DAILY PRESS BRIEFING OF OFFICE OF SPOKESMAN FOR SECRETARY-GENERAL

Press Briefing

DAILY PRESS BRIEFING OF OFFICE OF SPOKESMAN FOR SECRETARY-GENERAL

(Incorporates briefing by spokesman for General Assembly President.)

Fred Eckhard, Spokesman for the Secretary-General, began today's noon briefing by saying that the Security Council was meeting this morning to discuss several items. The first matter on its agenda was the United Nations Preventive Deployment Force in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The Council had reviewed the report of the Secretary General and the Council President was expected to make a press statement following the consultations.

Now the Council was discussing the situation between Eritrea and Ethiopia, Mr. Eckhard said. A draft resolution on the issue was put in blue, or finalized, last night, and the Council was expected to adopt it today. On Monday the Council would hold an open debate on children in armed conflict, starting at 10:30 a.m.

In a press release issued in Rome, the World Food Programme (WFP) welcomed the decision by the Government of Sudan to allow the agency to more than double the number of aircraft used to transport urgently needed food to hundreds of thousands of hungry people. The latest development, together with increasing donations from governments, would help save thousands of lives, Mr. Eckhard said, quoting the agency.

According to the WFP, he continued, so-called "famine zones" were emerging in about 25 pockets of the Bar el-Ghazal region of the Sudan, where according to reports, children were dying at the rate of about 15 a day. Those conditions were expected to deteriorate further as the population entered the "hunger gap" period between the planting of crops and the harvest. The press release and the fact sheet on the situation were available in room 378.

The Secretary-General, echoing the concern of the WFP over the deteriorating situation in southern Sudan, had asked donors to contribute rapidly and generously to alleviate the considerable shortfall of food urgently needed by 2.6 million Sudanese, the Spokesman said. The Secretary- General had also called on the belligerents to agree on a truce that would permit the opening of land routes, since an airlift alone could not reach all the people in need.

The United Nations today appealed for $20.2 million to meet the urgent humanitarian needs of populations affected by the crisis in Sierra Leone, Mr. Eckhard said. In the last three months, more than 237,000 Sierra Leoneans had fled into Liberia and Guinea, bringing the total number of refugees in those two countries to over a half million. In addition, about 50,000 Sierra Leoneans who had been forced to leave their homes but who remained in their country had sought shelter in camps and towns in the northern provinces. A press release issued in Geneva and New York by the Office for Coordination of

Humanitarian Affairs, which had prepared the appeal, noted the particularly alarming condition of the refugees suffering from exhaustion, disease and malnutrition.

Meanwhile, Mr. Eckhard said, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) expressed its strong concern over the situation in the Gueckedou region of Guinea bordering Sierra Leone and Liberia. There, about 150,000 recently arrived refugees from Sierra Leone had gathered in scattered sites where neither UNHCR nor its partners had regular access to them.

Word had just been received about a delay in the release of the report of the Secretary-General's investigative team on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mr. Eckhard said. Yesterday it had been announced that a member of the team, Daniel Michael O'Donnell, would join the noon briefing on Monday. It now appeared the report would be made available to the Council on Tuesday afternoon. Arrangements would be made for Mr. O'Donnell to be available to answer questions as soon as the report was shared with the Council sometime late on Tuesday.

The Secretary-General had just arrived in Ditchley, which was north-west of London, the Spokesman said. He would give his address at 1:45 p.m. New York time. An embargoed copy of the speech was available in room 378.

This morning, before driving out to Ditchley, the Secretary-General had a working lunch with Lord Carrington, the Spokesman said. They discussed the report of a task force chaired by Lord Carrington and sponsored by the United Nations Association of the United States on enforcing Security Council resolutions. They also discussed possible further areas of study that Lord Carrington might consider undertaking.

The Twelfth World AIDS Conference beginning in Geneva on Sunday and organized by the United Nations Programme on AIDS/HIV (UNAIDS) was bringing together more than 12,000 experts and others involved in the global campaign against AIDS, Mr. Eckhard said. The Executive Director of UNAIDS, Peter Piot, was opening the five-day conference at 5:30 p.m. local time on Sunday. A media advisory on the conference prepared by UNAIDS was available in room 378. It included a list of contacts in Geneva, New York and Paris.

Also available in room 378, Mr. Eckhard said, was a summary of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) briefing in Geneva. It included updates on the humanitarian situation inside and outside Guinea- Bissau, and an account of the UNHCR mission into Kosovo.

Today was the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, Mr. Eckhard said. In his message, the Secretary-General noted that the United Nations was founded to reaffirm faith in the dignity and worth of the human person. "We cannot get anywhere near fulfilling that pledge unless we wipe the scourge of torture off the face of the earth", Mr. Eckhard quoted, saying

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that the Secretary-General had also appealed to all governments and members of civil society to defeat torture and torturers everywhere. The Department of Public Information had a new website on the issue, located at www.un.org/events/torture. The statement was contained in a press release available in room 378.

There was also a press release from the Compensation Commission Governing Council, the body that paid compensation for losses and damages for Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, Mr. Eckhard said. The Council would hold its twenty-eighth session from 29 June to 1 July. It would consider new appointments, recommendations for the sixth instalment of individual claims and for the first instalment of corporate claims. Copies of the release were available in room 378.

