United Nations Daily Highlights, 99-05-19

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

DAILY HIGHLIGHTS

Wednesday, 19 May, 1999

HEADLINES

• Secretary-General visits Kosovo refugee camps in former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
• UN mission continues to assess humanitarian needs of civilians in Yugoslavia.
• Security Council, Secretary-General welcome signing of Sierra Leone ceasefire agreement.
• Downing of Russian plane in Angola draws strong condemnation by Security Council.
• Security Council urges diplomatic solution to fighting between Eritrea and Ethiopia.
• Secretary-General sees business community as UN's ally in promoting peace and development in Africa.
• Security Council extends term of a Rwanda tribunal's judge allowing two cases to go forward.
• UN Centre for Human Settlements and World Bank launch joint project to reduce urban poverty.
• Ted Turner's United Nations Foundation announces $21 million in grants for UN projects.
• UN meeting maps plans for final assault on polio.

Speaking to the press at the Stenkovec 1 refugee camp on the outskirts of Skopje, the Secretary-General said he hoped the refugees would not have to spend winter in the camps. "We are doing our best to make sure a political solution is found as soon as possible and that they, the refugees, can go home in peace and security," he said.

Mr. Annan told journalists that the Government had reassured him that it would keep the borders open and that there were 20,000 to 30,000 new places for additional refugees, should they arrive. Noting that there was a tendency to underestimate the contribution of asylum countries, the Secretary-General said the international community should be grateful to the people of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

In response to a reporter's question, Mr. Annan said it was important that the international community, under the umbrella of the UN, pool its efforts to resolve the Kosovo crisis. "All concerned believe that the UN has to be a central part of the solution, that there ought to be a Security Council resolution permitting the deployment of troops and the future administration, to some extent, of Kosovo," he said.

As part of his tour of the camps, the Secretary-General went to the border crossing at Blace, where nearly 4,000 refugees have arrived since yesterday. He and his wife, Nane, spoke to a 100-year-old woman and the mother of a one-day-old child born in the woods yesterday, according to a UN spokesman.

Meanwhile the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that about 3,000 crossed into the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia on Wednesday -- 1,500 in their own vehicles, and another 1,500 by train. UNHCR said there were no significant refugee movements into Albania.

The assessment mission, which is being led by the Under-Secretary- General for Humanitarian Affairs, Sergio Vieira de Mello, is expected to go to Kosovo tomorrow. Yesterday, the mission visited Novi Sad and Pancevo -- two towns north of Belgrade.

Meanwhile, one of the Secretary-General's Special Envoys for the Balkans, Eduard Kukan, was in Washington D.C. today for discussions with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on the UN role in peace negotiations regarding Kosovo.

Mr. Kukan will meet Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov on Thursday in Moscow.

The Secretary-General's other Special Envoy, former Swedish Prime Minister, Carl Bildt, was in Europe to establish contacts with various parties in an effort to facilitate a lasting political solution to the crisis.

In a statement to the media, Council President Ambassador Denis Dangue Rewaka of Gabon said Council members urged the parties to work constructively and in good faith to establish a wider and more comprehensive peace agreement during the negotiations scheduled to begin 25 May in Lome, Togo.

Members of the Council also urged the parties to implement fully all the provisions on the ceasefire agreement and reiterated their commitment to monitor and assist in the implementation of the agreement, Ambassador Rewaka said.

Reacting to the news of the ceasefire, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said through a UN spokesman in New York that the agreement would help to create an atmosphere "conducive to the success of the peace talks."

The current agreement guarantees safe and unhindered humanitarian access to populations in need and the immediate release of all prisoners of war and non-combatants. The parties also agreed to request the United Nations, subject to Security Council authorization, to deploy military observers as soon as possible to observe compliance with the agreement.

According to his spokesman, the Secretary-General intended to initiate immediate measures to strengthen the United Nations Observer Mission in Sierra Leone (UNOMSIL) for its role in implementing the agreement. The UN is sending a military assessment team to the country to draw up plans for an expanded presence.

In a presidential statement read out by Council President, Ambassador Denis Dangue Rewaka of Gabon, the Council stressed that UNITA and its leader, Jonas Savimbi, carried "full responsibility" for the hostages' safety. The Council also demanded information on the fate of the Angolan passengers, expressing its grave concern at the fate of those who were on-board the downed aircraft.

The Council called upon the Angolan Government and other concerned parties to cooperate in obtaining the release of the Russian crew members as well as in ascertaining the fate of the passengers and crew members of other commercial aircraft lost under suspicious circumstances over UNITA- controlled territory.

