PRESS CONFERENCE BY HUMANITARIAN COORDINATOR FOR CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

PRESS CONFERENCE BY HUMANITARIAN COORDINATOR FOR CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

Returning from four months in the Central African Republic, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for that country, Toby Lanzer, briefed correspondents at Headquarters today on the country’s growing border crisis. 

After a decade of tremendous instability in the Central African Republic, the elections held in May 2005 had signalled the country’s engagement in a much brighter future, said Mr. Lanzer.  However, a growing problem faced the country along its northern border with Chad and along the northeast border with the Darfur region of the Sudan.  During the last seven or eight months, the situation had become increasingly volatile and fragile, with a confirmed presence of four armed rebel groups in the north.

He said that those groups created a difficult situation for the Government and the population living in the area.  Almost one million people had been affected in the last six months by severe levels of violence between rebel groups and armed forces, with the local population caught in the middle.  There had been the forced displacement internally of 150,000 citizens in those regions, 50,000 persons had fled to Chad and 20,000 into Cameroon.

The humanitarian situation in the northern and northeastern parts of the Central African Republic continued to be extremely serious and merited the attention of the international community and the United Nations, said Mr. Lanzer.  “The picture in the border area is quite bleak”, he said, adding that the crude mortality rate of 1.5 per 10,000 was where Darfur was in September 2004.

In addition, he said, the situations in the Sudan and Chad had enormous bearing on the stability of the Central African Republic.  The international community should try to stabilize the humanitarian situation, and prevent the crisis from destabilizing the whole of the country and threatening the viability of its first democratically elected Government.

When asked about the worsening HIV/AIDS pandemic and a governmental bill on the rights of people living with the disease, Mr. Lanzer replied that he had spoken with President Bozize, and a working group had been formed to address those issues, referring to a recent law, which included some paragraphs that were not in line with some norms of the international community.

In response to a question about reports that Joseph Konyof the Lord’s Resistance Army was going to apply or seek asylum in the Central African Republic, he said he could not confirm such reports.  He added, however, that those ideas could not be excluded, but he would be very surprised if asylum was granted.

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For information media • not an official record