Executive Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Carol Bellamy told a Headquarters briefing today that the leadership of Sierra Leone had reaffirmed full commitment to the demobilization of child combatants. They had expressed concern, however, that it was a difficult task to achieve in a war situation.
The Ottawa Treaty to ban landmines was a "convention of conscience" that had acquired the force of binding international law with historic speed, although only the first battle in a long struggle had been won, Deputy Secretary-General Louise Fréchette said today at a Headquarters press conference.
"If a disastrous confrontation is to be averted in Burma, the United Nations must support the efforts of the democratic forces in Burma to seek a non-violent negotiated solution", Dr. Sein Win, prime minister of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, said at a Headquarters press briefing sponsored by the Mission of Denmark this afternoon.
The Asian financial crisis and its global reverberations had dominated the work of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) over the last year and led to record lending, David Cheney, Chief of the Fund's Editorial Division, this morning told a Headquarters press briefing, as he introduced the IMF's Annual Report 1998.
