distribution plan had been finalized and approved; a humanitarian coordinator had been appointed and an observation and reporting mechanism prepared to ensure the equitable distribution of humanitarian supplies inside Iraq; and lastly, the escrow account had been opened.
The Secretary-General, Ms. Foa told correspondents, said that one of the most fundamental aspects in discussions with the Government of Iraq had been the unrestricted freedom of movement of United Nations personnel, an area on which the humanitarian coordinator and his staff had recently encountered difficulty. He added that he expected the Iraqi authorities to abide by all their obligations under resolution 986 and the memorandum of understanding. By early December, Saybolt -- the company contracted to carry out the oil inspection -- would be able to certify that the metering systems were up to acceptable standards. Following that, the 14 oil inspection agents would be deployed in Mina Al-Bakr, Zakho and Ceyhan. In the meantime, Lloyds, which had an advance team in the country, would make arrangements to dispatch the initial complement of goods-inspection agents. As correspondents were aware, there would eventually be 32 such agents in place.
The Secretary-General also said that preparations were under way within the Department of Humanitarian Affairs to send an advance team to Iraq for assessment of the progress requirements, including logistical and support arrangements, ahead of the arrival of the rest of the international staff. "So guess what. We're not quite cooking with gas, but we might be cooking with oil very soon."
The next step, Ms. Foa continued, was to wait for the oil-pricing formula to be accepted. Under the 48-hour no-objection rule, that should be known by 1 p.m. today. [Shortly after 1 p.m., Deputy Spokesman Ahmed Fawzi
announced that the oil-pricing formula had been accepted.] Meanwhile, Saybolt was expected to arrive in Iraq on 3 December to take a look at the broken meter and see how well it had been repaired. She had no idea how long it took to test a meter, "but that's the main thing we're waiting for". Then, if everything was still "go go go", the Secretary-General would make his final report to the Security Council. The report out today was an interim report; the idea behind it was to get it all out there so that all we had to do in the end was say "Let's go" in a one-page report.
The Spokesman added that, according to the oil-for-food formula of resolution 986, one third of the funds coming from the oil sales would go to the Compensation Commission. That Commission had now issued a new report on its work, saying that the sixth and last instalment of Category A claims (for the 80,456 people forced to flee Iraq) had been awarded compensation for a total of $320 million. The Commission had now completed processing of all Category A claims. Of the 922,000 claims so far received by the panel, 862,000 had been awarded compensation for a total of $3.2 billion. The Compensation Commission, she added, was looking for some money to hand out because it did not have any left.
This morning, the Spokesman said, the Secretary-General had had a rare moment of fun. The Chargé d'affaires of Seychelles, Claude Morel, had presented him with a coco de mer, a double coconut-shell -- very beautiful and probably the most popular item tourists brought back from Seychelles. A nice gift to the United Nations.
At 11:15 a.m., the Secretary-General had held a task force meeting on eastern Zaire with various members of the Secretariat, including Kofi Annan, Marrack Goulding, Yasushi Akashi, Chinmaya Gharekhan, Ismat Kittani, Lansana Kouyate and Hedi Annabi. The Spokesman said she had herself left that meeting just in time for the briefing. The meeting was intended basically to go over the situation in eastern Zaire and assess where matters now stood.
There was some rather interesting news from the region, she said. An advance inter-agency team from the World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had travelled down the Goma-Bukavu road on Wednesday, where they had found 50,000 Rwandan refugees in the Minova region, at the edge of Lake Kivu and about 35 kilometres to the south-west. The team, in a convoy of six vehicles, had driven through Sake and halfway down the western edge of Lake Kivu to a town called Nyabibwe.
