PRESS BRIEFING BY INTER-AGENCY COORDINATOR ON INTERNALLY DISPLACED PERSONS

Press Briefing

PRESS BRIEFING BY INTER-AGENCY COORDINATOR ON INTERNALLY DISPLACED PERSONS

Up to 90 per cent of the people in the camps for internally displaced visited by the recent inter-agency mission to Eritrea were women and children, Dennis McNamara, Coordinator of the Senior Inter-Agency Network on Internally Displaced Persons, told a Headquarters news conference this afternoon. He said that was a higher percentage than in the refugee camps and he attributed the situation to the fact that the men had not demobilized.

The team also saw humanitarian demining linked to the problem of returning displaced persons in Eritrea. The urgent need for humanitarian demining, as opposed to military demining, following conflicts so that people could go home was highlighted, he continued. HIV/AIDS was also an issue in the camps. With the female population and military demobilization, there had been much concern about the spread of AIDS in the border areas.

Mr. McNamara said that the Senior Inter-Agency Network on Internally Displaced Persons had been set up by the Secretary-General within the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) to bring United Nations agencies together to review the problem of internal displacement of populations around the globe as opposed to refugees. The network was to look at how to strengthen the international response to that problem, identify what gaps existed where and who could do something about them, and find out how much it would cost to fill those gaps as well as whether donors were prepared to support that.

That process started last month with the inter-agency mission to Eritrea and Ethiopia, involving 10 agencies, as well as representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The team looked at the displacements on both sides of the border as a result of the war between the two countries and talked to the Governments and to United Nations teams. It identified areas where increased focus was needed. That network would undertake similar missions in the coming months to half-a-dozen countries, including Colombia, Burundi, Angola, Sudan and possibly Sri Lanka.

He said that the problem of internal displacement as opposed to refugee cross-border movement was a massive global one. The Special Representative of the Secretary-General, Francis Deng, had put out a figure of 25-30 million internally displaced persons globally as a result of conflict, violence or human right abuses. That number was about double the global refugee figure of 13 million. There might be another 20 or more million displaced persons from natural disasters like floods, famine, earthquakes and so on. Ethiopia, for example, estimated 10 million displaced by the droughts there.

He said internal displacement from wars and violence was also massive –- 4 million in the Sudan, up to 2 million in Colombia, millions in Afghanistan and probably 12 million in Africa.

No single United Nations agency had been designated for the problem and it had been something of a hidden humanitarian problem that was somewhat neglected. There had, however, been an inter-agency response but that was only partial because of the problem of access in many situations, and also because donor governments had not been particularly supportive of programmes for displaced populations, particularly the long-term displacements of Sudan and Afghanistan.

Displaced Persons Briefing - 2 - 3 November 2000

Those governments had, at the same time, demanded that the United Nations agencies do more. After a trip to Angola, Richard Holbrooke, the Permanent Representative of the United States, had raised the issue of the failure of the agencies to do more for the displaced populations. United Nations agencies then put out an appeal for $11 million for those displaced populations, but had only received $2 million. The agencies had to strengthen their responses but donor governments and the host States had to do more.

He said the Mission to Eritrea and Ethiopia was prompted by the decision of the agencies to look at how they could address the problem more systematically. Many of the agency heads had talked about filling the gaps that existed in assisting displaced populations, compared with other specific categories for whom separate agencies existed. The agencies agreed that the network would first look at the countries listed earlier and then decide where to go from there. The missions would lead to some recommendations for the future.

Mr. McNamara said the protection of displaced populations was a difficult issue. Mr. Deng had been working on the principles for that for many years. The network would implement those principles on the ground.

In response to a question, he said the United Nations had never denied that there was a problem of responding to the internally displaced persons. The agencies all had programmes for displaced persons but the problem was that funds for displaced persons were not readily available. Access and security were also major problems. In many countries, it was not possible to drive down the road to deliver services. It was necessary to fly. The agencies had always said that they would like to do more. The current effort was a way to try to plug those gaps.

He said that the hundreds of thousands if displaced persons on both sides in Eritrea and Ethiopia were the result of the fighting. They were civilians caught in the fighting, and women and children bore the brunt of the “men’s war”. The question of “expellees, internees, deportees, return of nationals” on both sides was a much more specific, complex issue on which the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was dealing with the two governments.

He added that the Inter-Agency Network had not yet received agreement to go to Colombia. The request had been made and it was with the Government now. The network hoped that the mission could go later this month. The effort was being looked at from a United Nations inter-agency perspective only.

On the Balkans, he said the situation there was a complex equation, with a mixture of refugees in Serbia numbering about 500,000. The displaced in Kosovo essentially had been taken care of, and had gone home.

Asked whether the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) should be expanded to cover internally displaced persons, and whether the agency was hamstrung that it was not in its mandate, Mr. McNamara responded in the negative. The head of UNHCR had said a number of times that she did not see that possibility for UNCHR. It was doubtful that there would be any expansion of the agency’s mandate. UNHCR had its hands more than full with refugees. It did help internally displaced persons when they were linked to refugees and returnees. The conclusion was that the problem of the internally displaced was an inter-agency one which cut across everything. No single agency could respond to it.

He added that the creation of a separate agency to deal with internally displaced persons was a matter for governments to decide. The recommendation to be made by the network was on how to approach the problem of the displaced persons within the United Nations system.

The missions were being sent with the agreement of host States or authorities, he said. Ethiopia and Eritrea had welcomed the Mission and had been with it in the debriefings. They supported the Mission’s findings and had been very positive about it. The same was true of the other States. The missions were not going across borders where the United Nations did not have programmes. There were agencies on the ground in all the countries mentioned and all the situations of displacement. The mission was going there to strengthen the mechanism.

The questions of sovereignty and humanitarian intervention did not need to arise in the area of internally displaced persons, he continued. The missions were not “invading”, but were going in to try to strengthen international humanitarian response. The response was not political or military and it was conditional on government agreement. In the case of Eritrea and Ethiopia, the Mission made a request to both sides for access to the border areas.

On the linkage between humanitarian and political realities, he said that humanitarians worked in an intensely political environment. That, however, did not mean that humanitarian action should be politicized. The United States and the United Kingdom had so far agreed to fund about two thirds of the $637,000 estimated cost of running the Inter-Agency Network for an initial nine-month period, he said.

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