UN-Truth

Well, at least someone realized that having Mia Farrow address the UN Security Council
on Darfur, via Chad and Central African Republic, would not have been very serious.

Farrow or her PR person told reporters, when she was in the Central African Republic,
that she would be addressing the UN SC on 27 February.

No actors or actresses have ever addressed the UN SC, as far as can be recalled…

A UN spokesperson told journalists, however, that: “The Security Council is holding consultations this morning on Chad and the Central African Republic, as well as other matters. Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Hédi Annabi is briefing Council members on the Secretary-General’s recent report on those two countries, which we flagged to you last Friday.”

A UN Press Release on Farrow’s press conference states that: “Having just returned from a two-week trip to Chad and the Central African Republic, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Goodwill Ambassador Mia Farrow described the population there as ‘extremely traumatized’, ‘utterly neglected’ and in dire need of humanitarian assistance, during a press conference at Headquarters this afternoon. She recounted how, during a several day trip to Paoua, a village in the north-western part of the Central African Republic where UNICEF was setting up an office, she saw ‘burnt village after burnt village after burnt village’. She described how the convoy stopped and, after 15 minutes, people started emerging until some ‘300 souls came out of the bush like spectres, just caked in dust, emaciated, remnants of clothes or no clothing at all’. She said they described how they had no blankets, their children were dying, and they were too terrified to return to rebuild their villages. She said that, at that moment, a car passed by, the only one she would see during the entire trip to Paoua. ‘You could hear pounding of feet on the hard clay ground as 300 people vanished, vanished into the bush in sheer terror’, she said. By contrast, eastern Chad was ‘ominously quiet’, she continued, especially compared to her trip there in November when she went on her own after UNICEF had deemed the conditions too dangerous. At that time, some 60 villages had been burned, and there were tremendous numbers of wounded or displaced persons. The tiny medical centre was overflowing with wounded, including three men lying side-by-side, their eyes gouged out by the Janjaweed. On her latest trip, she said people were living makeshift camps, where water and food were in short supply. Furthermore, the rainy season was coming on and people were unable to plant crops. Aid workers were struggling to meet the needs of a ‘fragile and increasingly abandoned population’, she said. With scaled-down staff and with access diminished because of security reasons, people were in a ‘deplorable situation’. Asked why non-governmental organizations had been absent from the region for more than a year, she called that situation ‘incomprehensible’, given the enormity of the humanitarian situation and the fact that it had scarcely been addressed. ‘It’s been called the ‘forgotten crisis’, but that implies that it was once remembered,’ she said. ‘I don’t know that it has been in the consciousness of the international community’ … She called for an international peacekeeping force along the Central African Republic’s borders with both Chad and the Sudan. Otherwise, she said, ‘you’re going to see two collapsed States, two failed States, which will serve no one …This is a seminal moment for all of us as human beings’, she said, noting that Darfur had been called “ Rwanda in slow motion’. She added: ‘It’s very sad when we have to ask the Government of the Sudan, perpetrators of these atrocities, ‘May we come in and stop you please?’ And then we do an immense international hand-wringing for years to say ‘well, it’s just regrettable and we just can’t find any of the right sticks and carrots’.”
http://www.un.org/News/briefings/docs/2007/070227_Farrow.doc.htm

Filed under: Sudan - Darfur, UN Security Council