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UNICEF urgently seeks funds for emergencies

"The entire picture of war in the world has changed," UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said. "Today, children and women are not only the first casualties in armed conflicts, they are being deliberately targeted and are being forced to take part in these conflicts as well."

UNICEF is requesting just over $136 million from donors for emergency assistance in 20 countries in an effort to stop these trends.

"The plight of these millions of children and women speaks to a major component of UNICEF's mandate: our commitment to ensure special protection for the most disadvantaged and defenceless," Ms. Bellamy said. "For this reason we appeal not only for funds but also to the UN Security Council to increase recognition of the needs of children and women in emergency situations."

Ms. Bellamy cited the need for specialized child rights training for all military, civilian and peacekeeping personnel, so that they will understand their solemn legal responsibilities to children, including the need to shield children from violations of their rights. She also called for increasing the accountability of those who target children and women, and who force children to become soldiers, by hastening the process of deploying a fully empowered International Criminal Court.

Only four years ago, UNICEF was working in some 15 countries gripped by civil conflict. Today that number has risen to more than 55 nations where situations exist that profoundly threaten the lives and welfare of children and women – and, by extension, the future stability of the very societies in which they are struggling.

An extraordinary proportion of these humanitarian crises are occurring in Africa, Ms. Bellamy said. "Some of the worst violations of human rights have taken place in Sierra Leone, where rebels have hacked off limbs of thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, and thousands of children are also used as soldiers. In Uganda, many thousands of children have been abducted and taken to Sudan where they are abused by the Lord's Resistance Army rebels."

Ms. Bellamy said that in Burundi, more than five years of civil war has displaced almost one million of the country's 6.3 million people, most of them women and children who do not have access to basic services such as safe water, latrines or health care. She said the task of rebuilding Burundi will be facilitated by the lifting of sanctions this month.

Despite huge obstacles, Ms. Bellamy said UNICEF and its partners continue to expand emergency relief, even in countries gripped by civil war. In Sierra Leone, where fighting caused the suspension of UNICEF activities in Freetown and other areas, national staff continued to provide emergency assistance such as vaccines, children's health kits, blankets, clothes, shelter material and chlorine for purifying water supplies to those in more secure areas.

Ms. Bellamy also noted urgent emergency conditions in a number of other countries addressed in the appeal:

In Angola, the resurgence of civil war has led to the death of as many as 22 UN and agency staff aboard two UN aircraft that were downed by hostile fire – a situation that intensifies the need for protective measures that will guarantee against future attacks on UN personnel.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has seen the displacement of more than half a million people, 300,000 of them children. UNICEF's efforts to assist their survival and health have been challenged by the problem of how to secure cross-border access to assist those who are most in need.

In Rwanda, which faces the problem of large numbers of child-headed households, relentless and largely unpublicized guerrilla attacks continue to sap the country of lives and resources.

In Sudan, where the 16-year civil war continues unabated, thousands of impoverished people still die in the south, a decade after the launch of one of history's biggest relief operations.

Afghanistan, after 20 years of warfare, experiences extreme poverty on a national scale, including soaring rates of maternal and child mortality – all of it compounded by widespread human rights abuses, especially for girls and women. In addition, the ruling Taleban's relationship with the UN system is fraught with tension and complexity.

The unresolved political situation in Kosovo continues to call for efforts to protect and assist hundreds of thousands of children and women to obtain shelter, health services, education and psychosocial support.

The last year has also seen increasingly destructive natural disasters like the recent hurricanes that ravaged Central America and the Caribbean. UNICEF must fight to ensure that the recovery is aimed not merely at rebuilding the damaged infrastructure, but at meeting the needs of people – especially children.

The requested funds are UNICEF's portion of this year's United Nations Consolidated Appeal and are earmarked for countries most of which are in conflict or post-conflict situations. Beyond those named above, target countries include several nations of the former Yugoslavia, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Tajikistan and Central America.

• See Humanitarian Response to Children 1999

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