The Secretary-General had sent a letter to the Security Council announcing his intention to appoint Lieutenant Colonel Graeme Roger Williams of New Zealand as the next Chief Military Observer of the United Nations Mission of Observers in Prevlaka, the Spokesman said. Colonel Williams would replace Colonel Harold Mwakio Tangai of Kenya, who would leave his post on 15 July after 20 months of service. A biographical release was expected by the end of the briefing.

At the initiative of "Friends of Microcredit at the United Nations", a dialogue on microcredit was being held today from 1:15 p.m. to 2:45 p.m. in the Trusteeship Council chamber. The President of Peru, Alberto Fujimori, would be the main speaker. The Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Louise Frechette, would be among many special guests.

A number of other press releases were available in room 378, Mr. Eckhard said. One from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) concerned the need for greater public access to environmental information. It contained the remarks of the Executive Director of UNEP, Klaus Topfer, to a recently concluded meeting in Denmark on that subject.

Also released was a report on a recent crop and food supply mission to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The mission carried out by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the WFP confirmed that the food crisis in the country was far from over, the Spokesman said. The food supply situation remained precarious and was expected to worsen over the next two critical months as stocks became exhausted.

A final release, Mr. Eckhard said, provided an update on the status of trials before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Preliminary defence motions were filed today in the case of Ferdinand Nahimana, a former senior officer of the Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines Broadcasting. The accused had pleaded not guilty to five charges against him, including genocide.

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A special ceremony would be held at Headquarters at 5 p.m. today in conference room 4 for the recipient of the Templeton Award for Progress in Religion, Mr. Eckhard said. The award was said to be the equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize in the area of organized religion and the recipient was Sir Sigmund Sternberg. Seven to eight hundred participants were expected. The Prize was approximately $1 million and Mr. Sternberg had already designated the charities to which he would donate the million-dollar prize. A press reference kit was available in room 378.

The United Nations working group on Informatics, along with the Business Council for the United Nations and the Association for Information Technologies, was sponsoring a symposium on Global Informatics Trends, Mr. Eckhard said. It would be held on Monday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Conference Room 2. All were invited to attend.

And finally, Mr. Eckhard said, at 12:30 p.m. today the United Nations Correspondents Association (UNCA) would hold a "German picnic" in the UNCA Club for United Nations correspondents to say good-bye to Press Officer Gunther Gruber of the German Mission to the United Nations, and to meet his successor, Jorg Marquardt.

A correspondent asked about a Wall Street Journal article that a week ago had said four African presidents would request the United Nations to send a mapping team to the disputed area between Eritrea and Ethiopia. Were there any plans for the United Nations to do that?

Mr. Eckhard said that a border demarcation exercise in the eventual shape of a peace agreement between Ethiopia and Eritrea had been under discussion for some time and there had been talk of United Nations involvement in that. However, a peace agreement in the dispute was still far off.

Alex Taukatch, spokesman for General Assembly President Hennadiy Udovenko, noted that as he was preparing for the briefing, a glitch in his computer had made it impossible to process information. He recalled that because just a few minutes before, the General Assembly had taken action on a slightly different kind of computer glitch; it had adopted a resolution urging Member States to forge global cooperation to assure a timely and effective response to the year 2000 problem. As 31 December 1999 neared and the transition was made to 2000, major problems were expected with some computer systems.

By adopting the consensus resolution without a vote, Mr. Taukatch said, the General Assembly called upon all governments, public and private sector organizations and civil society, to share locally, regionally and globally, their experiences in addressing the year 2000 problem, popularly known as the Y2K problem or the millennium bug. The resolution also requested the Secretary-General to take steps so that all parts of the United Nations system

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took measures to ensure that computers and equipment with embedded microprocessors were year-2000 compliant.

A number of delegates spoke regarding the importance of the step the Assembly was taking, Mr. Taukatch said, adding that the Assembly was meeting in Conference Room 1. That was because earlier this morning the Fifth Committee had completed the second part of its resumed fifty-second session and right after that, the General Assembly met in plenary in the same conference room.

In the morning, the Fifth Committee had met and acted on two draft resolutions on two interrelated issues, Mr. Taukatch said. One was the support account for peacekeeping operations (A/C.5/52/L.54) and the other was the question of gratis personnel (A/C.5/52/L.55). As mentioned yesterday, the Fifth Committee had not been able to reach agreement on those two draft resolutions earlier, but after very intensive and extensive consultations, they had managed to come to an agreement. The delegate of Australia who presented the report on the support account and who acted as coordinator of consultations, summed up the process by saying he was very relieved to present the report because at times during the consultations it felt there would be nothing to present.

However, agreement was reached, the drafts were approved in the Fifth Committee, and later they would be acted upon by the General Assembly. Thus, after dealing with the year 2000 problem, the General Assembly would act on all the reports the Fifth Committee adopted during the second part of its resumed fifty-second session.

The vast majority of the drafts dealt with the financing of peacekeeping operations, Mr. Taukatch said. A total of 15 draft resolutions and two draft decisions were approved by the Fifth Committee and the Assembly would act on them, generally following the same procedure as followed in the Committee. If there was no vote in the Committee, the General Assembly would do it the same unless there were other requests. Most of the Fifth Committee resolutions and reports were expected to be adopted without a vote, although during the Fifth Committee consideration of the financing of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), there were two votes, one on the inclusion of one preambular paragraph and four operative paragraphs, and then on the whole draft.

The Fifth Committee would have another resumed session from 17-21 August, Mr. Taukatch said. In response to a question, he said there were no changes in the two drafts from yesterday except that brackets had been removed from some marked paragraphs during informal consultations prior to the meeting.

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