United Nations Daily Highlights, 99-03-12

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

DAILY HIGHLIGHTS

Friday, 12 March, 1999

HEADLINES

• UN Secretary-General and Cambodian Foreign Minister discuss bringing Khmer Rouge leaders to justice.
• UN aid personnel to return to Afghanistan next week.
• UN food agency to expand assistance to Afghanistan.
• UN refugee agency reports growing despair amid renewed fighting in Kosovo.
• UNICEF says private efforts to buy freedom of slaves in Sudan will not end slavery.
• Saddened by death of Yehudi Menuhin, Secretary-General eulogizes late violinist as "citizen of the world".

The Secretary-General and the Foreign Minister agreed on the need for accountability and to end impunity and that the Cambodian national judiciary in its current state was unlikely to meet minimal standards of justice. They also agreed that while there were positive aspects to the idea of a truth commission, it was not a substitute for justice.

Meanwhile, in the summary of its report which was distributed at UN Headquarters on Friday, the three-member Group of Experts appointed by the Secretary-General, concluded that the evidence gathered to date testified to the commission of serious crimes in Cambodia under international and Cambodian law. The Group also said that there was sufficient physical and witness evidence to justify legal proceedings against the Khmer Rouge leaders for these crimes. The Group considered that the crimes committed during the 1975-79 period included crimes against humanity, genocide, war crimes, forced labour, torture, crimes against internationally protected persons, as well as crimes under Cambodian law.

After analyzing legal options for bringing to justice Khmer Rouge leaders, the Group of Experts recommended that in response to the request of the Government of Cambodia, the UN should establish an ad hoc international tribunal to try those leaders. It said that such a tribunal should be established by the Security Council under Chapter VI or VII of the UN Charter, or, should it not do so, that the General Assembly establish it. The Group further recommended that the UN, in cooperation with the Cambodian Government, should determine the desirability of a truth-telling mechanism to provide a fuller picture of the atrocities of the period of Democratic Kampuchea.

Following the meeting with the Secretary-General, the Cambodian Foreign Minister told reporters at UN Headquarters in New York that since the crimes were committed in Cambodia and the victims were Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge leaders should be tried by a national tribunal with international assistance. He also noted that according to its constitution, Cambodia could not extradite a Cambodian to a foreign country to be tried.

Sergio Vieira de Mello told a news conference in New York that a UN observer mission sent to Afghanistan in February to monitor the investigations into the killings of three UN staffers last summer was satisfied that Taliban authorities had made "some progress" on the investigations and that they also had shown a "concerted effort" to meet the minimum UN security requirements agreed to last October for the return of aid workers.

The murders of two local staff in Jalalabad and a military observer in Kabul prompted the UN to remove all personnel from Afghanistan in August 1998.

Mr. de Mello said the UN will take a three-stage approach to redeploying personnel on a two- to three-week rotational basis. Five international staff, including a security officer and representatives from various UN aid agencies, will be sent to Kabul Monday.

The UN will resume its presence in Khandahar beginning March 22 with the deployment of a field security officer and up to eight international staff.

Staff members will subsequently reopen UN offices in Herat and Jalalabad depending on the deployment of field security officers and other security arrangements.

Further deployment of UN personnel throughout the rest of Afghanistan will depend on the security status within the country as the UN will continue to closely monitor the security environment, Mr. de Mello said.

Since August when WFP and other UN international staff pulled out of Afghanistan amid growing security concerns, local WFP staff have provided essential aid to much of the population, feeding half a million urban dwellers and conducting emergency pre-winter distributions to some 200,000 beneficiaries who lack land or income in food-deficit rural areas. WFP also provided logistical support and food to victims of the recent earthquakes in Wardak and Logar provinces.

With the return of UN relief workers to Kabul Monday, the WFP plans to resume its food-for-work and food-for-training projects should the security environment remain stable.

According to the UN agency, in the last six months, food prices in Afghanistan increased and health conditions deteriorated. Several work and training projects in Kabul also had to be suspended, although similar activities that provided income and training for hundreds of women continued in other parts of the country.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) warned that the humanitarian situation in the province was rapidly deteriorating with every day bringing more displacement, destruction and despair. UNHCR said that military activities and fighting in Prizren had escalated significantly since Wednesday resulting in further or repeated displacement.

On Thursday the High Commissioner, Mrs. Sadako Ogata, warned Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic that Kosovo would slide to disaster unless the Serbian military, paramilitary and police forces were reined in, the UN agency said. Mrs. Ogata expressed deep concern about the fate of Albanian and Serb civilian population.

According to UNHCR, heavy fighting continued on Thursday in parts of the Vucitrn area and there were also reports of renewed violence in parts of the Podujevo area. At dawn on Thursday the Yugoslav troops entered the village of Hoca Zagradska causing between 3,000 and 3,500 civilians to flee towards Prizren, the UN agency reported. UNHCR said that difficult terrain and inaccessible locations had thwarted its continuing efforts to locate and assist these displaced persons in southern Kosovo.

In a statement released in Geneva and New York, UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy stressed that while the agency understood the humanitarian instincts of those who had engaged in efforts to buy the freedom, those attempts did not address the underlying causes of slavery in Sudan: "the civil war and its by-products of criminality".

"To roll back and eventually bring a halt to slavery in Sudan, UNICEF believes the main effort should be directed at enlisting the support of the warring parties in ending the armed conflict and all its practices," Ms. Bellamy said.

In response to recent indications of readiness by the Government and the Advisory Council for Human Rights of the Republic of The Sudan to deal with the problem, Ms. Bellamy drew attention to the failure of previous initiatives. She expressed the willingness of UNICEF to cooperate with the Government of Sudan and the international community to quickly achieve specific objectives, such as freedom of movement for international verifiers and full support for retrieval, tracing and reunification programmes. The head of UNICEF stressed that here must also be provision of free access to document all phases of a full-scale effort to bring the slave trade to an end, to free its victims and to restore them to their rightful communities and families.

Reacting to the news of Mr. Menuhin's death of heart failure Friday morning, the Secretary-General said in a statement the late violinist had devoted himself tirelessly to world peace, human rights, defence of the environment, and support for the United Nations.

"As a member of a people which more than any other has been the victim of this century's barbarism, he redeemed the century by rising above all resentment and showing what human beings at their best are capable of," the Secretary-General said.



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

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