SECRETARY-GENERAL VISITS ETHIOPIA, 29 APRIL - 2 MAY

 

(Received from the Spokesman travelling with the Secretary-General.)

The Secretary-General departed New York on the morning of Tuesday, 28 April, to begin an official trip to Africa, where he was scheduled to visit eight countries:  Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya, United Republic of Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Eritrea.

He spent the night in Frankfurt, where he met on Tuesday evening with Germany's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Helmut Schaefer, who had just returned from a visit to Sudan and Djibouti.  They spoke for about an hour and a half about African issues, the Middle East and Iraq.

The Secretary-General arrived in Addis Ababa in the evening of 29 April, on the first leg of his eight-nation tour.  He was met by the Foreign Minister, Seyoum Mesfin; the Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), K.Y. Amoako; and by the Acting Representative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Hendrik Olesen.

In the morning of Thursday, 30 April, the Secretary-General met for an hour with Foreign Minister Mesfin.  Their talks focused on the conflicts in Somalia and the Sudan.  He then laid a wreath at the Martyrs' Monument, which commemorates the massacre in 1937 of more than 100,000 Ethiopians (predominantly civilians, including women, children and the elderly), by Italian forces.  With Prime Minister Meles Zenawi he discussed a wide range of African issues, from troubled areas like the African Horn and the Great Lakes region, to African peacekeeping, reconstruction and development. 

After lunch with the Prime Minister, he travelled to the National Palace to pay a courtesy call on President Negasso Gidada, whom he thanked for Ethiopia's cooperation with the United Nations.  He and the President then inaugurated the new United Nations Conference Centre attached to the building of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).  The Secretary-General called it a "symbol of the United Nations enduring commitment to Africa".  

The Secretary-General then attended the Conference on African Women and Economic Development, held in the new Conference Centre, where he made an address.  “Without a clear recognition that women's rights are human rights”, he said, “and that they cut across all aspects of the development process, the African renaissance will grind to a halt”.  He was given a standing ovation.  (See Press Release SG/SM/6544 for the full text of the statement.)

That evening he hosted a reception on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the ECA.

The Secretary-General spent the entire morning of Friday, 1 May, at the closing session of the Conference on African Women and Economic Development.  The Ethiopian Government then hosted a luncheon for the senior-most officials attending the Conference -- the Presidents of Botswana and Burkina Faso, the Prime Ministers of Algeria and Ethiopia and the Vice-Presidents of Ghana and Uganda.  The Secretary-General also attended.

In the afternoon, he held a series of bilateral meetings, starting with President Festus Mogae of Botswana.  He then met with President Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso, who will host the next summit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU).  They had a tour d'horizon of African issues. 

Those meetings were followed by one with Ahmed Ouyahia, the Prime Minister of Algeria.  They discussed sanctions regimes, specifically the one applied to Libya, the peace process in Western Sahara and the internal situation in Algeria, on which the Secretary General pressed for acceptance of a United Nations human rights rapporteur. 

With Mohamed Said Saadi, Minister for Family and Childhood of Morocco, he discussed Western Sahara.

He was then briefed by Søren Jessen-Petersen of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on his recent five-nation tour of the Great Lakes region of Africa ( Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, United Republic of Tanzania and Ethiopia).

That evening he dined with the heads of United Nations agencies in Addis Ababa, hosted by the Economic Commission of Africa.  They described their collective effort to begin planning and working together as he had urged them to do in the context of his reforms.

The Secretary-General concluded his official visit to Ethiopia on Saturday, 2 May, with a meeting with Thelma Awori, Director of UNDP's Regional Bureau for Africa, followed by a visit to the OAU, where he met with Secretary-General Salim A. Salim and his senior aides.

At the OAU, the Secretary-General discussed the conflicts in Somalia and Sudan and the leading role in the peace process in each country assumed by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), which encompasses the nations originally affected by the East African drought of the 1980s    Eritrea, Sudan, Uganda, Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti.

They also touched on other African problem areas, such as the Great Lakes, Comoros and Western Sahara.  The practical obstacles to African peacekeeping, such as logistics and finance, were also discussed.

Secretary-General Salim informed the Secretary-General that the OAU hoped to have its Panel on Investigation into the Rwanda genocide up and running by July.  The Secretary General pledged United Nations support for the work of the panel, which would be looking into the events before, during and after the 1994 slaughter of over a half million Tutsi and moderate Hutu.

Before leaving Ethiopia, the Secretary General gave a press conference.

The Secretary-General and his party departed for Djibouti that afternoon aboard a United Nations plane borrowed from the United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG).

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For information media • not an official record