United Nations Daily Highlights, 98-11-03

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From: The United Nations Home Page at <http://www.un.org> - email: unnews@un.org

DAILY HIGHLIGHTS

Tuesday, 3 November, 1998

HEADLINES

• General Assembly elects nine judges to International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
• United Nations begins distribution of relief assistance to victims of hurricane Mitch in Central America.
• United Nations refugee agency welcomes report of Human Rights Watch on "terrible events" in Afghanistan.
• UN High Commissioner for Refugees hopeful that new Guinea-Bissau agreement will allow returns.
• Internally displaced persons in Kosovo are returning to their homes, according to United Nations refugee agency.
• Developing States oppose emissions reduction targets at UN Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting.
• Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social development reconfirms UN's commitment to microcredit.
• Over 50 delegates gather in Bangkok to discuss strategies to combat trafficking in women in Asia.

Six of the elected judges will replace those who have served since 1995 on the two original Trial Chambers of the Tribunal when their terms expire on 24 May 1999. The other three judges will serve on a third Trial Chamber, established by the Security Council in April this year to facilitate the work of the Tribunal.

The terms of all judges elected today will expire on 24 May 2003. While the six elected to the exiting Trial Chambers will assume their post on 25 May 1999, the other three will start as soon as possible following the elections so that the new third Trial Chamber can start to function at the earliest possible date.

The Tribunal, which is based in Arusha, Tanzania, was established by the Security Council on 8 November 1994 to prosecute persons accused of genocide or other violations of international humanitarian law committed in Rwanda or neighbouring territories in during that year.

The election process for Tribunal judges begins with an invitation by the Secretary-General to Member States and non-member observers of the United Nations to submit up to two candidates for the Tribunal within 30 days of his request. The Secretary-General then forwards the nominations received to the Security Council, which establishes "short lists" by secret ballot, taking into account adequate representation of the principal legal systems of the world.

The list of candidates, which consists of not fewer than 18 names and not more than 27, is then sent to the General Assembly for final decision. On 30 September, the Security Council established a short list of 18 candidates, which had been forwarded by the Council President to the President of the General Assembly.

The elected judges were Navanethem Pillay (South Africa), Laity Kama (Senegal), Dionysios Kondylis (Greece), Mehmet Gney (Turkey), Pavel Dolenc (Slovenia), William Sekule (United Republic of Tanzania), Yakov Ostrovsky (Russian Federation), and Erik Mose (Norway) and Lloyd George Williams of Jamaica and Saint Kitts and Nevis.

The World Food Programme (WFP) distributed over 100,000 tonnes of food previously allocated for development projects in Nicaragua and Honduras. According to the United Nations food agency, up to 400,000 persons and up to 600,000 persons have been affected by the hurricane in Nicaragua and Honduras respectively.

For its part, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has made arrangements for the immediate shipment of 500,000 packets of oral rehydration salts and has provided $20,000 for medicines for those affected in Nicaragua. In Honduras, UNICEF is distributing food, clean water, essential drugs for infectious diseases and blankets for the victims the hurricane.

According to UNICEF, the worst hit countries are Nicaragua and Honduras where whole villages have been swept away and roads, schools and hospitals have been destroyed. UNICEF added that Guatemala and Belize have also suffered to a lesser degree. The United Nations agency has presented a $36, 000 cheque to the Prime Minister of Belize to support families in greatest distress.

The Executive Director of UNICEF, Carol Bellamy expressed her deep sympathies to the thousands of families who have lost loved ones in this "dreadful, far-reaching tragedy." She said that international support was vital both for the immediate rescue operation and for the longer term and appealed to the international community to give generously.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has responded to the emergency crisis by raising cash grants for Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador. OCHA is prepared to serve as a channel for cash contributions for the immediate relief needs of the affected countries.

Meanwhile, at United Nations Headquarters in New York, the Permanent Representatives of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua called a joint press conference and appealed for urgent international assistance to tackle the difficulties created by the destructive hurricane. They were also scheduled to meet with the United Nations Secretary-General to discuss the issue.

UNHCR Spokesman Kris Janowski told reporters in Geneva that the report would finally attract attention to the "terrible events" that took place in Mazar-i-Sharif on and after 8 August when the city was captured by the Taliban.

According to UNHCR, those events led to new displacements within Afghanistan, as well as to Pakistan and Iran. "UNHCR has carried out extensive interviews with refugees trickling out of northern Afghanistan over the past two months, and our findings very much correspond with those of Human Rights Watch," said Mr. Janowski.

UNHCR remains concerned that would-be refugees continue to face great difficulties in escaping the country. "We cannot give a number for those killed -- at this point all anyone can do is guess, but it would certainly seem that several thousand people were killed, including both civilians and fighters," said Mr. Janowski. He added that the agency could not give a precise number of refugees arriving in Pakistan, since they were all along the border. Many had been forced to pay smugglers to get them across Taliban territory, and were keeping a very low profile once they had arrived.

"We also do not have any firm idea of how many people have been displaced inside Afghanistan, although we think at the very least 15,000 fled Mazar before and as the Taliban arrived in the city," said Mr. Janowski.

According to UNHCR, there are still some 2.6 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran. About 4.1 million have returned since 1988.

According to UNHCR Spokesman Kris Janowski, the agency is hopeful the accord will allow for a speedy return of both refugees and internally displaced persons.

Meanwhile, a ship carrying refugees from the hostilities in Guinea-Bissau was allowed by Senegalese authorities on Sunday night to dock in the port of Dakar, Mr. Janowski told reporters in Geneva on Tuesday. The ship, carrying 166 people, had been anchored off the coast of Senegal since Friday. UNHCR had drawn the attention of officials to the humanitarian conditions on board the ship, where an elderly woman had died of an apparent heart attack.

