DAILY PRESS BRIEFING BY THE OFFICE OF THE SPOKESMAN FOR THE SECRETARY-GENERAL
| Press Briefing |
DAILY PRESS BRIEFING BY THE OFFICE OF THE SPOKESMAN FOR THE SECRETARY-GENERAL
Following is a near-verbatim transcript of today’s noon briefing by Fred Eckhard, Spokesman for the Secretary-General.
Good afternoon. Welcome to our guests from North Africa.
We’ll start with Sudan.
**Sudan
The Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Sudan, Jan Pronk, travelled to South Darfur early this morning. He met with the state Governor in Nyala and then went to Kalma camp for internally displaced persons, where he is meeting with humanitarian workers. Nyala and the surrounding area, including the Kalma camp, are among the areas the Government of Sudan is to make safe and secure by the end of August in accordance with the Darfur Plan of Action.
Yesterday evening, Pronk and the Sudanese Foreign Minister, Mustafa Ismail, co-chaired the fourth meeting of the Joint Implementation Mechanism. At that meeting, the Government of Sudan presented the measures it is taking to implement the Plan of Action, including the deployment of 2,000 police between 10 and 20 August, the redeployment of armed forces to avoid direct contact with civilians and IDPs, and the identification of militia in the areas identified under the Action Plan, over whom the Government has influence. The Foreign Minister indicated that the names and numbers of the militia would be provided shortly. They also discussed the Government’s human rights commitments and the upcoming mission of a joint delegation to all three states of Darfur from 26 to 28 August.
On the humanitarian side, the United Nations refugee agency, or UNHCR, is reporting that the continuing insecurity in Darfur could drive some 30,000 people into Chad, a new influx that could strain the agency’s ability to care for the refugees in its swelling camps. According to a UNHCR spokesman, representatives of some 30,000 displaced persons in Masteri, a large village in West Darfur, told the UNHCR team that if they do not get international security guarantees, they will all cross over into Chad as soon as the rain-swollen river that marks the border with Sudan dries up.
Further information is available in a press release upstairs.
**Côte d’Ivoire
On Cote d’Ivoire, the Secretary-General sent to the Security Council yesterday the first report of the Monitoring Group on the Accra III Agreement on Côte d’Ivoire. The tripartite body, made up of representatives of the Economic Community of West African States, the African Union and the United Nations mission in Côte d’Ivoire, reported on three significant steps taken by the Government to implement Accra III. They cited two official decrees related to the reinstatement of the three dismissed ministers to their previous posts and a third decree delegating specific powers to the Prime Minister.
Copies of the report are available in English and in French on the racks.
**UNHCR/Afghanistan
The High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers, says he remains very concerned at the deterioration of the security situation in some parts of Afghanistan. Earlier this week, fighting in Herat prompted the United Nations refugee agency to suspend its daily repatriation convoys from Iran. This forced the agency to provide emergency help to some 13,000 stranded returnees in Iran and Afghanistan, with thousands more stranded in transit camps in Herat.
Lubbers notes with concern that this week’s temporary suspension of UNHCR-assisted convoys and other recent security problems in Afghanistan have coincided with an upsurge in the numbers of refugees wanting to go home. He stresses that those who have made the brave choice to return home deserve peace and security. We have more information in the UNHCR briefing notes from Geneva.
**Afghanistan
Also from Afghanistan, the United Nations Mission there reports that yesterday evening there was a series of explosions at the offices of the electoral authority in the province of Farah. Seven police officers were reportedly wounded, two of them seriously. Inside the compound, the three international staff and the local radio operator escaped without injury. Widespread damage is reported in the building and to a number of vehicles that were in the car park. An investigation into the bombing is currently under way.
**Somalia Swearing-In Ceremony
A swearing-in ceremony for the transitional federal government of the SomaliRepublic will take place this weekend, on Sunday, at the United Nations Offices in Nairobi, Kenya. The Somali National Reconciliation Conference has been going on in Kenya for the past 22 months, and it’s now in the last stages of selection of members of the new National Assembly.
If you’d like more details, we have the contact numbers of a spokesman of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, which has been sponsoring this Conference.
