Home | UNICEF in Action | Highlights | Information Resources | Donations, Greeting Cards & Gifts | Press Centre | Voices of Youth | About UNICEF

Crises elsewhere eclipsed by Kosovo, UNICEF says

"While the Kosovo crisis merits an immediate and generous response worldwide from both the public and the media, relatively little attention has been paid to similar conflicts in Angola, Sierra Leone, Eritrea and Ethiopia and many other places where thousands of persons are displaced from their homes, tortured and killed every day," UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy stated.

In the first four months of this year, for instance, the renewal of the civil war in Angola has displaced 780,000 people, bringing to 1.5 million the estimated number who have been driven from their homes. The conflict in Ethiopia-Eritrea, where human wave attacks have produced thousands of battlefield casualties and deaths, has displaced over 550,000 people. Some 440,000 refugees have poured out of Sierra Leone into Guinea and Liberia over the course of an eight-year armed conflict characterised by brutality, rape and mutilation. Currently some 310,000 are internally displaced.

Some 2.6 million Afghan refugees languish in Pakistan, Iran and other countries, and the total number of African refugees, displaced persons and still vulnerable returnees presently exceeds seven million. Ms. Bellamy, who recently returned from visiting Kosovar refugees in Albania, said that, in all locales, the vast majority of the world's displaced are children and women.

"There are many situations in the world that rival Kosovo's in the sheer brutality shown toward children and women and in the degree to which populations have been displaced - internally and across country borders," Ms. Bellamy said. "Yet media tend to focus on the crisis of the moment, and humanitarian assistance may now be following the same pattern, giving the most attention to situations that attract the most TV and print coverage."

Ms. Bellamy noted that UNICEF's initial fund-raising goal for the Kosovo crisis was substantially met in the space of just a few weeks -- a response unlike any in the last 20 years. She said she hoped the support would continue because the costs of meeting the needs of the Kosovo crisis continue to rise and further appeals will be made.

But, at the same time, Ms. Bellamy said, this year's overall consolidated UNICEF appeal -- for $180 million to deal with emergencies in 22 countries -- has so far achieved a mere 15 per cent of its goal.

Funding for seven countries presently stands at five per cent or less of the total requested and humanitarian actions in Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Guinea-Bissau have received no emergency funding at all.

"In post-conflict situations, returning children to normalcy best heals the scars of armed conflict," Ms. Bellamy said, "and yet our hands are tied without adequate funds."

Last year in Guinea Bissau, one third of the country's children were displaced in half a year's time. Hundreds of thousands still remain in makeshift shelters away from their villages. As peace is restored and people are returning home, the humanitarian community lacks the funds to provide even the most basic of services to these children.

In eight other countries -- Angola, Croatia, DPRK, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Uganda and Somalia -- UNICEF last year received less than 40 per cent of its funding needs for re-establishing educational services.

Ms. Bellamy said UNICEF is obligated by its mission and by international conventions on the rights of children and women to serve the most vulnerable, wherever they are in the world.

"Whether one looks at Burundi, East Timor or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, at the continuing war in Sudan or the famine conditions in Somalia, one finds humanitarian situations as wrenching as those in Kosovo," Ms. Bellamy said. "Commensurate attention should be given to the situation of children and women at risk -- wherever they may be."

"The injury or death of any child diminishes the sum of human life," Ms. Bellamy said. "And where that injury or death takes place, or what the race, nationality, creed or language of the child is, cannot be allowed to influence our collective response."

Home| UNICEF in Action | Highlights | Information Resources | Donations, Greeting Cards & Gifts | Press Centre | Voices of Youth | About UNICEF