United Nations Daily Highlights, 99-05-20

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

DAILY HIGHLIGHTS

Thursday, 20 May, 1999

Latest Developments

HEADLINES

• On visit to refugee camps in Albania, Secretary-General stresses need to get Kosovars home by winter.
• UN humanitarian assessment team arrives in Kosovo capital of Pristina.
• UN agencies begin advanced planning for return of Kosovo refugees.
• Secretary-General proposes $45 million budget for UN's East Timor operation.
• UNICEF highlights major educational ills in Haiti.

"Again today", the Secretary-General told reporters at the Albanian border town of Kukes, "I have heard heartbreaking stories about Kosovo. I have seen people uprooted from their homes who are anxious to go back again. We are all doing our best to get them home before the winter."

On Thursday, the Secretary-General visited refugee camps in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

At Kukes, Mr. Annan visited a family in their tent and spoke with others in a tented infirmary, including a young mother who said she had been shot in the leg by a Serb sniper while carrying her child over the mountains into Albania. The Secretary-General also visited a camp run by the non- governmental organization Medicins Sans Frontier.

In the Albanian capital of Tirana, the Secretary-General met with President Rexhep Meidani and members of his cabinet to discuss prospects for the return of refugees, the winterization of the camps and current peace efforts. He thanked the President and the Albanian people for opening their borders and their homes to ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and praised the cooperation between the UN agencies and what he called "our solid partners, the NGOs".

The Secretary-General, who also met with representatives of UN agencies and non-governmental organizations working in Albania, said he hoped that the refugees could return home before winter so that winterization could be carried out in Kosovo rather than on the Albanian side of the border.

Meanwhile, the Secretary-General's Special Envoys for the Balkans, Eduard Kukan and Carl Bildt, continued their consultations in Europe on Thursday. Mr. Kukan travelled from Washington, D.C. to Moscow where he met with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov. Carl Bildt was also expected to travel to Moscow from Brussels.

The mission -- the first from the United Nations to go into Kosovo since the UN pulled out on the eve of NATO airstrikes in March -- was scheduled to spend three days in the province, the spokesman said.

The team is expected to assess the situation in and around Pristina on Thursday. A UNICEF truck carrying baby food and other supplies for the children in Kosovo accompanied the mission.

Meanwhile, Asma Jahangir, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, announced on Thursday that she would soon go to Albania and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to evaluate allegations of human rights violations in Kosovo. Ms. Jahangir will visit the two countries from 23 to 28 May.

UNHCR cautioned that prospects for return appear "remote" at present, but said that international agencies must start planning now for the return of up to 1.5 million people uprooted by the conflict.

In the report, UNHCR, which will co-ordinate the return effort, reiterates that no significant refugee return is possible until Serbian military and paramilitary forces withdraw from Kosovo and until a robust international military force is deployed to protect the civilian population and humanitarian workers. The report also lists security guarantees from the Yugoslav government that are considered essential for refugee return.

UNHCR acknowledges that while it is impossible to predict the future political arrangement in Kosovo or its timing, some kind of "interim administration" or "international protectorate" is likely.

Meanwhile, the UN agency said there were no new arrivals of Kosovo refugees in Albania on Thursday. In the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, one train was reported arriving on the border carrying an estimated 2,000 to 3, 000 refugees from Kosovo.

The Secretary-General's budget proposal of $45,677,300, which does not include an estimated $7.4 million needed to deploy up to 300 civilian police, would cover the cost of more than 4,700 international and local personnel in addition to mission hardware and equipment.

In a report to the General Assembly's Fifth Committee, which oversees budgetary matters, the Secretary-General says he has set up a trust fund for voluntary contributions that would enable him -- pending formal approval by the Security Council -- to immediately establish a UN presence in East Timor. The aim of that presence is to carry out "various phases of the consultation process," according to the terms of the two Supplementary Agreements signed on 5 May by the United Nations and the Governments of Indonesia and Portugal. So far, contributions of nearly $19 million in cash and in-kind assistance have been received.

The two accords supplement the Basic Agreement, which requests the Secretary-General to put for consideration by the East Timorese people through direct ballot a proposed constitutional framework providing for a special autonomy for East Timor within the unitary Republic of Indonesia. Should the autonomy proposal be accepted, East Timor would be removed from the UN list of Non-Self-Governing Territories; if, however, the proposal is rejected, the United Nations would initiate moves towards East Timor's independence. The popular consultation is scheduled to take place on 8 August 1999.

The Fifth Committee is expected to consider the Secretary-General's budget proposals and make its recommendation to the General Assembly before the Committee completes its current session next Friday.

"Haiti's educational system has utterly failed for as many as half of that nation's children," Sheldon Shaeffer, chief of UNICEF's Education Section, said in New York. "It is a major violation of human rights to consign children, by denying them education, to lives of poverty and disease."

In real terms, Mr. Shaeffer stated, more than one million primary school- age children in Haiti simply have no access to education. As a result, the country has an illiteracy rate of over 55 per cent that is the highest in the Americas. In addition, the vast majority of schools lack trained teachers, less than half the children have access to textbooks and only one in five young people reach secondary school.

According to UNICEF, those figures reflect an educational crisis found throughout the developing world, one which has left one billion people illiterate, with girls outnumbering boys two to one among those who receive no education at all. UNICEF is spotlighting the crisis in the wake of "The State of the Worldþs Children 1999", the agency's wide-ranging examination of challenges to the right of all children to basic education.

In Haiti, UNICEF is working with the Haitian Ministry of Education to improve schools and to reach children who have dropped out. Mr. Shaeffer said that school reform in Haiti - a major thrust of which should be to strengthen and empower free, public education - would require substantial input from donor nations.

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