**DRC/Burundi
The Security Council held consultations yesterday afternoon on the situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Burundi, during which members were briefed on developments in the region by the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Jean-Marie Guéhenno.
Speaking to the press after the consultations, Guéhenno said that in the aftermath of the massacre of refugees at the Gatumba camp in Burundi, and following inflammatory statements by political and military leaders, there was a real threat of a spiral of violence in the region. He called for all actors to step away from the brink of war, to exercise restraint and to seek justice rather than revenge.
Asked about the Secretary-General’s request to the Security Council to authorize an increase of 13,100 troops for the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he said he hoped there would be a number of countries prepared to provide those troops, especially specialized units in the area of intelligence, which could provide better information about troop movements in the vast territory of the DRC.
The report on the United Nations mission in the Congo is out on the racks today. The Council is due to take up the matter next Wednesday.
**WFP/Burundi
On the food situation in Burundi, the World Food Programme today says it’s providing food to the wounded and other survivors of the Gatumba camp massacre, and that it’s ready to help refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo when they are transferred to safer sites. It adds that it’s been feeding tens of thousands of refugees who fled into Burundi from the DRC –- with 1,000 tonnes of food aid delivered to the Congolese refugees since June –- but the extra load is hampering its capacity to cover food needs for Burundi from September through January. And we have more in the WFP press release.
**DRC Human Rights Expert
The new independent expert on the situation of human rights in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Titinga Frederic Pacere, will undertake his first official mission to the country from this Sunday until 2 September. With this visit, he aims at carrying out a first assessment of the current situation of human rights there, and to establish positive working relations with the Government and with national civil society.
We have a press release, which contains details of his schedule. He is due to present his findings and recommendations in an interim report to the General Assembly in October.
**African Peace-Building
We have upstairs two press releases from United Nations peace-building offices in Africa. The first, from the United Nations Office in the Central African Republic, concerns an initiative run by the United Nations and the local electoral commission to encourage Central Africans to sign up for the electoral lists. And the other is from the United Nations office Guinea-Bissau, in which it expresses its concern at the current verbal escalation among the political actors in the country. The United Nations office calls on all political actors to show restraint and to settle all disputes in a peaceful manner, as provided for by the law. Both documents are available upstairs.
**OCHA/Bangladesh Update
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that the situation in Bangladesh remains dire in flood-stricken areas, with many areas still under water. Acute shortages of seeds seriously threaten the rice harvest, and the number of new cases of diarrhoea and other communicable diseases is increasing. Nevertheless, agencies are continuing their relief work. For example, the World Food Programme has already distributed almost 13,000 metric tons of food; and UNICEF -- the United Nations Children’s Fund -- has contributed 11 million water purification tablets.
We expect to have more on this in a press release shortly, available from my office.
**UNESCO on Journalist Murder
UNESCO has condemned the murder of Iyer Balanadarajah, better known as Sinna Baia, a reporter of the Tamil weekly Thinamurasu. UNESCO’s Director-General, Koïchiro Matsuura, has called for a full investigation of the killing -– the second assassination of a journalist in Sri Lanka this year. We have a UNESCO press release on that.
**Appointment of Mercenary Rapporteur
The United Nations Commission on Human Rights has appointed Ms. Shaista Shameem, of Fiji, as the new Special Rapporteur on the use of mercenaries as a means of impeding the exercise of the right of people to self-determination. Shameem currently serves as the Director of the Fiji Human Rights Commission, and has been a fervent activist in the South Pacific region on human rights. We have more on that appointment upstairs.
**UNAIDS/Bollywood
UNAIDS has hailed a new Indian film as a major contribution in the fight against the pandemic of AIDS and the ignorance, fear, stigma and discrimination in the workplace that surround it. The film – “Phir Milenge” –- is about a successful career woman, who suddenly learns that she is HIV-positive.
UNAIDS says it’s an extremely significant fact that Bollywood is joining the struggle against the epidemic and helping to break the silence that surrounds the disease. The Bollywood industry is huge: it produces some 800 films a year and on any given day, 15 million Indians watch such movies. An estimated 5.1 million Indians are living with AIDS, the highest number in a single country outside South Africa. We have more on that in a press release.
