United Nations Daily Highlights, 99-07-09

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

DAILY HIGHLIGHTS

Friday, 9 July, 1999

HEADLINES

• Security Council welcomes "significant progress" by Libya in complying with Council resolutions.
• Members of Security Council welcome peace accord on Sierra Leone.
• UNHCR says Belgrade treating Serbs from Kosovo as second class citizens.
• Newly-appointed chief of UN mission in Kosovo heads for Europe to begin assignment.
• Concern over lack of funding for development voiced as Economic and Social Council continues session in Geneva.
• Middle Eastern leaders say joint efforts to fight illicit drugs will boost peace.
• More than 1 million people in Afghanistan need food assistance, UN agencies warn.

In a presidential statement read out at an open meeting, the Council also welcomed Libya's commitment to further implement those resolutions and encouraged all parties concerned to maintain their spirit of cooperation.

Recalling that the coercive measures it imposed on Libya back in 1992 and 1993 have been suspended, the Council reaffirmed its intention to lift the sanctions "as soon as possible, in conformity with the relevant resolutions."

The Security Council expressed its gratitude to Secretary-General Kofi Annan for his continued efforts in seeking the cooperation of the Libyan Government to provide full and effective response to Council's requests. It also expressed gratitude to Mr. Annan for his role in nominating international observers to attend the trial of the two Pan Am bombing suspects before a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands.

In a press statement released Thursday evening after they were briefed on the conclusion of the accord, Council members urged both the Government of Sierra Leone and the RUF to do their utmost to ensure that all provisions of the agreement are implemented. The accord was signed in Togo's capital of Lome on 7 July.

Congratulating those who negotiated the accord -- in particular, President Eyadema of Togo, and Francis Okelo, Special Representative of UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan -- the Council also paid tribute to the key role played in Sierra Leone by ECOMOG, the Monitoring Group of the Economic Community of West African States.

Looking ahead, members of the Council said the UN would have a key role to play in implementing the accord, "especially in the key task of disarmament and demobilization and reintegration."

In the next few days, Secretary-General Kofi Annan is expected to submit his recommendations to the Council outlining the UN's involvement in what he called "the difficult task of implementation."

Deprived of any official status they have become second class citizens, said a UNHCR spokesman. According to local press reports in Serbia, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Serbia sent an instruction to all primary and secondary school directors in the territory of Serbia to reject enrolment of pupils from Kosovo. Other bureaucratic pressures are reportedly being applied on the internally displaced to return to Kosovo, spokesman Kris Janowski said.

Last week, the Serbian Health Ministry said if health workers from Kosovo did not report to their old jobs they would loose them as well as back pay. Internally displaced Kosovars in Serbia cannot claim monthly fuel rations outside Kosovo nor can they receive pensions unless they first de-register with the police in their old place of residence -- an impossible task since the withdrawal of police forces from Kosovo.

Meanwhile, minority Serbs and Roma or Gypsies remaining in Kosovo are also facing an increasingly critical situation, said Mr. Janowski. In the town of Prizren, some 20 Serb houses have been burned in the last 48 hours and 130 Serbs are still in the Orthodox seminary at Bogoslavija, under the protection of German troops with KFOR, the international military force.

The situation is very tense in Djakovica where 360 Roma are gathered in the mined graveyard near the centre of town, according to the UN refugee agency. Houses have been torched and some Roma taken away by the Kosovo Liberation Army for interrogation. The Roma group is asking to be evacuated to Montenegro.

The Serb community in Orahovac is also asking to be taken out of the area, Mr. Janowski said. Most Serbs have moved from surrounding villages to the upper part of the town where they are living in a ghetto-like area under Dutch KFOR protection.

Mr. Kouchner is expected to arrive in Pristina by the middle of next week after attending a high-level meeting in Brussels on Tuesday on reconstruction in Kosovo.

Meanwhile, the acting Special Representative in Kosovo, Sergio Vieira de Mello, met with the UN Police Commissioner and a representative of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to work out details on the recruitment of local police for training. OSCE, which will oversee institution building as part of the UN mission in Kosovo, will be responsible for setting up of a Police Academy.

