Home / Employment / Contact / Search / Français / Español   

Briefing Note

Comments by Carol Bellamy on Iraq at the Palais briefing

GENEVA, Tuesday 28 January 2003 - UNICEF has a large staff in Iraq - more than 300 people in total, the majority of whom are Iraqi nationals - and a strong history of helping Iraq's children and women. We were there in 1991 and we're still there. We've been working in Iraq since the early 1980s.

The international community has some very dramatic decisions to make in the next few days and weeks. Those decisions will have an enormous impact on the children of Iraq.

This is no small matter, because almost half of Iraq's total population of 23.6 million people are children. (11.3 million under the age of 18.)

At UNICEF we are still hopeful that the current crisis will end without war.

But we all face a chance of war, and we cannot be unprepared. UNICEF, along with the rest of the UN family, has been working on contingency plans. Our intentions are simple: to be ready to help meet humanitarian needs, especially those of children, in the event of armed conflict.

I think it's important that the people of the Middle East know that.