**Locust Update
A locust update, Western Africa. Swarms have been reported for the first time in northern Nigeria and Cape Verde; crop damage has also been reported in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad.
The Food and Agriculture Organization warns that unless young locusts in southern Mauritania are sprayed quickly with insecticide, a new generation of mature locusts will take to the skies in the coming weeks and wreak even greater damage on crops throughout the region. FAO now says the cost of controlling the locust invasion has been put at $100 million –- up from the initial $9 million that FAO first appealed for in February.
**UN Disability Convention Meeting
The United Nations committee that’s drafting the first-ever international convention on the rights of people with disability is holding its two-week meeting here at Headquarters starting Monday, and that will be in Conference Room 4. The General Assembly Ad Hoc Committee on a Comprehensive and Integral International Convention on Protection and Promotion of the Rights and Dignity of Persons with Disabilities -– that’s the committee’s full name –- will tackle issues such as the convention’s title, its structure and its definition.
The 25-article convention will create a legally binding framework for promoting the rights of the world’s 600 million people with disabilities. There are also various side-events and panels planned; and for more on this, we have a press release upstairs with details.
**Security Costs
In answer to a question that was raised yesterday about the amount of money that the United Nations is spending on security, we can say that total security resources approved for the current two-year budget (2004-2005) -– that’s the United Nations regular budget -- and for the Office of the United Nations Security Coordinator initially amounted to about $160 million, and that was at the start of 2004. Recent increases approved in June 2004 amount to $85 million, including over $60 million of one-time capital costs.
**Notes on Personnel Wounded in Baghdad and Week Ahead
We also put out yesterday afternoon, an updated note on the status of personnel that were wounded in the August 19th attack a year ago. And we have the Week Ahead for you at the United Nations to help you in your coverage for next week.
Any questions?
**Questions and Answers
Question: On Darfur, do you have a general sense of the health indicators, mortality rates and malnutrition there? Are you seeing signs of basic improvement?
Spokesman: Let me try to get something for you. As you know, since the Accra III Agreement -– no, not the Accra, the Darfur Plan of Action and the joint communiqué that the Secretary-General signed with the Government after his visit there -- access for humanitarian workers has improved considerably. It has not been a hundred per cent, but there has been a big improvement on getting international workers in and getting relief supplies in. And we have been reporting to you about some dramatic efforts by the World Food Programme to airdrop food to Darfur, since the rains have made many roads there inaccessible.
But with the continuing movement of threat of movement of people out of Darfur into Chad -– in fact, the three Darfur provinces themselves are larger than France, we are talking about a huge area -– it is very possible that the aid effort has not uniformly reached all those in need. So I think it’s probably a complex situation, but I will ask OCHA to give us the latest for you after the briefing.
Question: Just to follow-up, you have mentioned that Khartoum had presented a plan of action –- do you have it on paper?
Spokesman: We’ll see if we received that by cable overnight from the Department of Political Affairs and whether we can make that available to you.
[The copy plan of action was not received.]
Question: Yesterday, Mr. Guéhenno mentioned that a report on the causes of the massacre in the Gatumba camp would be ready early next week. I wonder if we can have any interim findings on that. Do you have any idea as to when next week the report will be done and how it will be presented?
Spokesman: I don’t think we would want to say anything before that report came out. And we’ll try to find out more precisely from Mr. Guéhenno when that report is expected next week.
Question: The film –- “Phir Milenge” -– is it a feature film that is trying to help raise funds for AIDS?
Spokesman: Yes. That is my understanding.
Question: Is this the first approach from the Indian Government and film industry, or were there other films before?
Spokesman: No, I think this is a first, and that is why the UNAIDS is praising it. I don’t think the Government is involved -- I think it’s private industry. There is an article on the United Nations Web site today if you want to check that, based on the information provided by UNAIDS. You can also call UNAIDS if you want more information.
OK, I am going off for two weeks now. I will miss you very much. Stéphane Dujarric will be in charge in my absence, and I will see you after Labour Day.
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