REGULAR PRESS BRIEFING BY THE INFORMATION SERVICE

Marie Heuzé, the Director of the United Nations Information Service in Geneva, chaired the briefing which was also attended by Spokespersons for the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the World Food Programme, the United Nations Refugee Agency, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Health Organization and the Economic Commission for Europe.

Situation in Chad

Ms. Heuzé said copies of the presidential statement issued yesterday by the Security Council were in the press room in English and French. In the statement, the Security Council expressed its grave concern regarding the situation in Chad. It strongly condemned the attacks and all attempts at destabilization by force, and recalled its commitment to the sovereignty, unity, territorial integrity and political independence of Chad. The Security Council called upon the States of the region to deepen their cooperation with a view to putting an end to the activities of armed groups and their attempt to seize power by force. It also called upon Member States to provide support, in conformity with the United Nations Charter, as requested by the Government of Chad. The Council expressed its concern regarding the direct threat that the combat posed for the safety of the civilian population, including internally displaced persons and refugees. There were 180,000 internally displaced persons in Chad as well as 285,000 refugees. Some 500,000 persons depended on humanitarian aid.

Anna Schaaf of the International Committee of the Red Cross said ICRC staff were in the Chadian capital N’Djamena and had been able yesterday to undertake a first assessment of the medical facilities in the capital during a lull in the fighting. The fighting over the weekend had been very violent, and although the ICRC staff could not move around, they could hear heavy machine and gun fire and shelling. ICRC estimated that more than 1,000 persons had been wounded, but it had no estimates for the number of people killed. ICRC had sent a surgeon and two nurses who were presently helping to support the Chadian teams at La Liberte Hospital in N’Djamena. The Chadian Red Cross volunteers were doing a good job evacuating the wounded and providing first aid to civilians. ICRC was especially worried about the situation of civilians and the wounded in the zones affected by fighting and called on all the parties to the conflict to honour their obligation to distinguish between civilians and people participating directly in the hostilities and to spare the civilian population and the civilian property. So far, the Red Cross and other medical services had been largely respected. However, ICRC reminded all parties to the conflict of their duty to spare and protect medical staff and facilities under all circumstances and to facilitate their work.

Elizabeth Byrs of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said according to an OCHA staffer who had just been evacuated from Chad to Cameroon, there was serious concern about the civilian population in Chad. OCHA was evacuating all non-essential staff and was leaving a skeleton team, including one international staffer in the capital and five in the east of the country. National staff remained. Most of the UN offices in the capital had been looted and vehicles stolen. This affected logistics as it took time to replace the infrastructure. If the situation of fighting continued, this could become a humanitarian catastrophe. There were 500,000 persons receiving humanitarian aid in Chad. More than 60 aid agencies, including the United Nations, international organizations such as the Red Cross, and non-governmental organizations, were working in the country. A “humanitarian” map of Chad was available at the back of the room.

Veronique Taveau of the United Nations Children’s Fund said UNICEF was particularly worried about the deterioration of the situation in Chad. UNICEF had major aid and emergency assistance programmes in Chad targeting the education and protection of children. In the violence that was ongoing, it was always the most vulnerable, children and women, who were the worst affected. Chad already had one of the highest mortality rates for children under five of 200 deaths for every 1,000 live births. UNICEF staff remained in N’Djamena and other parts of the country. UNICEF was following closely the volatile situation.

Christiane Berthiaume of the World Food Programme said WFP was following closely the situation in Chad. The WFP representative remained in N’Djamena and it also had staff in Abeche and in Kousseri. Around 21 international WFP staff had been evacuated to Cameroon. The situation of the displaced population in Kousseri was worrying, with civilians arriving with no water or food. WFP had food stocks, including high-energy biscuits, in Cameroon and would be undertaking food distribution in Kousseri. Inside Chad, WFP had already been helping refugees from Darfur, Sudan and the Central African Republic as well as internally displaced persons. Luckily, before the fighting, the food aid to the refugees from Darfur for January had already been distributed as well as the food aid to internally displaced persons for February.

Ron Redmond of the UN Refugee Agency said a five-member UNHCR team arrived yesterday evening in the Cameroon border town of Kousseri and estimated that up to 20,000 people had crossed the river border with Chad since Saturday to escape fighting in N’Djamena. As of this morning, frightened people were still crossing in a continious flow. UNHCR was also preparing to send two airlift flights this week from its regional aid stockpiles in Dubai to Cameroon. They would carry a total of 90 tonnes of relief supplies, including plastic sheeting, jerry cans, blankets, mosquito nets, kitchen sets and plastic rolls. These supplies would be enough for 14,000 refugees. UNHCR was planning to move these refugees as soon as possible to a campsite in Maltam, 32 kilometres from Kousseri. The UNHCR team was meeting with the authorities and the Red Cross in Kousseri in order to coordinate and speed up assistance to the refugees.