In Minova itself, they had seen approximately 40,000 refugees, who said that they had been camping there for several days along the lake and in the nearby woods. They said they were waiting in Minova because they had heard that boats would be coming to ferry them back into Rwanda. Along the road, the team had counted another 10,000 refugees moving in small family groups towards Minova. The UNHCR reported that the people seemed to be in fairly
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good health, but things were not so good in Nyabibwe (about 100 kilometres south of Goma), where a major battle had apparently taken place. Scattered along the road were the carcases of 57 trucks, buses and cars, many of them apparently hit by rocket-propelled grenades. Other vehicles had broken windows and were simply abandoned. They had seen no dead bodies along the road, but local villagers said that a lot of civilians had been behind the fleet of 57 abandoned vehicles. They had fled into the hills. Local residents around Minova said that there were very many refugees in the hills, up to several miles to the west. However, the inter-agency team had not been allowed to go into the area to confirm numbers. The team members said that when they came through Sake this morning the town had been completely empty, but on the way back 7,000 refugees, who had somehow materialized from the nearby bush, were waiting for them. The team had, therefore, called in buses to pick those people up. While it was often difficult to catch a glimpse of refugees, said the Spokesman, they tended to come forward and make themselves known when they saw a United Nations vehicle.
As she spoke, said Ms. Foa, the Secretary-General was meeting with the Permanent Representative of Italy, Francesco Paolo Fulci, to discuss the presidency of the Security Council for the month of December.
Also this morning, the Security Council was expected to extend the mandate of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) for another six-month period, until 31 May 1997. The Council was also expected to renew the mandate for the United Nations Preventive Deployment Force (UNPREDEP) in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, with its military strength reduced by 300, and with termination also scheduled for 31 May.
Turning to United Nations Correspondents Association (UNCA) affairs, the Spokesman said that 4 p.m. today was the deadline for nominations to the UNCA executive elections. Jim Wurst would be in the 3rd floor bullpen all afternoon to accept nominations: there would be no extensions and no exemptions. Jim was tough. Ms. Foa went on to say that the Parliamentarians for Global Action would present parliamentarians from the Great Lakes region at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, 4 December. The World Wildlife Fund would brief correspondents on the Law of the Sea at 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, 5 December, in the UNCA Club, while on Friday, the Permanent Representative of Indonesia, Nugroho Wisnumurti, would brief reporters at 1:30 p.m. on the work of the Security Council in the month of November. That would also be in the UNCA Club.
Next Monday, 2 December, World AIDS Day would be observed at Headquarters, the Spokesman concluded. Its theme would be "One World, One Hope", and observance would be at 3 p.m. in the General Assembly Hall. It would, of course, be under the auspices of the President of the General Assembly. The Secretary-General would deliver a World AIDS Day message -- and Liz Taylor would be attending along with television host Christina Saralegui. Liz Taylor would be at the United Nations on Monday at 3 p.m.
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Asked whether the refugees near Lake Kivu had indeed been picked up by boats, the Spokesman said that the UNHCR had requested trucks to return them to Rwanda. It was hoped that the trucks would get there tomorrow, although there were reports that the 7,000 refugees in Sake were already being trucked out. But the 50,000 people in the Minova area were a little farther away, and much greater numbers of vehicles were being called in for them.
A correspondent asked for a description of the "real mandate" of the Canadian forces, which were reported seeking to establish headquarters at Entebbe, Uganda. The Spokesman said that she did not have the relevant resolution before her, but her understanding was that it was to facilitate the return of all humanitarian aid agencies and the provision of humanitarian aid to people in need. The situation in eastern Zaire was evolving very fast, and people were moving, which presented a problem. Things were not so easy as they once had been. She had seen on the wires this morning that the possibility of air-drops was once again being discussed because people were so widely scattered. But as inter-agency teams gained progressively greater access to eastern Zaire, it might become easier actually to get help to people.
A correspondent asked the Spokesman whether the Secretary-General had acknowledged that central elements had been left out of the briefing to the Security Council on 11 January 1994. Specifically, was the Council alerted to the possibility of a plan for systematic killing in Rwanda?
