REGULAR PRESS BRIEFING BY THE INFORMATION SERVICE

Elena Ponomareva-Piquier, Chief of the Press and External Relations Section of the United Nations Office at Geneva, chaired the briefing which was also addressed by Spokespersons for the United Nations Children’s Fund, the World Food Programme, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the UN Refugee Agency and the World Health Organization.

Secretary-General

Ms. Ponomareva-Piquier said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon yesterday welcomed a “new era of partnership” between the United Nations and non-governmental organizations in a meeting in Chicago with the Rotary Club and the Mac Arthur Foundations. The Secretary-General also met with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, saying that the United Nations and Chicago “share one common goal and vision – that is addressing climate change, to make this planet earth more hospitable and environmentally sustainable for generations to come.”

Conference on Disarmament

Ms. Ponomareva-Piquier said the Conference on Disarmament held a public plenary yesterday during which it was addressed by Thomas D'Agostino, the Administrator of the United States National Nuclear Security Administration, as well as the delegations of Algeria, Poland, Malaysia and Iran.

The Conference will next meet in public plenary at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, 12 February, when the Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation Sergey Lavrov will address it. Mr. Lavrov will give a press conference in Room III at 11:15 a.m.

Situation in Chad

Jennifer Pagonis of the UN Refugee Agency said a UNHCR emergency airlift was now under way to bring aid to the refugees who had fled from N’Djamena in Chad into Cameroon in recent days. UNHCR had chartered an Ilyushin-76 plane which was expected to land this morning in Garoua, about 800 kilometres north of Yaounde in Cameroon, with 45 tons of relief items. There would be another plane carrying the same amount of aid shortly after that. This would be enough for 14,000 people. An estimated 30,000 persons fled fighting in N’Djamena earlier in the week and had found refuge in Kousseri in Cameroon. UNHCR teams on the ground had observed that Chadian refugees were crossing back and forth into Chad to check on their properties. Rather than remain in N’Djamena, most of them returned to Cameroon to spend the night there, so it was far too early to tell whether people were returning. By the end of the day today, UNHCR would have 16 staff in Kousseri. The site presently hosted between 7,000 and 10,000 Chadian refugees, and this morning, UNHCR and the Red Cross began work on sanitation facilities for the transit site. UNHCR was also planning with WFP a food distribution for up to 30,000 people on Saturday.

Ms. Pagonis said two UNHCR trucks carrying 12 tons of relief items arrived on Wednesday and Thursday in Kousseri from eastern Cameroon. On Sunday, UNHCR was planning to distribute relief items including blankets, jerry cans, buckets and soap. The situation in N’Djamena was calm this morning, but the streets remained empty and very few shops were open. UNHCR local staff who remained in N’Djamena were starting to collect UNHCR tents which were looted from the UNHCR warehouse and later abandoned by looters in the streets. UNHCR’s office in the capital was not touched. In eastern Chad, UNHCR and its partners continued to provide protection and assistance to 240,000 Sudanese refugees in 12 camps and 180,000 internally displaced Chadians. UNHCR was alarmed by the sudden jump in armed banditry in refugee camps.

Veronique Taveau of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said the situation of Chadian refugees who had taken refuge in Kousseri in neighbouring Cameroon remained difficult. An inter-agency UN team made up of UNICEF, UNHCR, WHO and WFP was in Kousseri distributing the necessary humanitarian aid to the refugees. There was a shortage of drinking water, and the sanitation situation was particularly bad. Dozens of unaccompanied children were among the refugees and they were already going through a process of identification with help from the Cameroon Red Cross and local non-governmental organizations. Psychologists had been sent in to help traumatized children. UNICEF had reinforced its team in Kousseri and a massive vaccination campaign against polio and measles was starting today, targeting 35,000 children in Kousseri. In cooperation with WHO, UNICEF was also distributing a Vitamin A supplement to children from six months to five years.

