Transcript of the UN humanitarian briefing in Amman, Jordan, 16 April

[David]

Nejib Friji, UN Spokesman

In his first official day in Greece, Secretary-General Kofi Annan met with Goran Persson, Prime Minister of Sweden

The Secretary General said they had a very good discussion this morning. They covered two main issues: the situation in Iraq, or post-conflict Iraq, and how the international community is going to deal with it, and of course, it also means how we heal the divisions that have emerged, and the Middle East-the need to press ahead with the road map and settle this long lasting conflict once and for all.

The Secretary General added that he thinks that what is important is that here the European leaders are strongly behind the UN; they support the multi lateral approach. The secretary General thinks in this interdependent world, international cooperation is the only way to resolve the issues that confront all of us. And so the Secretary General appreciates support of the European Union. The main thing is we should heal the divisions and we are going to try to do our best to heal them in the UN, and the Secretary General is sure it will be done here too.

The Secretary General also met with Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Jose Maria Aznar, Prime Minister of Spain, Guy Verhofstadt, Prime Minister of Belgium, Mr. Louis Michel, Foreign Minister of Belgium and Igor Ivanov, Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation.

On safeguarding Iraqi cultural heritage, the Secretary-General deplores the catastrophic losses to Iraq's cultural heritage that have occurred in recent days and weeks. He urges the Iraqi people to do what they can to restore that invaluable heritage by returning any looted items, and calls on the coalition authorities to act immediately to prevent further losses by protecting Iraq's archaeological and religious sites, museums and other cultural institutions. He also joins the Director-General of UNESCO in calling on the authorities of countries bordering Iraq, international police, customs organizations and leading actors in the art market to join forces with UNESCO in the work to prevent trade in stolen Iraqi objects. He notes that Iraq's cultural treasures bear witness to an invaluable legacy for all humanity, and their loss is a wound inflicted on all humankind.

Deputy Secretary General is briefing the Security Council at 4:00 pm New York time, on the humanitarian situation in Iraq.

Geoffrey Keele, Spokesman for the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF)

There has been an outbreak of Blackwater Fever in southern Iraq. This is a waterborne disease also know as Laeshmaniasis.

The Iraqi Refugee Aid Council has told us of 100 cases in Amarah, 70 cases in Nasariya, and an unspecified number of cases in Az Zubair. The ages of the victims are not known, however, Blackwater Fever can be fatal and children under five are the most vulnerable to contracting it.

This disease - spread mainly by sand-flies -- causes malnutrition and anaemia and can kill weaker, malnourished children (although no fatalities have been reported in these towns so far).

Symptoms of the disease include fever, weakness, discolouration, bloated stomach due to swollen organs, and black coloured urine due to hemorrhaging. If not treated within 4-6 weeks it leads to severe debility and eventually death.

Given this, our biggest concern is that the first cases of the fever were reported in February before the outbreak of the war. UNICEF immediately procured the drugs needed to treat the fever, but war broke out before we could get them into the country.

At that time, 100 cases had been discovered from Thiqar governorate in the south, to Babylon in the north. These are areas we still do not have access to, and 90% of cases could die without medicine (PENTOSTAM).

UNICEF has 1,000 doses of the medicine and we were able to send 100 vials of it to Nasriya yesterday. In an excellent example of UN - media cooperation, we sent in the life saving medicine with a German television crew. We hope to send 200 vials to Amarah tomorrow.

Nine Trucks carrying clean water to the Fao peninsula left Iran today and entered Iraq at the Shalamcheh border crossing. Three other trucks were unable to cross today, but will cross tomorrow instead.

Melanie Zipperer, Spokeswoman for the World Health Organization (WHO)

1. Mosul and Kirkuk
A team from the World Health Organization has conducted a preliminary assessment of health facilities in the northern town of Mosul, in Ninawa Governorate. The team reports that the main hospitals in the town have been partially looted. They are now estimated to be operating at about 50% of normal capacity. Most of the health centres in Mosul are also reported to have been looted and burnt, as have the department of health offices and at least some of the warehouse facilities. We hope to give you more details on this tomorrow.

WHO is working with local health authorities in the three Northern Governorates to support health facilities in Kirkuk. We have agreed with them that they will move emergency supplies to Kirkuk to meet some of the urgent needs, which have been identified over the past two days. WHO is also working on ways to provide urgently needed financial support to keep the health system in Kirkuk working.

2. Baghdad
The situation in Baghdad continues to be a source of major concern. The Central Public Health Laboratory has been looted and incubators containing polio virus cultures have been stolen. There have also been reports from elsewhere in Iraq of virus cultures being stolen. This is very unlikely to cause disease, but is a serious concern because these cultures are vital for research and public health work.