Mr. Vieira de Mello also spoke with Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova and encouraged him to return to Kosovo to attend a scheduled meeting on Tuesday of the Kosovo Transitional Council, the highest level consultative body representing a broad spectrum of opinion in the province.

After intensive negotiations by UNMIK and KFOR, a group of 80 Albanians and 60 Serbs will resume work on Monday at Pristina's municipal building. The return to work is a result of an agreement that may prove to be a model for efforts to reconstitute Kosovo's public institutions.

The agreement allows for 400 workers from various ethnic groups to work alongside each other. Its ultimate goal is full integration of all former employees in the municipal building, including those employed as of 24 March and those previously employed in 1990.

The dialogue, which took place within the framework of the Council's current substantive session in Geneva, focused on poverty eradication and capacity-building and highlighted the need for increased cooperation between the UN agencies and the Bretton Woods institutions.

Amid general agreement that the issue of dwindling resources for development needed urgent attention, some participants suggested that the problem was the result of a lack of political will and that the funding system, which now operated on a purely voluntary basis, might have to undergo some changes.

Mark Malloch Brown, Administrator of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), said that today UNDP was threatened by political and financial neglect and there was a need to take an unambiguous message to the highest political level that UNDP would grow and change. Nafis Sadik, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), said that resource mobilization was a top priority in its own right, but especially so in relation to the effective implementation of major international conferences held by the UN.

The need for more donor support for development was also underscored by Catherine Bertini, Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), who stressed that with smaller pots of resources to resolve more problems, the scarcity of development funding called for joint action. Commenting on another important area of UN activities, Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), said while much had been achieved to improve the rights and development of children since the 1990 World Summit for Children, much remained to be done and resources remained a major problem.

Concern over the slow but sure reduction in the amount of development- related funding, was also expressed yesterday during ECOSOC's high-level debate on UN operational activities for international development cooperation, poverty eradication and capacity-building.

During meetings this week with Under-Secretary-General Pino Arlacchi, Executive Director of the Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP), top officials from Israel and the Palestinian Authority agreed that transnational crime and the drug problem can only be tackled at the regional level.

"Drug trafficking and crime are problems that know no boundaries. We therefore have to work together in the Middle East to counter this threat to the welfare of our societies," Mr. Arlacchi said in a meeting with Yasser Arafat, President of the Palestinian National Authority.

Mr. Arlacchi expressed strong support for efforts by the Palestinian Authority to set up a functioning drug control system and pledged to substantially increase ODCCP assistance. The agency is providing equipment and training for the Palestinian drug police, setting up drug abuse prevention and treatment centres and helping the Palestinian Authority draft and harmonize drug control laws.

While in Israel, Mr. Arlacchi met President Ezer Weizman, Foreign Affairs Minister David Levy, and Shimon Peres, Israel's newly appointed Minister for Regional Cooperation. He praised Israel's successes in fighting crime and illicit drugs and welcomed its efforts to reduce drug abuse among young people. Israeli authorities said they had set up a task force and were preparing a parliamentary bill to tackle money laundering.

The report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) says that cereal production is expected to fall 16 percent to 3.24 million tonnes in 1999.

Based on a recent FAO/WFP crop and food supply assessment mission to the country, the report says that Afghanistan's cereal production was sharply reduced this year by a shortage of irrigation water. Late and erratic spring rains, and a high incidence of yellow rust and sunnpest in some regions, also contributed to the fall in cereal production.

According to the UN agencies, food deficits in Afghanistan have been exacerbated by a trend among farmers to turn their wheat fields over to the cultivation of such cash crops as onions, potatoes, poppies and tree crops.

Cereal import requirements for the next 12 months are estimated at a record 1.1 million tonnes, but with commercial cereal imports reaching just 800, 000 tonnes, Afghanistan faces a food shortfall of 323,000 tonnes, the agencies say.

Although WFP has procured 97,000 tonnes of emergency food aid, the remaining deficit will have serious implications for the poorest and most vulnerable people in a population that is heavily dependent on food aid because of high levels of poverty and unemployment, FAO and WFP warned.



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