Ms. Taveau said UNICEF was also worried about unexploded ordnance in and around Kousseri. The local authorities had said they had neither the experience nor the capacity to deal with this problem. UNICEF was ready to help the local authorities with this problem, including by a campaign to warn refugees about the danger of unexploded ordnance. UNICEF was also working with MSF France to follow the nutritional situation of the children in Kousseri.

Christiane Berthiaume of the World Food Programme said WFP had trucks carrying food from the Cameroon town of Maroua, where WFP had food stocks, to Kousseri. Thirty-two tons of rice, 31 tons of leguminous vegetables, and 19 tons of vegetable oil had been transported to Kousseri yesterday by truck, and today, 15 tons of sorghum, 15 tons of rice, and 2.5 tons of vegetable oil were being transported. WFP would also be transporting by plane high-energy biscuits from Accra in Ghana to Kousseri. There were trucks carrying 80 tons of sorghum into Chad that had been held up by the hostilities. WFP was working with the Cameroon Red Cross to distribute all this food aid. The Chadian refugees were living all over Kousseri, in hotels, with friends and family, in schools and in buildings. It was now necessary to gather the refugees to organize the distribution of food. WFP also had planes which were transporting humanitarian actors from Yaounde to Maroua and Garoua, and from there, they traveled on land for three hours to reach Kousseri. WFP had unblocked from its emergency funds $ 500,000 to respond to the crisis.

Ms. Berthiaume said yesterday, the situation was calm in Chad according to her colleague on the ground. There was hope that the situation was returning to normal, unless the fighting resumed. Police yesterday were patrolling the streets of N’Djamena and buses were also running. A lot of looting had taken place in N’Djamena, but luckily, the WFP offices and ware houses in N’Djamena were not affected. Abeche and the refugee camps there were also calm yesterday. WFP helped 400,000 persons in Chad, including refugees from Darfur in Sudan and from the Central African Republic, and displaced persons in the east of the country. WFP had stockpiles of 12,500 tons of food in Cameroon, but this was also the time of the year when it started stockpiling food for the refugees in preparation for the rainy season which started in June and which blocked the roads.

Elizabeth Byrs of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said OCHA was neither being optimistic nor alarmist about the situation in Chad. For the moment, the situation was calm, and it was hoped this would continue. OCHA wanted non-governmental organizations to return to Chad, at least in the east of the country. The humanitarian actors had to return to help provide assistance to the 500,000 refugees and displaced persons in the east of Chad who depended on humanitarian aid. The stockpiles of food, medical supplies, water or fuel for water pumps in the camps in the east of Chad were enough for between two to four weeks maximum. OCHA should be back to full business in no time when normality was restored and the overall situation was clearer. In the past two months, 5,800 refugees from the Central African Republic had entered Chad, and OCHA was worried about them, as well as 30,000 Chadian refugees who had fled into Cameroon.

Situation in Kenya

Elizabeth Byrs of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the Kenya Red Cross was reporting more than 325,000 people displaced in Kenya in 296 camps around the country. The security situation in most parts of the country had improved slightly, though displacements continued. Access to the affected populations continued to be a challenge due to security reasons and population movements. The logistics situation remained very unpredictable and security continued to be the biggest challenge. This had made the movement of commodities from Nairobi to storage and distribution points particularly difficult. Transport difficulties continued to impact on Uganda and the wider central and east African region, raising fuel and transport prices and forcing transporters to use alternate routes, rather than the primary routes through Kenya. The Kenya Emergency Humanitarian Response Plan of $ 42 million launched on 16 January was 25 per cent covered so far. UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, John Holmes, arrived today in Kenya on a three-day visit and would be meeting with former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, humanitarian agencies and non-governmental organizations. He would also travel through the Rift Valley. More details were available in the notes.

