United Nations Daily Highlights, 99-06-22

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

DAILY HIGHLIGHTS

Tuesday, 22 June, 1999

Latest Developments

HEADLINES

• As refugees stream back to Kosovo, UN stresses need to provide shelter.
• UN officials in Kosovo confer with ethnic Albanian leaders on future political arrangements.
• Security Council members welcome continuing UN-Angola talks on UN's future role in country.
• UN food agency fears hunger crisis in horn of Africa.
• UNHCR steps up campaign to help Crimean Tatars obtain Ukrainian citizenship.

The number of people who have returned to Kosovo since the deployment of first KFOR troops is expected to top 200,000 by the end of Tuesday and the stream showed no signs of abating, said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Camps in the northern Albanian town of Kukes that housed 35,000 refugees just a week ago are now practically empty.

UNHCR and other aid agencies are rapidly expanding their operations in Kosovo to keep up with what is turning out to be the Balkan's fastest spontaneous return movement during the 1990s wars. Two UNHCR convoys carrying tents, plastic sheeting, blankets and hygiene kits travelled to Podujevo on the strategic road between Kosovo's capital Pristina and Belgrade.

From Prizren, UNHCR teams went to look at conditions in the Suva Reka region and reported severe damage in many villages. In the village of Studencane, for example, only 20 of 500 houses were intact and hundreds of returnees were trying to rebuild their homes. Another team reported that in Prizren's Bogoslavija Monastery, KFOR troops were protecting 50 mainly elderly people. They included Serbs suspected by ethnic Albanians of being collaborators, and other minorities.

The UN refugee agency also opened a supply line on Tuesday between Skopje in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Pec in Western Kosovo, to deliver urgently needed tents. A UN aerial survey last week found that up to 50 per cent of the houses in the heavily devastated area were uninhabitable.

The Acting Special Representative of the Secretary-General Sergio Vieira De Mello has been meeting over the last two days with a Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) leader Thaci, who goes only by his nom de guerre, said Spokesman Fred Eckhard. The Secretary-General's Special Envoy for the Balkans, Carl Bildt, joined Monday's meeting.

Within the next few days, the three other ethnic Albanian signatories to the Rambouillet Agreement will be in Pristina and Mr. Vieira De Mello plans to ask them to be part of an advisory council he is forming to discuss interim political arrangements.

Meanwhile, the growing tide of returning Kosovo refugees has swelled the population of the provincial capital Pristina, which now stands at approximately half its normal size. The return has been accompanied by a rise in the crime rate, according to UN reports.

Troops from the international military force, know as KFOR, are responsible for maintaining security, including law and order, until the UN Interim Administrative Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) re-establishes a civilian police force and installs international police monitors to oversee their work.

In a press statement, Council President Ambassador Baboucarr-Blaise I. Jagne of Gambia said Council members expressed a close interest in the UN Secretariat reaching an early agreement with the Angolan Government on this issue.

The President's statement was issued after the Security Council was briefed by UN Under-Secretary- General for Peacekeeping Bernard Miyet on his recent trip to Angola, where he had held discussions with Government officials on the future role of the United Nations in the country.

As a result of these talks, Mr. Miyet was able to reach an agreement in principle with senior Angolan officials on a small United Nations mission for the country that would include political, information and humanitarian components. There was no agreement, as yet, on military observers or human rights monitors, but more discussions were expected to follow.

An extended dry spell with only scattered rains during May and June in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya is likely to slash crop and livestock production further weakening the region's already precarious food situation, WFP said.

According to the UN aid agency, rainfall in the Ethiopian highlands, which feeds Somalia's rivers, has been so poor that water levels downstream are dangerously low. Satellite imagery reveals a below-normal status of crops and grazing areas since mid-May, especially in the Juba Valley, parts of Bay and Bakool and the agricultural areas of Somaliland.

WFP has already approved a $40 million emergency operation to feed nearly 1.2 million people in desperate need in eight drought-stricken regions of Ethiopia.

In Kenya, below average rainfall is one of several factors which will have an adverse impact on the country's next harvest, according to WFP. Another factor is an infestation of army-worm, which has hit large swathes of cereal producing and pastoral lands. Disturbingly high malnutrition among children has already been reported in north-eastern districts with rates up sharply from 21 per cent in January to nearly 40 per cent in May.

UNHCR has been sending mobile teams to remote villages informing people they can renounce their current Uzbek citizenship and apply for Ukrainian citizenship before 31 December.

Since 1996 UNHCR has helped 50,000 Crimean Tatars to acquire Ukrainian citizenship. The agency is also continuing to assist the Ukrainian Government in the negotiations on citizenship agreements with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan concerning Crimean Tatars who have returned from other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Many of an estimated 20,000 returnees are facing practical difficulties in acquiring Ukrainian citizenship.

In May 1944 Soviet leader Josef Stalin deported more than 400,000 Crimean Tatars to Central Asia. At the end of the cold war and during the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union, about 250,000 returned to their traditional homeland in Crimea, in southern Ukraine. The rest remained scattered in Central Asia, largely in Uzbekistan.

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

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