PRESS CONFERENCE BY GOODWILL AMBASSADOR MIA FARROW

 

Having just returned from a two-week trip to Chad and the Central African Republic, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Goodwill Ambassador Mia Farrow described the population there as “extremely traumatized”, “utterly neglected” and in dire need of humanitarian assistance, during a press conference at Headquarters this afternoon.

She recounted how, during a several day trip to Paoua, a village in the north-western part of the Central African Republic where UNICEF was setting up an office, she saw “burnt village after burnt village after burnt village”.

She described how the convoy stopped and, after 15 minutes, people started emerging until some “300 souls came out of the bush like spectres, just caked in dust, emaciated, remnants of clothes or no clothing at all”.  She said they described how they had no blankets, their children were dying, and they were too terrified to return to rebuild their villages.

She said that, at that moment, a car passed by, the only one she would see during the entire trip to Paoua.  “You could hear pounding of feet on the hard clay ground as 300 people vanished, vanished into the bush in sheer terror,” she said.

By contrast, eastern Chad was “ominously quiet”, she continued, especially compared to her trip there in November when she went on her own after UNICEF had deemed the conditions too dangerous.  At that time, some 60 villages had been burned, and there were tremendous numbers of wounded or displaced persons.  The tiny medical centre was overflowing with wounded, including three men lying side-by-side, their eyes gouged out by the Janjaweed.  On her latest trip, she said people were living makeshift camps, where water and food were in short supply.  Furthermore, the rainy season was coming on and people were unable to plant crops. 

Aid workers were struggling to meet the needs of a “fragile and increasingly abandoned population”, she said.  With scaled-down staff and with access diminished because of security reasons, people were in a “deplorable situation”. 

Asked why non-governmental organizations had been absent from the region for more than a year, she called that situation “incomprehensible”, given the enormity of the humanitarian situation and the fact that it had scarcely been addressed.  “It’s been called the ‘forgotten crisis’, but that implies that it was once remembered,” she said.  “I don’t know that it has been in the consciousness of the international community.” 

Asked to describe what UNICEF was doing to help, she said that trucks were currently headed to the north-eastern part of the Central African Republic to bring mosquito netting and other supplies before the region was completely cut off during the rainy season.

“We are focused first and foremost on keeping kids alive”, added Daniel Toole, Director of Emergency Programs for UNICEF, “so it’s things like measles vaccinations, medical kits, and getting those out to the field, looking at water and sanitation, and then trying to see what we can do to try to increase the protection of children and women in particular.” 

He added that the agency had had a programme in the country for many years, but it had taken a long time to gear it up. 

“It’s very hard to blame aid agencies when we are asking them to do the thing that the entire international community has turned away from,” added Ms. Farrow.  “We’re asking our aid workers to work in very difficult, volatile conditions, and put their own lives at risk.” 

She called for an international peacekeeping force along the Central African Republic’s borders with both Chad and the Sudan.  Otherwise, she said, “you’re going to see two collapsed States, two failed States, which will serve no one.”

Asked how she felt about sending other mothers’ children to potentially die on behalf of people in a faraway land that did not necessarily pose a security risk, she said that it depended on whether you looked at the situation through the prism of Iraq or Rwanda. 

“I am a mother, and I wouldn’t want to see my child in Iraq, but I would not mind if my children chose to go and protect innocent civilians and aid workers in Darfur,” she said. 

“This is a seminal moment for all of us as human beings,” she said, noting that Darfur had been called “ Rwanda in slow motion”.

She added:  “It’s very sad when we have to ask the Government of the Sudan, perpetrators of these atrocities, ‘May we come in and stop you please?’  And then we do an immense international hand-wringing for years to say ‘well, it’s just regrettable and we just can’t find any of the right sticks and carrots’”.

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For information media • not an official record