DAILY PRESS BRIEFING BY THE OFFICE OF THE SPOKESMAN FOR THE SECRETARY-GENERAL

DAILY PRESS BRIEFING BY THE OFFICE OF THE SPOKESMAN FOR THE SECRETARY-GENERAL

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

**Release of UN Staff Held in Somalia

Good afternoon.  At about 9:25 a.m. EST today (or 4:25 p.m. local time), a UN plane picked up the last two UN staff members detained in Somalia -- Bill Condie, 61, and Roger Carter, 41, both nationals of the United Kingdom.

The two were picked up at Gisera Airport, near Mogadishu, after being held by a Somali militia faction since Tuesday, 27 March.  Both are reported to be in good condition.  They are currently on their way to Nairobi, where they will be met by UN officials at the airport.  We think the plane should have arrived in Nairobi just a few minutes ago.  The United Nations welcomes the unconditional release of the two staff members, which follows the previous release of five other UN staff members who also had been abducted on 27 March. [It was later confirmed that the two staff members had arrived in Nairobi.]

**SG_Arrives in Amsterdam

     The Secretary-General should be touching down in Amsterdam, where he will stay through tomorrow.  Tomorrow evening he is scheduled to have a working dinner with Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.  Also attending that dinner will be Prime Minister Wim Kok and Foreign Minister Jozias van Aartsen.

In Nairobi yesterday evening, the Secretary-General met with Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), and Peter Piot, the Executive Director of the UN Programme on HIV/AIDS.  They discussed the UN's efforts in support of getting affordable AIDS medication to poor countries.

If we get further details on the Secretary-General's programme today and tomorrow, we'll squawk it for you.  The Secretary-General will now fly back to New York on Friday.

**Security Council

The Security Council is holding consultations this morning.  As part of the efforts to make its work more efficient, the Council started promptly at 10:30 a.m.  First they had a brief update on recent developments in Sierra Leone by Dmitry Titov, Director of the Africa Division in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations.  By the way, on the subject of Sierra Leone, the Deputy Secretary-General is arriving in Freetown in about an hour, and she will stay in Sierra Leone through Saturday on a visit.

The Council then discussed the Secretary-General’s report on UNIKOM, the UN Iraq-Kuwait Observer Mission.  Joachim Hutter, Director of the Asia and Middle East Division of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, introduced that report and, as you will recall, the document was circulated on Monday, and we reported on it at that time.

They are now reviewing the situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  The Council President, Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock of the United Kingdom, briefed Council members on the meeting that the Ambassadors to the DRC of France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States had with Jean Pierre Bemba, the leader of the MLC, the Congolese Liberation Movement.

This afternoon, the Security Council committee on sanctions on Liberia will meet for the first time.  Ambassador Kishore Mahbubani, of Singapore, as you know, is the chair of that Committee.

**ICTY/Milosevic

The Registrar of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Hans Holthuis, left today for Belgrade, where he intends to hand over to the Yugoslav authorities the Tribunal's arrest warrant for former President Slobodan Milosevic, to ensure that it is served on the accused.  Mr. Holthuis, in his neutral capacity as the Tribunal's registrar, intends to hold a series of meetings with, among others, the Justice Minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Momcilo Grubac; Serbian Justice Minister Vladan Batic; and possibly also Serbian Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic.  He will clarify to the authorities the steps to be taken to fulfil their legal obligation, as set out in the Tribunal's Rules of Procedure and Evidence, and he will also seek information on the nature of the charges being brought against Milosevic in the Belgrade district court.

We have a press release from the Tribunal on that subject.

**Kosovo

NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson and members of the North Atlantic Council today delivered a stern warning against any further activities by Albanian extremists in Kosovo, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and the Presevo Valley of Serbia.  Lord Robertson also said that the recent violence undermined the support of the international community for the reconstruction and development of Kosovo.

Among the meetings Lord Robertson and his colleagues participated in today were discussions with members of the UN mission, and with members of the Interim Administrative Council of Kosovo.  Lord Robertson said he had invited the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Kosovo, Hans Haekkerup, and a delegation representing all Kosovo communities to visit Brussels on 26 April for further talks.  We have a press release from the United Nations on that subject.