Christiane Berthiaume of the World Food Programme said in Kenya, WFP had distributed food to 212,000 displaced persons in the Rift Valley and the west of the country, as well as 160,000 affected persons in the capital Nairobi. OCHA had already spoken about the transport problems in Kenya, and the Kenyan army was now escorting WFP trucks from the north of Nairobi to the border with Uganda where there were stockpiles of food. Food rations were being distributed in all the main sites where there were internally displaced persons, as well as among smaller gatherings. There was still a lot of displacement continuing. The crisis was considerably affecting the agricultural sector in Kenya. The Rift Valley was the grain basket of the country, so this would have repercussions for the future.

Other

Veronique Taveau of the United Nations Children’s Fund reminded journalists that UNICEF’s Humanitarian Action Report 2008 would be launched at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, 12 February in Salle III. The embargoed report provided an overview of the agency’s emergency assistance programmes and appealed for funding to meet humanitarian needs in the year ahead. The embargoed report would be available on line, under strict embargo, as of today.

Elizabeth Byrs of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said a brief update concerning the floods in Bolivia was available. The floods were persisting and the emergency was moving from the west of the country to the east. There was also a press release available on the United Nations Central Emergency Respond Fund allocating more than 20 million to four under-funded crises in West Africa: Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali and Niger.

Fadela Chaib of the World Health Organization said she wanted to highlight some information which had been posted on the WHO website and which she would probably be returning to in coming weeks. It concerned yellow fever in Brazil. As of 1 February, the Ministry of Health of Brazil had reported a total of 48 cases of yellow fever, including 13 deaths. Twenty three of these cases have been laboratory confirmed. The laboratory confirmed cases were reported from the three states of Goias, Distrito Federal and Mato Grosso do Sol. The first confirmed case was on 17 Dec 2007. Twenty one confirmed cases had never been vaccinated for yellow fever and the other two were last vaccinated over 20 years ago. This outbreak of yellow fever followed an epizootic outbreak in monkeys that started in April 2007 and had since spread to 80 municipalities. Brazil had suspended exports of yellow fever vaccine from Bio-Manguinhos, one of three WHO pre-qualified manufacturers of yellow fever vaccine, based in Brazil, in order to meet the needs of the country to respond to this outbreak.
On 18 January, the Brazilian Ministry of Health submitted a request to borrow an additional 4 million doses of vaccine from the global emergency stockpile managed by the International Coordinating Group on Vaccine Provision for Yellow Fever Control, in order to complete the required levels of yellow fever vaccines stocks held nationally to enable an emergency vaccination campaign.
The campaign, which would target approximately 7 million people in the most affected states, would be carried out in February.

Ms. Chaib reminded journalists that a meeting of the intergovernmental negotiating body on a protocol on illicit trade in tobacco products would be held from 11 to 16 February at the International Geneva Conference Centre. A media advisory had been sent out yesterday. There would be an unveiling of “the death clock” which counted the deaths from tobacco at 2 p.m. on Monday, 11 February at the International Geneva Conference Centre.

Jennifer Pagonis of the UN Refugee Agency said UNHCR welcomed the end of Australia’s “Pacific Solution” which came to a close today, with the departure of the last remaining 21 refugees from the tiny Pacific Island state of Nauru for Australia. The group was among 83 asylum seekers intercepted on their way to Australia on 22 February last year. They were all determined to be refugees. UNHCR had strong concerns about the “Pacific Solution”, a deterrence policy which diverted asylum seekers to Nauru or Papua New Guinea, denying them access to Australian territory to lodge asylum claims.

Canine Team

Ms. Ponomareva-Piquier said she wanted to present today two new colleagues, members of the UNOG security staff. UN staff came from all walks of life, and UNOG was continuing this tradition by bringing in York Von Goldenberg, the first four-legged UNOG staffer who specialized in the detection of explosives and arms. York was accompanied by his master, José Gallardo, and together they made up UNOG’s first K9 unit. There was a K9 unit at Headquarters in New York, but this would be the first K9 team at a UN office in Europe. The unit was expected to include at least three dogs. Before joining UNOG on 1 February, York and José belonged to the Brigade of Police Dogs in the Genevoise Police specialized in the detection of explosives.