DAILY PRESS BRIEFING BY OFFICE OF SPOKESMAN FOR SECRETARY-GENERAL

Press Briefing

DAILY PRESS BRIEFING BY OFFICE OF SPOKESMAN FOR SECRETARY-GENERAL

The following is a near-verbatim transcript of today's noon briefing by Fred Eckhard, Spokesman for the Secretary-General.

**Security Council

The Security Council is meeting in consultations this morning to hear the Under-Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations, Hedi Annabi, present the Secretary-General’s report on the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO).

The Secretary-General reports that despite numerous efforts by his Personal Envoy James Baker III, no progress was made during the last round of talks held in London on 28 June between the Frente POLISARIO and the Kingdom of Morocco. Still, the Secretary-General is hopeful that some headway can be made during the forthcoming expert-level talks scheduled to be held later this week in Geneva.

A recommendation is made to extend the mandate of MINURSO by another three months until 21 October and a vote on a resolution is expected on Monday of next week.

After considering the report on Western Sahara, the Council is expected to resume the discussions on Sierra Leone that it began yesterday.

**Sierra Leone

Meanwhile, in Sierra Leone, the situation there is described as tense and unpredictable.

We have learned that a Nigerian peacekeeper was killed in an exchange of fire when his patrol ran into suspected combatants of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) on Sunday. That was near Rogberi Junction in the western part of Sierra Leone. The incident took place on Sunday; his body was recovered yesterday.

On the humanitarian front, the health situation for displaced civilians at Mile 91 continues to deteriorate due to poor water and sanitation conditions. A key obstacle to expanding programmes in Mile 91 is the lack of Ministry of Health staff, who have left due to security concerns. Malnutrition has also increased. The World Food Programme (WFP) and its partner CARE are in the process of distributing 700 metric tons of food in one-month rations to about 60,000 internally displace people in Mile 91. The process of identifying suitable sites for the new camps is underway.

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The Secretary-General's report on the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone, which was due out tomorrow, is now expected to be delayed an additional couple of days.

The Secretary-General, by the way, has invited Force Commander Major General Vejay Jetley to come to New York on Monday next week to personally brief him on the weekend extraction operation.

**Somalia

In Arta, which is a small town in Djibouti, The Somalia National Peace Conference voted overwhelmingly on Sunday to approve the Somali Transitional Charter, which is to serve as an interim constitution for the country. The aim of this document is to provide the framework for a federal structure for Somalia as a means of bringing all elements of society back into the political process.

The Peace Conference, which has been meeting since 2 May and continues to meet, is being attended by 810 delegates representing clan elders, civil society and women's groups. More than 1,500 others are attending as observers.

A United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) team, led by Randolph Kent, will be visiting Djibouti on Thursday this week, to meet with delegates and assess future development projects in Somalia.

**Burundi Women’s Conference

From Burundi, we hear that 50 Burundian women delegates and observers are participating in an All-Party Burundian Women’s Peace Conference from the 17th to the 20th of July, and that's taking place in Arusha, Tanzania. The United Nations Development Fund for Women and the Mwalimu Nyerere Foundation are convening the conference, which is the first of its kind in Burundi.

We have a press release with more information in my office if you're interested.

**Haiti

The report of the Secretary-General on the elaboration and implementation of the long-term programme of support for Haiti is out today. This report will be the basis for the Economic and Social Council meeting on Haiti which will be held Monday of next week.

The report notes that “considering the key role that a duly constituted government and elected parliament would have to play in creating a conducive policy environment, it remains difficult at the present time to lay out a precise timetable for the elaboration of a coherent long-term programme of support for Haiti that would meet the approval and draw active support from the international community”.

It notes, however, that the groundwork for such a programme is being laid through the ongoing Common Country Assessment (CCA), the planned formulation by

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the interim government of a medium-term development strategy, and later a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper with the support of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and the formulation in 2001 by the United Nations in Haiti of the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF).

This report has been prepared in response to an ECOSOC resolution in July of last year, which requested the Secretary-General to "take the necessary steps to develop a long-term strategy and programme of support for Haiti", in consultation with the Haitian Government.

**ECOSOC -- IDP Panel

Also on ECOSOC, as part of the humanitarian segment of its 2000 substantive session, the Economic and Social Council will hold a panel discussion tomorrow at 10 a.m. on internally displaced persons. The Panel, moderated by Emergency Relief Coordinator Carolyn McAskie, will feature presentations by the Humanitarian Coordinators for Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Georgia.

Following that, comments will be made by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata; the Executive Director of the UN Children’s Fund, Carol Bellamy; the Director General of the International Committee for the Red Cross, Paul Grossrieder; and Francis Deng, the Special Representative of the Secretary- General for IDPs.

**High Commissioner for Refugees

The High Commissioner for Refugees, by the way, is in New York for ECOSOC and other meetings this week, and she will speak today at a luncheon in her honour hosted by the New York University School of Law and the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University. The subject of her address will be “Protecting People on the Move”, with a particular focus on the rights of internally displaced persons. The High Commissioner has just completed her thirty-first mission to Africa, home to the majority of the world’s internally displaced.

We expect to have copies of her address later this afternoon.

**Humanitarian Coordinators

We just mentioned that a number of humanitarian coordinators will be participating in that panel. Quite a few are here in New York attending the two-day humanitarian segment of ECOSOC that starts tomorrow.

If you are interested in talking with humanitarian coordinators from Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Georgia, Mozambique, Turkey or Venezuela, contact OCHA -– that’s the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs -- at extension 2380.