**Democratic Republic of the Congo

The Force Commander of the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), General Mountaga Diallo, on Wednesday welcomed the first batch of 130 Senegalese troops who arrived in Kananga.  The second half of the Senegalese contingent is expected to arrive on Friday, bringing the total to 260.  The arrival today is the second of UN Guard Units in the Congo and the first deployment of blue helmets in a government-held area.

Some 200 Uruguayan soldiers have been deployed to Kalemie, one of the four Sector Headquarters.  Next month, a second Senegalese Guard Unit of some

280 troops is planned to deploy to Mbandaka in the north-west, which is also a UN Sector Headquarters, as is Kisangani.  We have a press release available on that, as well.

**Burundi Attack

The Emergency Relief Coordinator, Kenzo Oshima, today condemned the attack by a group of heavily armed militiamen on a convoy of the World Food Programme (WFP) in south-eastern Burundi, which took place on Monday.  As a result of that ambush, four relief workers were wounded, one of them very seriously.  Mr. Oshima called on all armed factions to adhere to international human rights and humanitarian law, and to cease and desist from targeting humanitarian relief workers and the civilian population.

**Ethiopia/Eritrea

We have a press release from our mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea on the head of the mission’s tour of the western sector of operations, during which he received briefings on military and humanitarian priorities in areas that had been the scene of heavy fighting over the past two years.

**Afghanistan

    The weekly humanitarian update on Afghanistan that came out today mentions that the International Organization of Migration in the western city of Herat has delivered the first consignment of a $7 million humanitarian assistance project donated by the Government of Japan.  Tents, blankets and plastic sheeting are being delivered to displaced families in camps there sheltering some 90,000 internally displaced persons.

**UNDP

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) announced today that the West African Rice Development Association, supported by UNDP and other partners, has developed new rice varieties that can yield up to 50 per cent larger crops without fertilizer.  The new rice will be known by the acronym NERICA -- short for "New Rice for Africa" -- and it is a result of crossing African and Asian species. In addition to the significant gains in production, the new varieties also mature 30 to 50 days earlier than the currently grown varieties and are substantially richer in protein.

Ken Fujimura, a Senior Advisor at UNDP’s Special Unit for Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries, said that the new rice "has a great potential to become the second miracle rice in Africa.”  We have more information in a press release from UNDP.

**Signings

Two treaty signings today.  Mali became the eighty-seventh country to sign the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity and El Salvador became the sixty-sixth country to sign the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

**Budget

One payment today from Kazakhstan that became the sixty-seventh Member State to be paid in full for its regular budget assessment this year, with a cheque for more than $299,000.

**New Addition

Those of you going into my Office today will see a new friendly face at the first desk immediately on the left.  Teddy Keya, who has been with my Office since last November, was hired out from under our noses by the Peacekeeping Department.  We wish him well in that new assignment.  His replacement is Israel Machado and he begins today.  Greet him.  He’ll be greeting you.

**Press Conference

There will be a press conference tomorrow at 11:15 a.m.  Joseph Chamie, Director of the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, will be here to update you on the thirty-fourth session of the Commission on Population and Development.  He will be joined by Makoto Atoh, President of the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research of Japan, and Antonio Golini from the University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy.  We’ll have a media advisory with more details.

**Questions and Answers

Question:  Where was that Bemba meeting?  In which country?

Spokesman:  I’m sorry, but there was a little bit of confusion on my wording of that.  It was there, not here.  I can’t find the note now.  We’ll let you know immediately after the briefing.  I’m sure Marie or whoever wrote that will come running down.

Question:  We understand that there is a keenness to get a Security Council mission out to [the Democratic Republic of the] Congo in the near future, possibly in June.  Could you tell a bit more about that and what they might be looking at? 

Spokesman:  I think you should put that question to Sir Jeremy.  He’ll be probably at the stakeout in a few minutes after this morning’s session.  He has not authorized me to say anything about that at this time.