Hospitals in Baghdad, which are reported to be functioning to some extent include the Medical City complex, which includes four hospitals, as well as Yarmouk, Kadhimiya and No'man hospitals. WHO staff will continue to visit the major hospitals in the city in order to assess, prioritise and rapidly meet the most urgent needs.

We have made contact with WHO staff in Baghdad and the information they have provided is bleak. The WHO office in Baghdad has been very badly looted and burnt. All the official vehicles have been stolen from the compound and much valuable equipment and information destroyed.


Priority Items worth $395 million can be Shipped by 12 May
An ongoing review of priority items in the Oil-for-Food pipeline for Iraq has so far identified $395 million worth of supplies that are "shippable" within the 45-day timeline adopted last month by the UN Security Council.

Most of the goods confirmed with more than a hundred suppliers are in the food ($181.7 million), agriculture ($103.8 million) and health ($46.1 million) sectors. Most were already in transit at the beginning of the war and will be routed to strategic locations in Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait and Iran for shipment to Iraq.

Wheat arrives in Kuwait City
The first Oil-for-Food shipment since the adoption of resolution 1472 arrived in Kuwait late last week. 50,000 tons of wheat were delivered and part of the delivery was immediately offloaded for milling into flour. The World Food Programme will manage surface transportation to warehouses in Iraq.

A second wheat shipment of 50,000 tons is expected at the Jordanian port of Aqaba within days.

In Northern Iraq: IDPs continue to return to their places of origin. Movement to Kirkuk and Mosul has improved and the restrictions in movement being enforced by the local authorities have been relaxed somewhat. Only 17 schools (12 in Dahuk, and 5 in Erbil) are still occupied by IDPs. The local authorities decided to send the 720-surrendered Iraqi soldiers settled in Ashkawtawan camp to their places of origin in centre/south of Iraq. Meanwhile, a new group of 27 surrendered Iraqi soldiers arrived at the camp on 13 April. UNOPS distributed relief items to this group.

We are still awaiting an answer from the US central command in Qatar to permit the re-entry of UN international staff by air to the three Northern governorates of Erbil Dahuk and Sulaymaniah. This delay is slowing down the delivery of humanitarian aid and the return of our 31 international staff to the North. It is a too long process to return to an area where direct conflict did not occur.

Khaled Mansour, Spokesman for the World Food Programme (WFP)


WFP convoys left Amman in Jordan and Kermanshah in Iran and are heading towards the borders to reach Baghdad and Sulaymaniah inside Iraq respectively.

The convoy from Amman is made up of 50 trucks and carries more than 1400 tons of wheat flour. This will be the first one to cross the borders into Iraq from Jordan.

The convoy from Kermanshah (about 300 km from the border with Iraq) is made up of five trucks and carries 100 tons of vegetable oil. The trucks are loaded with 100 tons of food (vegetable oil). The trucks are moving slowly on a hilly road and are expected to reach the border crossing point of Bachmaq tonight and head towards Sulaymaniah inside Iraq tomorrow morning.

The corridor from Turkey has been dramatically scaled up. A large convoy -as many as 100 trucks - is scheduled to cross the Turkish border into Northern Iraq today, heading for Dahuk. This food delivery (of more than 3,000 tonnes) is the biggest consignment yet to travel along this corridor - which is still the only one currently open into Iraq.

In Iraq, WFP met with directors of the Department (ministry) of Trade in Basra (Tuesday) and agreed that the staff members of the three warehouses in the city will report to work as of today to prepare the warehouses for receiving food supplies. The Ministry officials will survey the conditions of the warehouse and work with WFP to see what is required to fix them.

WFP staff members will have a presence in the warehouse as well (an office).

In Baghdad, all our 70 staff members are reported safe but the city remains unsafe (noting gradual improvement in security conditions over the past few days). Staff mobility remains limited due to insecurity and the lack of fuel.

WFP welcomes two further donations towards its emergency operation in Iraq - from Japan - 10,000 tonnes of rice and $5.8 million cash to buy pulses and from Finland - $2 million cash. These donations take the total contributions received so far for the operation to approximately $310 million. WFP has appealed for $1.3 billion.

Peter Kessler, Spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for the Refugees (UNHCR)
The UN refugee agency's (UNHCR) representative in Jordan, Sten Bronee, on Tuesday signed a letter of understanding with Jordan's Minister of Interior, Mr. Quftan Majali, concerning the provision of international protection and humanitarian assistance to persons in need.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers, had earlier written countries in the region asking them to keep their frontiers open to desperate people fleeing war and chaos inside Iraq.