The Spokesman noted that her questioner referred to an article by a correspondent in the Boston Globe. The story was familiar to everyone: on 11 January 1994, General Romeo Dallaire, United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) head in Kigali, had sent a cable addressed to Maurice Baril saying basically that an informant in Kigali -- someone he felt comfortable with, but with whom others did not feel so comfortable -- had told him that plans to kill the Tutsis, to commit genocide against the Tutsis, were being formulated, and that arms caches were being hidden everywhere by the Interahamwe. The existence of that cable had been known for some time, and had been referred to several times by the United Nations, including in the chronology distributed at one point to correspondents.
The Spokesman recalled that the Secretary-General had asked General Dallaire and his Special Representative, Jacques Booh-Booh, to go and immediately brief the Ambassadors of the United States, Belgium and France on the informant's story. He had also instructed them to go immediately to the President of Rwanda and inform him that what the informant reported would, of course, be in major violation of the Arusha Accords, and that the international community hoped that he would take some action. She believed, the Spokesman went on, that they had also gone to the Prime Minister of Rwanda with the same message. The next day, there had been a regular briefing to the Security Council in which the concerns of UNAMIR over the possibility of increased violence had been presented. Evidently, the word "genocide" had not
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been used at the briefing. "But let's get real here". The cable could not be passed around because it named names -- and General Dallaire was very concerned about his informant's life. "This was just one person telling us something" -- and as she had already pointed out, some people were comfortable with that particular person, and some were not. The discussion about that cable was whether to go public with it, or else to work to try and stop whatever was happening before it happened. If the United Nations had gone public with it at that time, if it really believed the cable (and there were some people who did and some who did not), would it then spark the Interahamwe into immediate action to do their dirty work? These were things that came up all the time.
She recalled the first reports of concentration camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina, when the United Nations and the ICRC had got together for three or four very agonizing days of debate. The question then had been: if we go to the world and announce that these camps exist, will they go in and kill all the prisoners in them? That had been a very, very real fear. Finally, after several days, it had been decided to announce it. But these were dilemmas the United Nations routinely faced. "Yes, we had an informant. Yes, this informant used the word 'genocide'. Yes, this informant told us about arms caches. But were we positive this informant was right? No. Did we know that if we went public with this cable, the killings -- if there were going to be killings -- might begin immediately? We certainly thought that was a possibility. Did we try to do it through diplomacy? Did we ask the three major players in the area -- the Americans, the French and the Belgians -- to help us with this? Yes."
A correspondent said she understood that General Dallaire had asked the Secretary-General for permission to check out the arms caches mentioned in the cable, but that permission was denied on the grounds that the United Nations did not have a mandate to that effect. At that point, the correspondent asked, could the Security Council not have reviewed the situation in Rwanda and given a mandate if the Secretary-General had requested it?
The Spokesman replied that she did not have the cables in front of her, but she could pull them for the correspondent. She did know, however, that the Department of Peace-keeping Operations had cabled the Special Representative authorizing UNAMIR to respond positively to requests from the authorities, on a case-by-case basis, for assistance in recovery of the illegal arms. "But we had to have a request. This was not a Chapter VII operation. This was a Chapter VI operation." As correspondents knew, the Organization's hands were tied in such matters. But UNAMIR did have permission to check on arms caches on a case-by-case basis.
Pressed by a correspondent who suggested that 800,000 lives might have been saved by more immediate action, the Spokesman urged her questioner to recall the mood of the time. The UNAMIR force, organized two months earlier,
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had been authorized up to two battalions, and only one battalion had been sent. By the end of December, "we were begging the Council to dispatch the second battalion -- while the Council was already looking at a possible reduction of the operation. We did not know what was going to happen. No one -- no one -- did enough to stop this. But it sure is a lot easier to Monday- morning quarterback what we should have done almost three years ago with the knowledge we have today than with the very scant knowledge we had then".
Asked who had been opposed to publishing the cable, the Spokesman said that there had been no one person in opposition or in favour. The information simply was not firm. "We had an informant. If tomorrow we get an informant in Bombay who tells us there's a militia group intent on killing 200,000 people in Madhya Pradesh ... These are the kinds of things we get frequently, people who have their own political agenda. Therefore, we have to tread warily. We went as far as we thought we could. We went to three governments with extensive intelligence capacities and told them we had received this information. We told them that we were going to the President and Prime Minister of Rwanda with it."