Question:  Is there any discussion between the Secretary-General and Carla Del Ponte on the issue of Milosevic in recent days?  Any sort of communication about that? 

Spokesman:  I’m not aware that they have spoken.  She is the region.  She’s in Rwanda but I’d have to check to see if he spoke with her.  {He later said the Secretary-General has not spoken to Prosecutor Del Ponte in the last couple of days.]

Question:  She’s made some rather firm comments publicly about Milosevic’s arrest not being enough, that he needs to be extradited.  Is there going to be any official statement from here?  Any involvement of Annan in this?

Spokesman:  I think the fact that the Registrar is arriving in Belgrade today is probably something we’ll be waiting to see the results of.  I don’t think there’s a need for any statement.  The Registrar will be handing over the indictment and also asking for information about the charges being brought against Milosevic in the local court, possibly also asking how long they think that trial will last, when it might get started and so on.  I think they are still in the information gathering stage.  The Prosecutor, of course, would say that she would want immediate turnover to The Hague, but I think we are all waiting to see how things develop in Belgrade first. 

Question:  Do you know when Mr. Annan is coming back to the Building?  Is it Monday?

Spokesman:  Back in the Building ..., he normally takes a day at home after a long trip.  Whether he will do that on Monday or come into the office I don’t know.  It will either be Monday or Tuesday.

Question:  Is there any particular mission that the Deputy Secretary-General is undertaking in Sierra Leone?

Spokesman:  It’s a familiarization visit.  It’s fairly ambitious.  She’ll be moving around to different parts of Sierra Leone in the three days that she’ll be in the country.  We have a programme in my Office, if you would like to see it.

Question:  Going back to Congo -– you mentioned about the peacekeepers, the Senegalese and Uruguayans being deployed there.  In some wire copy, the UN mission spokesman in the Congo, Hamadoun Touré, has been talking about the difficulties of the peacekeeping mission.  Could you enlarge a little on those difficulties?

Spokesman:  Actually the big picture in the Congo today is rather a more positive one.  The Secretary-General, as we reported yesterday, had spoken on the phone with the Presidents of Rwanda and Uganda.  The feeling is that all of the parties to this conflict are serious about implementing the peace agreement.  We see the movement of troops.  It’s not across the board.  It’s not as full as we would like to see it, but it is movement in the right direction.  In the meantime, we’re getting our military observers in.  The troops are there to establish four secure bases from which the military observers can operate.  So all of that seems to be going rather smoothly. 

The difficulties you would expect, and I don’t know whether this is what the local spokesman was referring to, would be the logistics of moving people around in that big country where the infrastructure has deteriorated to a great degree.  But of course all of that was factored into our planning from the beginning, so I hope we’re coping with it as best we can.

Question:  He was also referring to the difficulties of the normal withdrawal of Jean Pierre Bemba’s men from particular areas and whether he was cooperating in the same way that the Rwandans do.

Spokesman:  Bemba has said that he wants assurances from us that our troops will move into the area he vacates and protect the civilian population.  We are not going there to protect the civilian population.  We’re going there to monitor the withdrawal of these troops.  And, we have to get some clarification from Mr. Bemba and his faction there.  If that’s his condition, it’s not going to be met on

our side.  If he’s going to cooperate with the agreement, he’s going to move back his troops.

If I could just clarify now for Evelyn, these were ambassadors who met with Bemba. They are based in Kinshasa.  The meeting, I’m told, was in the DRC but I don‘t know where.

Question:  What do you hear from KFOR?  What are they doing to stop the Albanian terrorism?

Spokesman:  Your questions are always so politically charged.  We announced yesterday that KFOR had moved two extra units to the border.  They are doing what they can in Kosovo to prevent the illegal movement of arms and personnel back and forth across the border of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. I have nothing new on that today.

Question:  Is there any timetable for the deployment of the new troops for Sierra Leone that were authorized last week by the Council?

Spokesman:  Let me find out what the latest timetable is and give it to you after the briefing.

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