**WFP -– Afghanistan

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The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) today announced a major relief operation to help more than 1.6 million famine-threatened people survive the worst drought in Afghanistan in more than 30 years.

Under this new emergency operation, WFP will bring about 120,000 metric tons of food into Afghanistan at a cost of $55.4 million, and that will be over the next 12 months. The extremely low rate of precipitation has destroyed almost all the rain-fed crops in the country and decimated livestock.

We have a press release with more details, if you’re interested.

**UNHCR -– Timor

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees today began a two-day meeting with representatives of UN agencies and non-governmental organizations to review assistance activities in West Timor. This followed the cancellation last week of a programme to register the remaining East Timorese refugees in West Timor because of continuing harassment and intimidation of aid workers and refugees by pro-Indonesian ex-militias.

You can pick up today’s UNHCR briefing notes for more details.

** Additional Notes

Available in our office, as well, is a press release from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on its upcoming Twenty-second Regional Conference for Europe to be held in Porto, Italy. The Conference, to be attended by 42 European Ministers of Agriculture, will review food security in Europe.

Also available are today’s briefing notes from Geneva and the highlights of the twenty-second plenary session of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia that was held on the 13th and 14th of July.

We gave you some highlights of the weekly report from the office of the Iraq programme. A more detailed version is out today; you can pick it up in my office.

**IFCR Briefing

You’re all invited to an informal briefing by the International Federation of the Red Cross with the participation of OCHA and the United Nations Development Programme on “Lessons Learned from Natural Disasters”. And that will take place today from 1:15 to 2:45 p.m. in Conference Room Five. And that is organized as part of the preparations for the humanitarian segment of ECOSOC.

**Press Conference

And a reminder of the press conference that we announced yesterday: this afternoon in this room at 3:30 -- Dr. Paul Robertson, the Foreign Minister of Jamaica.

That’s all I have for you.

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**Questions and Answers

Question: Sir, a two-part question on Indonesia. The Indonesian president has said that some Indonesian troops have taken sides on the sectarian violence in the Molucca Islands and there’s been some television footage as well to confirm that. Has the Secretary-General received any information to confirm that or any other news of that? Also the Indonesian President has said that he may ask for international help or outside help in quelling the violence. Are there any discussions right now about sending peacekeepers or anything to that effect?

Spokesman: We have no independent confirmation of what has been going on in the Moluccas; we have a very small humanitarian presence there. In the coverage today, there was mention of a phone conversation between President Wahid and the Secretary-General. That conversation actually goes back about 12 days. The Secretary-General called the President from Geneva just to express his concern about the rising levels of violence. There was no discussion, the Secretary-General told me this morning, in that phone conversation, of the kinds of things being talked of more recently, of logistical support or peacekeepers.

And to my knowledge, there’s been no contingency planning here at the UN, concerning the sending of peacekeepers. In fact, there were conflicting signals in today’s press coverage concerning the comments by the Indonesian Foreign Minister -- one paper saying he had ruled out the idea of foreign forces, the other paper saying that he was allowing for the possibility. So I don’t think we’re yet at a point where we can do any contingency planning here at the UN.

Question: In Sierra Leone, since the operation has been converted from peacekeeping to a military operation, do you think the Force Commander can brief us here, so we can have a first-hand report?

Spokesman: I don’t think that I would say that the operation was converted to a military operation from a peacekeeping operation. A peacekeeping operation is a military operation but one which doesn’t use normal military methods, except in a case like this where they had to fight their way out of a tight corner. We’ll see if we can get General Jetley to come in to talk to you when he arrives early next week.

Question: On the Sierra Leone report, would it be delayed until after the Secretary-General has been briefed by General Jetley or are we looking more towards the end of this week?

Spokesman: No, I don’t think that’s a factor; I have the impression that it’s a delay of just a couple of more days.

Question: In Haiti, what is the goal of the Secretary-General at this time?

Spokesman: I think we would like to see a legitimate government elected by procedures that meet international standards, and when there is such a government to work closely with that government to try to get the economy of Haiti back on some kind of a secure footing. So I think the immediate objective

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is political, the medium- and long-term objectives are developmental, and they probably have to go in that order.

Question: Can you just tell me when the Secretary-General is coming back to work here at the building?

Spokesman: Tomorrow morning. He’ll be in first thing in the morning.

Question: On Sierra Leone, have you got any more about the circumstances of the clash in which this Nigerian soldier lost his life? And what does that take the overall number of casualties to, on the part of the UN?

Spokesman: That was not linked to the extraction operation. It was a routine patrol by Nigerian peacekeepers who came across a group of what we think were RUF. There was an exchange of fire, and the Nigerians took one casualty. That’s all that we have now, but it was not linked to the extraction. The numbers from the extraction varied somewhat yesterday from one dead and five wounded to one dead and six wounded. I’m not sure what the final count is, but that’s a ballpark for the extraction exercise. [He later confirmed that it was one dead and seven wounded.]

Question: Is there a figure that you know at this stage of how many have lost their lives in all these different incidents…

Spokesman: In Sierra Leone?

Question: Yes.

Spokesman: We’ll try to get that number for you. The record-keeping on that is probably not 100 per cent. But certainly on deaths we should be able to give you a precise number; on the injured, we might have to give you an approximate number. [He later reported that the number dead since the beginning of the Mission is seven, with eight others report missing.]

Thanks very much.

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