Mr. Redmond said in eastern Chad, UNHCR and its partners continued to care for hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced people, including 240,000 Sudanese refugees from Darfur. It took care of 50,000 refugees from the Central African Republic in camps in southern Chad. UNHCR was also involved in providing help to some of the 180,000 Chadians who had been displaced internally by earlier unrest in the country. But continuing security concerns led to the evacuation yesterday of 25 non-essential UNHCR staff from its main field operations base in Abeche. They were among 47 non-essential UN staff and 99 non-government organization workers flown in two UN planes to Yaounde in Cameroon. Conditions were reported as calm but tense in Abeche. The security situation remained difficult further in the north in Guereda, where a series of armed attacks on UNHCR and other aid agencies last week forced an evacuation of most staff. Hundreds of thousands of uprooted people in Chad depended on international support and a very fragile aid lifeline that had to reach some of the most desolate and isolated parts of the country. UNHCR urgently appealed to all sides to respect humanitarian principles and to halt the violence.

Director-General’s Activities

Ms. Heuzé said Sergei Ordzhonikidze, the Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva, participated yesterday through a videoconference in a meeting at Headquarters for senior managers to sign “compacts” on priorities.

Kenyan Refugees

Ron Redmond of the UN Refugee Agency said Ugandan authorities were reporting that some 12,000 Kenyan refugees were now in Uganda after fleeing the post-election violence in their homeland. A UNHCR emergency team arrived over the weekend in Uganda and had been deployed to Tororo, in the south-eastern part of the country along the border with Kenya. The team would lead emergency response and coordination with the local and central authorities.

Christiane Berthiaume of the World Food Programme said according to the latest estimates, there were more than 300,000 persons who had been displaced by the post-election violence in Kenya. The situation in the past few days had been calmer and many were using this lull to leave. Some 1,200 persons, mostly women and children, had arrived in a city in the west of the country, and other vehicles remained moving towards the west of the country. These people were arriving with no supplies. WFP had already distributed one month’s worth of food aid to them.

Human Rights

Yvon Edoumou of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour would field a fact-finding mission to Kenya starting Wednesday, 6 February, to look into human rights violations that had been committed since December 2007. The three-week mission would travel around the country, security conditions permitting, to gather first-hand information from diverse sources, including victims and witnesses, Government officials, non-governmental organizations, representatives of the Kenyan national human rights commission and other stakeholders. The findings of the mission would be made public at the end of its work.

Other

The Conference on Disarmament was meeting this morning and was being addressed by Des Browne, the Secretary of State for Defense of the United Kingdom.

Veronique Taveau of the United Nations children’s Fund said 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 appeals for funding to meet humanitarian needs in the year ahead. The embargoed report would be available on line, under strict embargo, as of 8 February. A note to correspondents was available.

Ron Redmond of the UN Refugee Agency said growing numbers of Somali asylum-seekers and migrants were fleeing to Djibouti in what may become a new migration route from war-ravaged Somalia to Djibouti and on to the Middle East. In 2007, a total of 700 Somali asylum-seekers fled to Djibouti. So far this year, more than 550 asylum-seekers and migrants had already crossed from north-west Somalia, also known as Somaliland, into Djibouti - 400 of them during the month of January. At the port town of Obock, north of the Djibouti capital, the number of people leaving the port by small boats had also risen steadily according to port authorities. The Government of Djibouti and UNHCR were now looking at possibilities of setting up a reception facility close to the border to receive and screen the asylum-seekers before transferring them to Ali Addeh camp which was sheltering some 7,000 refugees. Some 3,500 of these refugees were from south and central Somalia with around 2,800 from Somaliland.

Elizabeth Byrs of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said an earthquake measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale had hit the Grand Lakes region on Sunday, 3 February, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, there were 200 persons wounded and five dead as a result of the earthquake, and 900 families were without shelter.

Fadela Chaib of the World Health Organization said the embargoed copy of the WHO report on tobacco was sent to journalists this morning by email. She had not been able to organize a briefing in Geneva, but she had the name and number of an expert who was in New York but would be available for interviews with journalists. In a related development, 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.

There were two interesting press conferences coming up. There would be an ICRC press conference on Wednesday, 6 February at 2:30 p.m. in press room 1 on cluster munitions and upcoming events aimed to achieving a new international treaty in 2008. Speaking would be Peter Herby, Head of the ICRC Arms Unit. And on Tuesday, 12 February, Sergey Lavrov, the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, would deliver the Gunnar Myrdal Lecture in Salle XIX at 3 p.m. The topic would be “the future of European cooperation – a view from Moscow”. He would also be speaking to the press.