Asked if the health of President Mobutu of Zaire was being monitored by the United Nations, Ms. Foa said that she had not seen anything recently, although President Mobutu now seemed to giving quite a few interviews, in which his voice was reported to be strong. President Mobutu was still in France. The Secretary-General had been on the telephone with him recently, and she would check with him. But the Secretary-General seemed quite optimistic whenever he spoke with the President of Zaire.
A correspondent recalled yesterday's question on whether the Secretary- General would accept an extension of his term by a year or two. The Spokesman replied that she had not had a chance to discuss it with him; the day had been taken up with the task force meeting on eastern Zaire. But as the Deputy Spokesman had stated, the Secretary-General would accept the decision of Member States, whatever that might be.
Samsiah Abdul-Majid, spokeswoman for General Assembly President Razali Ismail (Malaysia), said that the General Committee had decided this morning to recommend two additional items for inclusion in the agenda of the current session, on cooperation between the United Nations and the International Organization for Migration and on the proclamation of 7 December as International Civil Aviation Day. The report recommending those two additions would be considered in plenary on Friday.
This morning, the plenary had adopted a resolution on cooperation between the United Nations and the Economic Cooperation Organization. It was expected to vote on the draft resolution on the elimination of coercive economic measures as a means of political and economic compulsion. [Later:
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this draft resolution was adopted by a vote of 56 in favour to 4 against, with 76 abstentions.] That item had been added to the agenda of the Assembly on the proposal of Libya. The resolution called for the immediate repeal of unilateral extraterritorial laws that imposed sanctions on companies and nationals of other States, and called upon all States not to recognize unilateral extraterritorial coercive economic measures or legislative acts imposed by any State.
The Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) had approved a number of resolutions this morning, said Ms. Abdul-Majid. She had received a number of questions on the subject, but as of the time of the briefing the draft on Myanmar had not been approved. But a few ideas had been approved. Drafts concerning Cuba, Kosovo, and human rights and unilateral coercive measures had been approved with recorded votes. Others had been approved without vote. She would make the voting results available later. The draft on the situation of human rights in Cuba, she said, would have the Assembly regret the numerous violations of human rights, and urge the Government of Cuba to ensure freedom of expression and assembly, and call especially on the Government to release numerous persons detained for activities of a political nature.
The draft on the situation of human rights in Kosovo, said Ms. Abdul- Majid, would have the Assembly condemn all violations of human rights there, in particular, the repression of the ethnic Albanian population. It would demand that the authorities of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia take all necessary measures to bring to an immediate end all human rights violations against ethnic Albanians of Kosovo.
On humanitarian rights and unilateral coercive measures, the Assembly would reject coercive extraterritorial measures as tools for political or economic pressure against any country. It would call upon Member States that had initiated such measures to revoke them at the earliest time possible.
The Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization) had also approved a number of resolutions, including those on the work of the Special Committee on Israeli practices and on Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people. That resolution demanded that Israel, as the occupying Power, cease all practices and actions which violated the human rights of the Palestinian people.
There was a lot of media interest in the draft resolution in the Sixth Committee (Legal) on the establishment of the International Criminal Court, she said. The Committee was scheduled to consider the relevant draft resolution this afternoon, so action had not yet been taken.
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A correspondent asked whether the Security Council would be able to deliver a response to the Assembly on the question of the Secretary-General's term by 17 or 18 December. Ms. Abdul-Majid replied that the Assembly had decided that the current segment of the session would conclude on 17 December. The work of all the Main Committees and the plenary had been geared to a conclusion of the current segment by that date. That included consideration of the item on the appointment of the Secretary-General. When the correspondent asked whether the Assembly could meet later on the issue if it was not ready in time, she replied that that was a hypothetical question. The President was aiming for 17 December, as that was the date scheduled for conclusion of the current main portion.
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