REGULAR PRESS BRIEFING BY THE INFORMATION SERVICE
Rhéal LeBlanc, Chief, Press and External Relations Section, United Nations Information Service in Geneva, chaired the briefing attended by the spokespersons for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Health Organization, the International Organization for Migration, and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Ravina Shamdasani, for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that OHCHR had seeked cooperation from the DRC authorities to launch an investigation into the crisis in the Kasai region. The response of the Government fell short, and the High Commissioner for Human Rights then decided to deploy a team of human rights officers to Angola to collect testimony from refugees. The report of that mission was then presented by Scott Campbell, Chief of OHCHR’s Central and West Africa Section and expert on the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Mr. Campbell said the report was prepared in the context of a degrading humanitarian, human rights, and security crisis in the Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and was based on testimony from 96 Congolese who had fled the Kamonia territory in Kasai. He reminded correspondents of reports of some 80 mass graves discovered in the region since last year by the human rights team in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in part in conjunction with the DRC authorities.
Many of the direct victims interviewed bore visible traces of violent abuse, including limbs amputated, scars from machetes, etc. Over a 3 month period between March and June 2017, the OHCHR team found that at least 251 people were killed in a fairly limited part of the Kasai region, including 62 children, some of them under 8 years old. The accounts from refugees were absolutely horrific.
Mr. Campbell said this was essentially a conflict over traditional powers, the succession of a traditional chief in the Kamonia territory that spiralled out of control. He added that it had spiralled out of control with complicity from the Government. The followers of one of the individuals involved in the succession crisis named Kamuina Nsapu was reportedly killed by the Congolese army. The Kamuina Nsapu militia was formed and revolted against the State, State symbols and State actors. The Congolese army then responded in a heavy handed manner with the complicity of a newly created militia known as the Bana Mura.
OHCHR investigators gathered many accounts of the Congolese army, national police and local administrators working in conjunction with the Bana Mura in attacking villages, often along ethnic lines.
One of OHCHR’a great concerns was that what was already an extremely grave situation could spiral further out of control and in particular along ethnic lines.
The High Commissioner was calling for a credible investigation into who was responsible for the crisis and he was calling for those responsible – be they members of militia, be they members of state agencies – to be held to account. The High Commissioner was calling for clear instructions to be given by the Government for the attacks to stop. It was important as well that there was full cooperation with an international team of experts that had been created by the Human Rights Council during its June 2017 session. That team would be starting work in the fall.
Answering questions by correspondents, Mr. Campbell said that difficulty of access to the region was related to security issues - including attacks against UN teams -, to geography and lack of infrastructures, and to the fact that OHCHR investigators had been blocked by either security forces or others on the ground from accessing sites where mass graves had been located. He also said that satellite imagery had corroborated testimonies of villages being destroyed.
In response to a question on Government responsibility in instigating violence, Mr. Campbell said OHCHR had, in very clear terms, testimonies of very credible accounts. Only a competent tribunal or a court of law could make the call on whether the situation amounted to crimes against humanity. OHCHR for its part had noted that the testimonies that it had received were very credible and pointed to a nature and a scale of acts that could amount to crimes against humanity. Mr. Campbell later added that the Kamuina Nsapu militia had allegedly been involved in very serious crimes as well, which could constitute crimes against humanity, including killings and the recruitment of children.
To another question, Mr. Campbell said there was no sign that violence had abated in the Kasais. He also stressed that the High Commissioner for Human Rights was concerned that what was happening was tipping towards ethnic cleansing.
Malaria
Tarik Jašareviæ, for the World Health Organization (WHO), spoke about malaria emergencies, in particular in Nigeria, where half of the deaths reported in Borno state, for example, were related to malaria. He introduced Dr. Pedro Alonso, Director of the WHO Global Malaria Programme.
Dr. Alonso highlighted the fact that sometimes a major disease like malaria fell in a blind spot in the context of humanitarian crisis and other public health crisis. That was the case during the Ebola epidemic a few years before, where malaria in the countries affected by Ebola killed many more people than Ebola itself. The year before, when there were yellow fevers outbreaks in Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, malaria was by far a much larger cause of death.
In the North East Nigeria crisis that had been going on for 11 months, the WHO teams and the state systems had documented that malaria accounted for more than 50% of the deaths in the context of massive excess mortality, and more than 50% of all clinical attendances at health facilities, with a massive increase of what would have been a normal baseline level. In that context, WHO, working with the regional and country offices and headquarters, had performed a visit three months before to best identify the strategies to tackle the malaria problem in North East Nigeria - in the Borno state liberated areas - and was moving on to fully deploy them.
The strategy called « mass drug administration » (MDA) consists in providing antimalarial drugs to a given population, regardless of whether they are infected or not, in order to rapidly reduce morbidity and mortality in the short term.
The first round of such MDA had happened in July, and was from a technical perspective the first ever where the polio teams working with the other health emergency teams and partners had been providing within a 5-day span malaria treatment and prevention to over 880,000 children, from 3 months to 5 years old, out of an expected target population of 1.1 million. It was a phenomenally high coverage in a very complex situation that would certainly be delivering major health benefits to this population.
