Press Conference by Emergency Relief Coordinator
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Department of Public Information • News and Media Division • New York |
Press Conference by Emergency Relief Coordinator
The United Nations has a decent chance to avert a catastrophe in drought-prone West Africa by taking timely action and scaling up its capacity to deal with the situation, but the effort would crucially depend on the needed resources being made available by the donor community, John Holmes, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator said today.
Briefing correspondents at United Nations Headquarters on his most recent visit to the region, and to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mr. Holmes also said he urged President Joseph Kabila and his Government to give serious thought to the humanitarian consequences of terminating the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC).
In West Africa, Mr. Holmes visited Senegal and the Niger, before proceeding to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was his first visit to West Africa since his appointment as Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, and the third to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in that time.
Mr. Holmes told correspondents that, in his public and private talks with President Kabila, his ministers and others, he had pointed out that the humanitarian consequences of any future withdrawal of MONUC needed to be fully taken into account in the discussions about the future of the Mission between the Secretariat and the Security Council, on the one hand, and the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Our fear is clearly that a premature or a poorly planned drawdown in areas where there are these security problems and major humanitarian needs could have a major impact”, he said.
He said that, undoubtedly, the humanitarian community would try to deal with those problems whether or not there was a peacekeeping force there. But, it might prove much more difficult to do so in the absence of MONUC, unless substitutes were found in terms of State presence and other forces which would be able to provide security. He said he raised all those issues with President Kabila, his Prime Minister and other ministers and officials he met during his visit to Kinshasa. He believed they understood the points he made about the severity of the humanitarian needs that continued and the need to take into account those concerns when it came to the discussion on MONUC, as well as the issue of security sector reform, which he said was crucial for stopping the abuses by the Forces armées de la République démocratique du Congo (FARDC) themselves.
On his visit to the countries of West Africa, Mr. Holmes said that West Africa was once again facing a severe food insecurity crisis, in particular because of poor rains and consequent poor harvest in late 2009, which had affected some 10 million people, particularly in Niger. Other countries of the region similarly affected included Western Chad, Mali, and northern Cameroon.
Following his two days in Senegal, at the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs regional office, Mr. Holmes spent four days visiting the Niger, not only the capital, but also Zanda province, one of the areas worst affected by the lack of rain. Altogether in the Niger, some 7.8 million people had been affected, representing about 58 per cent of the population. New studies under way may come out with even higher figures than that, he said.
The poor rains had resulted in the partial failure of the harvest in some places, he said. One or two places he visited suffered a total failure of the harvest. That had resulted in a lack of food for those affected, and a decreased ability to access food; that is to say, even if food was there in the markets, people had no income with which to buy it. But, even more importantly for the Niger, the drought had resulted in a nearly two-thirds deficit in the amount of fodder available for livestock.
He characterized the situation in the Niger as “extremely serious, but not yet disastrous”. People were hungry and many of them eating wild foods, which not only were hard to find, but were not easy to eat. Additionally, many people were moving away from the areas where they lived in search of income elsewhere, whether it was in northern Nigeria or southern Libya. Schools were being abandoned in some cases and the livestock sold, where they could be sold.
However, Mr. Holmes warned that it was six months, at least, to the next possibility of a harvest and the situation could get much worse, unless the right action was taken to deal with it. He observed that his Office was better placed to deal with the situation than it was for the last similar crisis in 2005, even though the underlying situation was worse today than in 2005.
He attributed that to several reasons: First, the alarm had been sounded early on this occasion. Second, the new Government had taken what he termed a “refreshingly open and transparent” attitude to the problem. Instead of denying its reality and being very reluctant to accept international assistance, as was the case in the past, including in 2005, the Government had been totally open about the severity of the problem and the need for international help to deal with it. It had also been cooperative with that international help as it arrived.
“While we are better placed to avert a disaster this time, we all have an awful lot to do if we’re going to avert that disaster,” he said. While he was in the region he made an appeal for a further $130 million from the donors to deal with the crisis, in addition to some $70 million already received from them. “And I repeat today a very urgent appeal to the donor community to provide these resources now, because then we can act in time”, noting that there was always a time lag between the resources arriving and the ability to use them, in terms of getting food in, for instance, to a landlocked country where transport was complicated and expensive at the best of times.
At the same time as tackling those immediate needs and problems, there was also need to tackle more energetically and more systematically the underlying causes of those problems, he stressed. The Niger was one the world’s poorest countries and was “on the frontline of climate change”, where its effects could literally be seen in the advancing deserts and sand dunes in places. Thus, there was a huge need to tackle for adaptation, and funding was a big need in achieving that goal, he said.
On his visit to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mr. Holmes said he toured three field locations to see for himself the humanitarian situation on the ground. He said in south Kivu in the East, despite some military successes, problems of insecurity still persisted, as elements of the FDLR (Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda) were still around and causing terror to the local populations. That was in addition to other Mai Mai groups still present and the continuing abuses by the Congolese forces themselves, the FARDC, “with their well-known lack of discipline, to put it no stronger,” Mr. Holmes said.
Therefore, despite the progress and the better relationship between the Democratic Republic of the Congo Government and the Rwandan Government, humanitarian needs remained severe. He said there were still 600,000 people displaced in the province, and issues of sexual violence were still as absolutely bad as they had ever been in the past, with very large numbers of cases from all armed groups, including the Congolese Armed Forces. The FDLR was perhaps the worst in terms of excesses. Parallel to that, he regretted that criminal attacks on humanitarians unfortunately had also grown quite dramatically in the last 18 months.
In the north‑east of the country, Mr. Holmes visited the Province Orientale, where he said, apart from the chronic problems of poverty, the problem was essentially that the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), was again, despite military operations against it, causing huge suffering and huge humanitarian consequences. There were some 300,000 people displaced in that area and that number continued to grow. He said the LRA continued its “reign of terror” in the area by its continued killings, rapes, abductions of children, acts of brutality and mutilation, sexual slavery and wholesale massacres.
He said, while the situation was a lot better than his last visit just over a year ago, the humanitarian community there had become heavily reliant on support from MONUC in that area for security, logistical and transport reasons. In that regard, the UN Mission’s presence there, and their ability to move forward into some of those remote areas, was extremely important. He said: “We have to do something more about the LRA, as despite the attacks by the Ugandans and the Congolese Armed Forces and some success there, this has only stimulated worse brutalities and attacks in some ways and, therefore, we need to find a solution once and for all to that.”
Lastly, Mr. Holmes also visited Equateur Province, in the west of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where longstanding ethnic violence had caused some 114,000 refugees to flee to Congo Brazzaville, another 18,000 to the Central African Republic and a further 30,000 to 40,000 internally displaced because of violence.
The humanitarian needs remained immense and there was need to ensure they continued to be addressed. That meant that resources from the donors were also needed. The current Humanitarian Action Plan for the Democratic Republic of the Congo was only 27 or 28 per cent funded, even though this was already May, he pointed out.
In response to a correspondent’s question, Mr. Holmes confirmed that MOUNC had already instituted investigations into the massacre in Katanga; and also that he had heard stories of a revenge attack following the FARDC’s retaking of a town that had been attacked by rebels in Equateur Province. He said he had raised those issues with the local leadership, who had denied them. They admitted to some “excesses”, but nothing on the scale of what had been rumoured. He said he did not know in detail whether MONUC was trying to investigate that incident; but he was aware the Mission was taking the report very seriously.
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For information media • not an official record