United Nations Daily Highlights, 99-03-10

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

DAILY HIGHLIGHTS

Wednesday, 10 March, 1999

HEADLINES

• Secretary-General ready to "press ahead" as new round of senior- level talks on East Timor opens in New York.
• UN anti-discrimination committee voices concern about suppression of rights of Kurds.
• UN nutritional survey depicts "famine in slow motion" in Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
• Poor weather delays start of UN-mediated talks between Taliban, opposition alliance.
• UN health agency sends medical supplies to remote Afghan area hit by deadly influenza-like disease.
• High-ranking Danish officer to head UN observer mission in Tajikistan.
• Continued displacements in Great Lakes region and West Africa keep UN refugee agency busy in the region.
• UN food agency approves emergency aid package to feed Ethiopians displaced by border conflict with Eritrea.
• Cuba, Hungary, Libya added to UN's committee on relations with host country.

In a series of encounters this afternoon, Secretary-General Kofi Annan held separate talks with the Indonesian delegation led by Foreign Minister Ali Alatas and the Portuguese delegation headed by Foreign Minister Jaime Gama. Mr Annan then met with the two delegations together. In the talks, the Secretary-General is joined by his Personal Representative on East Timor, Ambassador Jamsheed Marker, who also had separate meetings with both Foreign Ministers.

In his comments to the press prior to the opening of the talks, the Secretary-General said that he found the developments in the last few weeks to be "encouraging" and stressed that "we are going to press ahead" at the talks.

In a statement adopted by consensus at its current session in Geneva, the 18-member Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination stressed that the Kurds, wherever they live, should be able to lead their lives in dignity, to preserve their culture and to enjoy a high degree of autonomy. The Committee also issued a broad appeal to authorities and organizations working for peace, justice and human rights "to deploy all necessary efforts to achieve peaceful solutions which do justice to the fundamental human rights and the identity of the Kurdish people.

The Committee, which is the first body created by the United Nations to review actions by States in fulfilling their obligations under a specific human rights document, examines reports submitted periodically by States parties to the 1969 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

At its current fifty-fourth session, which is being held from 1 to 19 March, the expert panel will review measures to fight discrimination by Austria, Costa Rica, Finland, Italy, Lesotho, Mongolia, Peru, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Syria and Kuwait.

In addition, the Committee, whose members are elected in their personal capacity, is scheduled to review the implementation of the Convention by Bahrain, Bangladesh, Congo and Slovenia whose reports were deemed to be seriously overdue.

The "Nutrition Survey of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea" was the first nationwide effort carried out by the World Food Programme (WFP), UNICEF and the European Union in collaboration with the DPRK Government from 23 September to 16 October 1998. The survey, which focused on children between six months and seven years of age, covered 130 counties of a total of 212 in eight of the DPRK's nine provinces.

Among their findings, the UN agencies reported that acute malnutrition (low weight for height) rates was more prevalent in the DPRK than in other East Asian countries most severely affected by malnutrition such as Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. That put DPRK among the ten countries with the highest malnutrition rates in the world. The survey also found that moderate and severe stunting, or low height for age, affected 63 per cent of all children surveyed, while the prevalence of moderate and severe underweight, or low weight for age was 61 per cent.

The UN agencies found it "quite disturbing" that severe malnutrition was widespread among children at crucial stages of growth, including brain development, since it suggested that this generation of children would have impaired physical and mental abilities. "These loses cannot be recovered; consequently, the future of an entire generation is damaged," the survey warned.

Representatives of the Taliban arrived in Ashkabad on Wednesday, by the delegation of the opposition alliance known as the United Front could not arrive on time from Afghanistan because of poor weather conditions in the Panjshir Valley.

The face-to-face talks, which were announced last week by the Secretary- General's Special Envoy for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, are now scheduled to begin on Thursday.

WHO-Afghanistan, which has its offices in Pakistan, flew the supplies by helicopter from Dushanbe, Tajikistan, to Faizabad in Afghanistan, from where they would be carried to the hard-to-reach affected areas.

WHO sent two of its epidemiologists to Faizabad last month to investigate the disease. Initial reports indicated respiratory conditions, and the symptoms were clinically those of influenza. The doctors suspected at the time that the deaths might have been caused by secondary infections.

Brigadier-General John Hvidegaard was appointed by Secretary-General Kofi Annan as the Chief Military Observer in Tajikistan beginning 4 April. In that post he will succeed Brigadier-General Tengku Ariffin Bin Tengku Mohammed of Malaysia.

Gen. Hvidegaard, who is currently on assignment to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Kosovo Verification Mission, previously served as Chief Military Observer of the UN Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) from 1992 to 1995 and with the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) in 1967.

UNMOT was established by the Security Council in 1994 to assist in monitoring a ceasefire agreement between the Government and the opposition. Its current mandate, which was expanded by the Security Council in 1997, runs through 15 May 1999.

UNHCR said that Sierra Leoneans continued to cross the border in the Gueck‚dou area in Guinea and that more than 6,500 new arrivals had been registered since December 1998. The UN refugee agency said that it was working to transfer the population of camps closest to Sierra Leone to sites further from the border. It said that two new locations at Guelo and Katkama would be large enough for 25,000 of the 50,000 refugees whose camps were considered to be most vulnerable to rebel attacks.

In the Sierra Leonean capital, Freetown, where the security alert had been downgraded a limited number of international staff had returned. UNHCR said that it was making arrangements to repatriate some 720 Liberian refugees by boat from Freetown. According to the UN agency, some 8,000 Liberians had been present in Sierra Leone, mainly at Waterloo, when the latest fighting erupted.

In the Great Lakes region, UNHCR said that additional staff had been deployed to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to help set up camps for refugees from neighbouring Angola and Brazzaville.

In Tanzania, UNHCR reported that higher numbers of refugees crossing from the DRC, along with the influx of Congolese to Zambia, pointed to renewed, widespread fighting in South Kivu and Katanga, in the DRC. The UN agency said that with the recent arrivals in Kigoma, the number of Congolese refugees registered in Tanzania between 2 August, 1998 and 8 March, 1999 had climbed to more than 40,000.

The Rome-based agency announced on Wednesday that it was launching the operation in response to Ethiopian Government's request to assist people displaced by the conflict and ease the burden on host communities and host families who themselves experienced food insecurity.

According to WFP, the fighting between Ethiopia and Eritrea over the disputed territory of Badme displaced some 337,000 Ethiopians. The Government was trying to integrate the displaced with the local population, avoiding camps.

The WFP operation is scheduled to last nine months, from March through November 1999.

The addition of Cuba, Hungary and Libya to the Committee came after the General Assembly, in its resolution 53/104, endorsed the recommendation that the Committee be enlarged by one member each from the African, Asian, Latin American and Caribbean and Eastern European regional groups.

An additional member, to come from the Asian States Group, is to be appointed by the President of the General Assembly and will bring the total membership up to 19.

Also at today's meeting, the United States representative to the Committee welcomed the decision of Secretary-General Kofi Annan last week to begin to garnish wages from staff members who refused to pay court- ordered spousal and child support.

Robert C. Moller said that he hoped the decision would correct "this unfortunate situation and make a significant improvement in the lives of affected family members -- usually women and children".

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

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