PRESS CONFERENCE BY SECRETARY-GENERAL’S DEPUTY SPECIAL REPRESENTATIVE FOR IRAQ

PRESS CONFERENCE BY SECRETARY-GENERAL’S DEPUTY SPECIAL REPRESENTATIVE FOR IRAQ

United Nations efforts to address Iraqis’ everyday humanitarian concerns, while not widely publicized, were quietly yielding substantial results, said Staffan de Mistura, the Secretary-General’s Deputy Special Representative for Iraq, at a Headquarters press conference this morning.

Mr. de Mistura said that those efforts had been undertaken after soliciting input from Iraqis, notably in a survey of 22,000 households, and were aimed at preventing widespread disease outbreaks, providing clean water and sanitation, and making sure children were able to attend school.

“These are the areas where, in everyday life, they feel they would like to see a difference, starting from now, even if the situation is not stabilized”, he said.

Those activities had intentionally been kept quiet because of the precarious security situation in Iraq.  “Everything is done in a discreet way,” said Mr. de Mistura, “because what matters is trying to have an impact rather than to have a visibility.”

Among the successes he cited were the surprising absence of polio and cholera in Iraq, despite the presence of those diseases elsewhere in the region, and the fact that malaria was substantially under control.  All of this has been accomplished despite conditions, including untreated open-air sewage and extreme heat that created a classic environment for epidemics.

During a particularly intense period of fighting in June, he said, 4.9 million children had been vaccinated as part of a two-week campaign organized by United Nations agencies and Iraqi authorities.  To remind parents of the vaccinations, five million messages were sent through mobile phone companies. 

About 7.9 million boys and girls were attending school, and each had been provided with a bag with school essentials, he said.  High-protein biscuits were distributed to children and pregnant mothers.  A national plan for wheat flour fortification had been implemented and, in the north, 90 per cent of salt was being iodised.

When saboteurs twice struck Baghdad water plants, the United Nations had helped move in tankers to ensure that all hospitals were receiving water, he added.  Technicians also supplied local engineers with spare parts to repair the plants.

As the political process hopefully moved forward in the coming months, Mr. de Mistura said, the United Nations would become much more involved in capacity-building.  Ultimately, though, everything was in the hands of the Iraqis.  “They’ve got 5,000 years of tradition, 200 billion barrels of oil, very bright people who are engineers, doctors, lawyers -- capable people.  What they need is just a moment of stability.  What we are doing now is just helping them to reach that point.” 

Asked several times to address the political situation in Iraq and the Saddam Hussein trial, Mr. de Mistura said those areas lay outside his purview, which covered reconstruction, rehabilitation and humanitarian issues.  He did say, however, that the United Nations was supporting the political process in essential logistical ways, e.g., by producing election ballots and training election workers. 

When asked about how assistance was reaching more dangerous areas, including the Sunni Triangle, Mr. de Mistura said that such aid did not go through United Nations organizations, but through accountable local authorities. 

Asked how distribution was monitored to make sure local authorities did not use the aid for political purposes, he said ad hoc inspections were taking place and media campaigns were getting the word out so that people knew when distributions were coming and what they were entitled to receive. 

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