These rounds of mass drug administration would be repeated monthly, up to October or November, to cover the high transmission areas. Estimates spoke of around 10,000 lives that could be saved over the following months by deploying these strategies.
Dr. Alonso said that this was an example of unprecedented collaboration and integration of the health emergency response in tackling what was effectively the main cause of death within these displaced populations.
WHO was seeing similar situations in parts of South Sudan, which would be the subject of specific and concrete actions during the following weeks and months.
These situations were a reminder of how, in the context of other health emergencies that take place in malaria endemic countries, in the context of civil strife, of dysfunctioning or only partially functioning health systems, malaria fired up and became the primary cause of death, from the WHO perspective, but also for partners such as UNICEF and others. They considered the malaria problem as a high priority.
To a question on the number of deaths and hospitalized people, Dr. Alonso said estimations on the data from WHO’s surveillance mechanism suggested that, on average, there were over 8,000 cases per week in a population of 3.7 million people with an average of 7 deaths per week. He recognized this was a gross underestimate, real figures were probably 4 times higher, particularly at this point with the onset of the rainy season; those numbers were derived from a mathematical modelling exercise.
Answering another question, Dr. Alonso said it took some time to mobilize the resources and to get the intelligence and the data on a malaria outbreak. For Nigeria, it came together at the beginning of 2017 when the low transmission season was over. What had been done in the last few months was gather information, align strategies, procure the commodities in order to be in time for the rainy season.
Concerning the accessibility of certain areas in Borno state, Dr. Alonso answered that many areas had become accessible with reasonable security over the previous year. It was significant that the polio teams had the capacity to roll out massive immunization campaigns even to hard to reach populations. They had been reaching out in many areas that were of difficult access. Some areas in North East Nigeria were not yet accessible due to security issues. The extent of the reach out of these campaigns had been very large.
Iraq
Joel Millman, for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), indicated that IOM had issued a report today on its work in Tal Afar, Iraq. He explained that an estimated 10,000 to 40,000 people remained in the city – sometimes referred to as the last ISIL stronghold in Iraq.
He added that last week, following the fall of Mosul, an IOM team dealt with 255 families, mostly nomadic shepherds with their livestock, who were not interested in going to emergency camps because their wealth was the livestock they had with them.
Libya
Mr. Millman, said that IOM Director General William Lacy Swing had just returned from a 3-day visit to Tripoli (Libya), his second visit to that country this year in an effort to establish again a stronger presence, which had been suspended because of the decision by the United Nations to evacuate international staff.
IOM raised its goal to assist up to 12,000 people who had been stranded – third country nationals with voluntary humanitarian return assistance. IOM had managed to repatriate over 5,000 stranded migrants this year and expected to double that number until the end of 2017.
Mr. Millman then added that for the first time, Mediterranean refugee and migrant flows from Libya to Europe – mainly Italy – had this year, for the first time, come in lower than at the same period last year. The number through July was now 95,215 migrants on the central route from Libya to Italy, against 97,892 last year, which represented a decline of 2.3%. The number of fatalities on that stretch of the Mediterranean was 796 lower than last year.
IOM was hoping that those statistics showed that a corner had been turned in that part of the world.
Nigeria continued to be the largest single sending country this year, but they are around 3000 behind what they were this time last year. Countries that have grown in numbers included Bangladesh, New Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mali. The number of migrants from Eritrea had dropped by less than 50%.
Geneva Events and Announcements
Geneva Activities
Rhéal LeBlanc, Chief, Press and External Relations Section, United Nations Information Service in Geneva, said that the Human Rights Advisory Committee would be holding its 19th session from 7 to 11 August in room XX. It would continue its discussions on thematic studies requested by the Human Rights Council.
Mr. LeBlanc said that the Committee against Torture was meeting this afternoon to conclude the consideration of the report of Panama, which was the last country scheduled for this session being held at the Palais Wilson since 24 July. Next Friday, the Committee would submit concluding observations on the four countries under consideration during the session: Antigua-and-Barbuda, Paraguay, Ireland, and Panama.
The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which is meeting for a three-week session since Monday, would conclude this morning the consideration of a report by the Federation of Russia.
Jens Laerke, for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), announced a press conference to be held Room III on Tuesday, 8 August at 11.30 a.m.,
on the humanitarian situation in Iraq, including humanitarian challenges in the aftermath of the military operation in Mosul. The speaker would be Lise Grande, Deputy Special Representative of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) and United Nations Resident Coordinator and Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq.
Answering a question on the reaction of the Secretary-General on the situation in Venezuela, Rhéal LeBlanc, Chief, Press and External Relations Section, said that the Secretary-General was following very closely the recent developments in Venezuela and was very much concerned with “the escalation of political tensions that will distance the country from a path conducive to finding a peaceful solution to the country’s challenges”. It was a critical moment for the future of the country and the Secretary-General was urging all Venezuelans, particularly those representing the powers of the State, to make all possible efforts to lower tensions, prevent further violence and loss of life, as well as find avenues for political dialogue.
The webcast for this briefing is available here: http://bit.ly/UNOG040817