Most of the boat's passengers have since moved in with families and friends in Dakar, UNHCR reported. "The refugee site established outside the Senegalese capital, at Thies, during the June crisis in Guinea-Bissau has also received new arrivals, with 65 people registered in the past ten days, " Mr. Janowski said.

Kris Janowski, a Spokesman for the agency, said the residents were going back mainly to see the condition of their houses and to find out if the police had gone. Some internally displaced persons had said they would stay for a few days, while others were repairing homes to bring in families. In some areas, villagers were preparing to plant the winter crop of wheat.

Only several hundred of the 10,000 internally displaced persons estimated to be under plastic before the 27 October military withdrawal, had either returned to their villages or are in host families. "Of the handful remaining in the open, about 100 are on the hill above Kisna Reka, where earlier the widely publicized group of 3,500 internally displaced persons were encamped, 30 kilometres west of Pristina," said Mr. Janowski.

Since mid-October, UNHCR has doubled the delivery of relief supplies from three times per week to six. According to the agency, those supplies were now reaching areas that had been inaccessible during the conflict. "UNHCR, along with non-governmental organizations (NGOs), can provide assistance to approximately 90,000 people a week," Mr. Janowski said.

At the Fourth United Nations Conference on Climatic Change, which opened yesterday in Buenos Aires, developing countries insisted that voluntary commitments should not be included on the agenda because industrialized nations are the main producers of those gases and therefore should reduce their emissions first.

In the Kyoto Protocol, developed nations committed themselves to reducing their collective emissions by 5 per cent. The objective is to stabilize them at 1990 levels to avoid any further harm to the ozone layer.

Industrialized countries, such as Australia, the United States and Russia, backed the proposed voluntary commitments, according to United Nations Radio officer covering the meeting. They declared that some developing countries are sufficiently well off to make sacrifices for a better world environment. Brazil, India and Mexico rejected the proposal.

In an interview to United Nations Radio, Jamaican's delegate to the Conference, Meteorologist Clifford Mahlung, said such a type of commitment would be an enormous effort for small countries. He said developing countries could not make commitments until industrialized States set the proper example. He said it was "immoral" that developing countries would be asked to undertake commitments at a time when "the countries that are deemed responsible for what is happening as far as the climate change issues are concerned, some of them [have] not even signed the Kyoto Protocol." He agreed that the developing nations would have to come on board at their own stage.

Argentine Environment Minister Maria Julia Alsogaray said she would pursue informal consultations on the proposed voluntary standards with representatives of developing countries during the two-week meeting.

"We in the United Nations system are fully committed to supporting microcredit, to advancing it, to strengthening it, and we see it as a crucial and vital intervention in the great objective of the eradication of absolute poverty," Mr. Desai told the General Assembly's Economic and Financial (Second) Committee on Monday.

One of the key features of microcredit schemes is that they are ready to lend small amounts of money without collateral, Mr. Desai noted. "The people who do not have collateral in our societies are essentially people who are poor or disadvantaged," he pointed out, adding that most of those were women. "It is for this reason that microcredit is a vital instrument in providing access to credit and, through credit, empowerment for women, for people who are way below the poverty spectrum."

Mr. Desai gave an example from his home city of Bombay, which was host to many migrant workers who were separated from their families. There was also a large number of widows. "An innovative microcredit scheme provided modest amounts of credit to these widows, who had no collateral to offer, to allow them to buy utensils and to procure supplies at wholesale prices," he said. "They would cook home meals, feed typically about 15 to 20 migrant workers every day, and earn a decent living." Through this scheme, which opened options to women who had no collateral, the workers got to enjoy home cooking.

Mr. Desai went on to point out that microcredit was most effective when other investments are also made to expand options and potential investments in small-scale infrastructure. He offered another example of a milk cooperative in India where microcredit had allowed poor farmers to acquire animals to produce milk. There, the effectiveness of microcredit was enhanced by parallel investments in the whole system of milk collection, processing and marketing. "The system met with spectacular successes in terms of income earning for poor people in rural areas and better quality of milk for urban consumers," he said. This pointed to the need to integrate microcredit with the broader processes of support for small- enterprise development.

According to Mr. Desai, much more needed to be done in the area of microcredit. Current levels of support were far short of the "numbers of the poor in rural areas and in urban areas of developing countries who have the willingness, the potential, the ability to use these credits constructively in order to advance their own position in life."

"Do not underestimate the entrepreneurial potential of the poor," Mr. Desai stressed. He said the real microcredit challenge "is to work out how we, in the international system, can best enhance our support for this initiative."

Organized by the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), the International Labour Organization, the International Organization for Migration, and the Asian Women's Fund, the conference has brought together over fifty delegates from various Asian countries, United Nations bodies and agencies and non-governmental organizations working on the issue.

Opening the Conference on Trafficking in Women, Andrianus Mooy, the Executive Secretary of ESCAP said that strategies to combat trafficking in women and children must confront the transboundary nature of the activity. He said that rising unemployment and poverty, children dropping out of schools and the falling exchange rates in the region could lead to possible increase in trafficking in women and children for sexual exploitation. Mr. Mooy warned that the deteriorating economic environment was cause for concern and called for new approaches and solutions to tackle the problem.

The Chairperson of the Committee on General Affairs, House of Councillors of Japan, Ms. Yusuko Takemura, said that her country had been the major destination for trafficking in Asian women for many decades. She said that members of criminal networks and syndicates were taking advantage of women who are often illiterate with little or no opportunity to travel independently to work legally as migrant workers in wealthier countries.

Ms. Takemura appealed to the conference to come up with measures for practical cooperation and an accessible network for exchanging information in order to tackle such trafficking.

From the United Nations home page at <http://www.un.org> - email: unnews@un.org

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