Despite indications yesterday that some people stuck at the frontier would be allowed to enter Jordan, so far, no one from among the more than 200 people waiting in no-man's-land has been permitted to enter the country.

For more than a week now, two little Iraqi girls who lost their mother and 11 year-old brother when a bomb flattened their home, have been stuck in no-man's-land, together with their father, waiting to enter the refugee camp at Ruweished.

The same holds true for a family of Palestinians fleeing the war in Iraq. Still more than a week after they got to Al Karama, they remain encamped in Jordan's inhospitable no-man's-land.

Likewise, more than 190 Iranians remain stuck on the windswept frontier, living in miserable conditions. These people include 114 ethnic Iranian Kurds who fled Al Tash refugee camp west of Baghdad due to threats and lawlessness. Also at the border is another group of Iranians, all recognized as refugees by various western countries, who arrived beginning last Friday and who need to be properly interviewed.

Persons fleeing Iraq, both Iraqis and other residents, should be provided humanitarian assistance in Ruweished's camps, rather than remain stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Iraq's other frontiers are reportedly quiet, with no reported refugee movements.

Questions and Answers

Q: ABC: Could you tell us more about the letter of understanding, what it contains or what it is meant to help do, if these people, even after the letter was signed are still sitting in no man's land?

A: P. Kessler: Obviously we think there is clearly some kind of message that is not getting down to the officials at the border. But indeed of course, the King & Queen have expressed strong statements of support for the people of Iraq & concerned that Jordan will treat people in a humanitarian way & that Jordan will abide by its humanitarian obligations to assist people fleeing the country. These are a small number of people, some 200 desperate & frightened people, who have been forced to flee their homes & who have left the bodies of their loved ones, in some cases, behind. We don't understand why they are being forced to sit in the no man's land for so long, but we hope that this official signing, which obviously just one of the understandings we have come to with the government in recent weeks, will help smooth the way into the country.

Q: ABC: Does the letter of understanding specifically outline that there shouldn't be people who are made to wait in no man's land & everyone should be processed quickly; did it address that problem directly?

A: P. Kessler: Every human being has the right to seek asylum, this is bodied in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which obviously has primacy over even this national agreement, which we & the Minister of Interior hold in great esteem. We hope that this word of understanding will be dispatched to the border quickly so that all these people will be allowed in.

Q: ABC: I just mean the timing, ultimately they are all going in, but after they spend a week or so, it is a matter of expediting the process, if they are ultimately going to let them in, why are they making them wait at the border & thus suffering even more?

A: P. Kessler: I honestly can't answer your question; no one should be forced to wait for days & obviously some people have been at the frontier some 10 days & more. Clearly this is inhumane to leave these frightened & anxious people in that kind of exposed situation.

Q: In the news last night, there were reports that 129 Iranians were forced by the US tanks to go to no man's land; are they among the 190 you mentioned before & why were Iranians forced to go to the no man's land between Jordan & Iraq; where did they come from?

A: P. Kessler: There are some 190 Iranians at the frontier, among them are a sum of 114 refugees, apparently ethnic Kurds, from Al Tash camp. This is a refugee camp about 2 hours west of Baghdad. They were not forced to the border by American tanks, they apparently fled Al Tash due to lawlessness & anarchy in the area; they were frightened & wanted to flee for their lives & the reason they are in no man's land, is because we are waiting word from Jordan as to when they will be allowed in the country.

Q: This delay in sending the 31 staff, could you elaborate on that; what kind of excuses are you getting, what kind of reasons have you been given & is there timeline of when you are going to be able to go in?

A: V. Taveau: No, there is no timeline at the moment & the only thing that was said to us, to the humanitarian coordinator, is that they are still waiting for that air corridor. It is a concern now, because as you remember, when the humanitarian coordinator was here, he said that the team will be in Erbil on the 14th April; we are now the 16th and still waiting. What we are saying that it is really important that the first UN international team can go back to the northern governorates & the team is composed of 31 UN international staff, with, for instance, UNICEF, UNDP, WFP & we really need to back there & we are still waiting for clearance from the central command in Qatar, we hope to get the clearance as soon as possible now.

Q: You mentioned that the corridor from Turkey is the only currently open & safe one, if the trucks go in from Jordan, will that also become an open corridor or will it be a one time thing?

A: K. Mansour: According to our plans, Jordan will become a major corridor once the road from Al Karama to Baghdad or other places in Iraq become open. Hopefully these trucks will be able to cross tomorrow & that will launch the corridor & we are expecting around 300,000 tonnes of food to arrive in Aqaba in a month.