In a press statement, Council President Ambassador Denis Dengue Rewaka of Gabon said Council members urged both parties to comply immediately and in full with the Council's 10 February resolution, which demanded that both sides resume diplomatic efforts to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

Expressing their continuing support for the Secretary-General's efforts with the Organization for African Unity (OAU) to find a peaceful solution, the members of the Council reaffirmed the OAU's Framework Agreement as a viable and sound basis for the political settlement of the dispute, Ambassador Rewaka said.

"Africa has all the critical ingredients needed to attract foreign investment," the Secretary-General said in a message to the fifth African/African-American Summit in Accra, Ghana, which was delivered on his behalf by the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs, Ibrahima Fall.

In his message to the forum that has brought together many heads of State and government from Africa, African-American leaders and business leaders from around the world, Mr. Annan underscored the importance of the Summit as an effort to mobilize energy and resources behind what he called "one of the most urgent challenges that Africa faces today": the creation of an enabling environment that would encourage investments in the development of the continent.

Pointing to the renewed international interest in Africa, the Secretary- General underscored in particular the commitment of the United States symbolized by President Clinton's visit last year to several African countries, and by congressional consideration of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act.

Mr. Annan said that the African-American community has played a successful advocacy role in this regard, and is continuing to increase the profile of African issues in the United States. The Summit in Accra, he said, was sustaining that momentum.

In a unanimously adopted resolution, the Council also took note of the Tribunal's intention to finish those cases before 31 January 2000.

The Secretary-General's recommendation came after the Tribunal's President, Judge Laity Kama, requested an extension for Judge Lennart Aspergen, whose term was set to expire 24 May after he was not re-elected for a second term.

Judge Kama pointed out in his letter to the Secretary-General that the departure of Judge Aspergen before their conclusion would force the trials to start over, creating unfortunate legal and financial consequences and causing serious prejudice against the accused, to the legal work and to the Tribunal's image.

The case against Georges Anderson Rutaganda, which began in March 1997, was about to proceed to the deliberations phase by the end of June, while the case against Alfred Musema was also coming to an end, with the closing speech and pleading expected to take place immediately after the last witnesses appeared in early September.

Called the Cities Alliance, the project is a multi-donor coalition that will work in partnership with cities to produce integrated strategies for urban development and to facilitate upgrading of low-income settlements.

At the launching ceremony in Washington D.C., Klaus Toepfer, the Acting Executive Director of Habitat who had originally conceived the idea, said that the Alliance would exploit the synergies between Habitat and the World Bank, the two largest sources of assistance to cities in the developing world.

The partnership would link Habitat's growing normative capacity with the large operational capacity of the World Bank, he said, as well as strengthen the impact of Habitat's own operational activities by linking them more directly with large-scale investments.

World Bank President James Wolfensohn said the Bank's cooperation with the Alliance would help achieve unprecedented improvements in the socio- economic and environmental viability of cities and in the living conditions of the poor.

Investments totalling $21 million will go to support 11 United Nations projects around the world.

Included in the package is $5.9 million to support two programmes by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to develop and distribute emergency reproductive health information and services to refugee communities in crisis. One grant will support services in Central Asia and Africa.

A second grant will go to UNFPA to help pregnant women in the Kosovo region, where over 1,000 to 1,5000 births a month are expected among the refugees.

Another beneficiary will be UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme for HIV/AIDS, which will receive $1.8 million to prevent the spread of HIV in Botswana and Zimbabwe, currently experiencing some of the highest infection rates in sub-Saharan Africa.

Other grants will go to promote a pilot programme on so-called "micro- insurance" for women in West Africa and to help combat invasive species that threaten the diversity of over 5,000 native species on the Galapagos Islands.

The international call to accelerate the eradication effort came at an extraordinary meeting called by WHO Director-General Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland to coordinate strategy for what she termed the "home stretch" of WHO's anti-polio campaign. The meeting, which coincided with the opening yesterday of the agency's annual World Health Assembly in Geneva, brought together governments of key polio-endemic countries, as well as representatives of donor nations and private and intergovernmental organizations.

"Poliovirus is now on the verge of extinction," Dr. Brundtland said, pointing to the remarkable progress made in polio eradication in past months. "But one of the paradoxes of an eradication initiative is that control efforts must be intensified as the disease disappears."

The meeting agreed to massive house-to-house immunization campaigns through 2001 in the reservoir and conflict-affected countries such as Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Countries also agreed to improve by the end of 1999 disease surveillance and polio laboratories to reach standards necessary to be certified polio-free. Donor countries estimated the total cost of this final effort to be $500 million.

WHO is spearheading the international effort to eradicate polio by the year 2000. As a result of mass immunization campaigns that reach hundreds of millions of children each year, the number of cases worldwide have fallen by 85 percent in 10 years -- from 35,000 in 1988 to 5,673 in 1998.

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

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