DAILY PRESS BRIEFING OF OFFICE OF SPOKESMAN FOR SECRETARY-GENERAL

Press Briefing

DAILY PRESS BRIEFING OF OFFICE OF SPOKESMAN FOR SECRETARY-GENERAL

Manoel de Almeida e Silva, Deputy Spokesman for the Secretary-General, told correspondents at the beginning of today's noon briefing that the Security Council was consulting this morning on the situation in Iraq. At the outset of the consultations, senior United Nations officials -- the Deputy to the Chef de Cabinet, Rolf Knutsson, and the Executive Director of the Office of the Iraq Programme, Benon Sevan, who is also the United Nations Security Coordinator -- updated the Council on the Iraqi situation. Council members were presently expressing their views on the "what next?" question.

Following consultations on Iraq, the Deputy Spokesman said, the Council would take up the situation in Guinea-Bissau. It had before it a draft resolution, by which it was expected to request the Secretary-General to make recommendations to it on a possible United Nations role in the peace and reconciliation process in that country, including the early establishment of liaison arrangements between the United Nations and the Economic Community of West African States' Monitoring Observer Group (ECOMOG). The ECOMOG was expected to play a major peacekeeping role in the implementation of peace agreements in Guinea-Bissau.

Mr. Almeida e Silva next updated the statement made yesterday by Mr. Sevan and issued by the Office of the Iraq Programme concerning the return to Baghdad of the humanitarian workers who had gone to Amman, Jordan. A final decision on their return would be taken today. Meanwhile, arrangements were being made for their return from Amman to Baghdad by tomorrow. Independent inspection agents from the Lloyds Register were now heading back to their stations. Some agents were already working at Umm Qasr; others were expected to start working at Trebil and Al-Walid tomorrow. Oil exports were continuing, and the Office of the Iraq Programme was assessing the impact of the military strike on the "oil-for-food" programme, which it was expected to produce in a few days.

Continuing on the Iraqi situation, the Deputy Spokesman read out a correction by the World Food Programme (WFP) concerning a number of newswire reports this morning that United States and British air strikes had destroyed 260,000 tonnes of food in a WFP-managed warehouse in Tikrit. The report was erroneous. There were 2,600 tonnes of food in the warehouse and the extent of the damage was still unknown. Moreover, the warehouse was not managed by the WFP, but by the Iraqi Minister of Trade. Also, according to the WFP, 260,000 tonnes of food would be equal to 10 per cent of the overall value of the food basket for six months; in fact, the WFP reported that the damage to the warehouse would not have a major impact on the oil-for-food programme.

He then drew attention to the Secretary-General's latest report on the United Nations Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (UNMIBH). In it, the Secretary-General stated that the Mission had continued to shift its

activities from general police monitoring to the establishment of the rule of law, including restructuring and reform of police services. That would encourage the police services to reflect the ethnic composition of the communities they served and to protect citizens from human rights violations and crime.

Also in the report, the Deputy Spokesman said, the Secretary-General stressed that the strong and consistent support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)-led multinational Stabilization Force (SFOR) would continue to be critically important in providing adequate security for implementing the Mission's mandate. He appealed to Council members to extend their full diplomatic support to the Mission's work of creating multi-ethnic police services in the Federation and the Republika Srpska.

Kyrgyzstan would be the twenty-first Member State to sign a Memorandum of Understanding on the standby arrangements for United Nations peacekeeping arrangements. The signing ceremony would take place on Tuesday at 12:15 p.m. So far, 80 countries had officially expressed their willingness to participate in the standby arrangements, which were designed to accelerate the deployment of peacekeeping operations.

He noted that on Saturday, in response to fighting in the southern part of the Republic of the Congo, concentrated in the capital of Brazzaville, the United Nations had evacuated 10 international staff to the Democratic Republic of the Congo on two flights provided by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Five international staff remained in the Republic of the Congo. The situation was unclear and might be dangerous, but the staff would remain for now. Local staff arriving from the countryside would be housed in the garden of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Efforts were under way to provide them with tents and water.

Available on the racks today was an exchange of letters between the Secretary-General and the Security Council President concerning a new Special Representative for the United Nations Preventive Deployment Force (UNPREDEP) in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The Council had taken note of the Secretary-General's intention to appoint Fernando Valenzuela Marzo as the new Special Representative. Mr. Valenzuela, who was currently serving as Ambassador of Spain to Canada, would take up his new functions at the beginning of next year. His biographical note was available in the Spokesman's Office, in Spanish only.

The Deputy Spokesman announced a forthcoming press conference for 10 a.m. Tuesday in room S-226 by the Permanent Representative of Austria to the United Nations, Ernst Sucharipa. The Ambassador would provide the European Union's assessment of the fifty-third session of the General Assembly.

Turning to a question about the status of talks between legal experts from Libya and the United Nations on the Lockerbie bombing, Mr. Almeida e Silva said

Daily Press Briefing - 3 - 21 December 1998

he did not think those talks were going on just now, but he would provide the correspondent with any additional information. He drew the correspondent's attention to the Secretary-General's reply today upon entering Headquarters to a question about the tenth anniversary of the Lockerbie incident, and his message for the victims' families.

He said that the Secretary-General had expressed regret that 10 years after the event, "we have not been able to get to the truth so that they [the families] can put this behind them, mourn their dead and carry on with their lives". He was "still hopeful that we will still get a positive decision from the Libyan Government". Although he had hoped that would happen before the tenth anniversary, he had not lost hope and the families should not either. To a follow-up question about why it was so difficult to begin the talks, the Deputy Spokesman said there had been a meeting of the People's Congress, and the Libyans had their own mechanisms for decision-making, which were awaited.

Asked for the United Nations position concerning a resolution by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) calling for the United Nations to step in to help solve the problem in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he said that was an initiative of the OAU and several African leaders. Of course, the United Nations supported it; recently, the Secretary-General had met with the parties in Paris. The anticipated ceasefire agreement had not emerged, but continued talks would hopefully produce the desired results.

In response to another question, the Deputy Spokesman said he did not yet have a readout of the meeting the Secretary-General had had this morning with the Permanent Representatives to the United Nations of Austria, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Asked if he had a read out from the earlier meeting between the Secretary-General and the Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs of the United States, Thomas Pickering, he said he did -- they had discussed Iraq and Libya.

Another correspondent, noting the Secretary-General's comment this morning that he had sent a message to the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, asked about the content of that message. The Deputy Spokesman said he did not have the content of that message.

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