UN’s Egeland to visit as food aid resumes in west

Jan Egeland, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, flies into Cote d’Ivoire on Tuesday for a first-hand look at relief problems on the ground after anti-UN protests last month disrupted aid. The protests, in which UN offices, vehicles and supplies were attacked and looted in the government-held south of war-divided Cote d’Ivoire, have disrupted humanitarian assistance in a country where roughly one out of five - or 3.5 million people of a population of 17 million - requires help. Since the world’s top cocoa producing nation split in two more than three years ago, UN peacekeepers have monitored a buffer zone between the government-held south and the rebel-controlled north, while the international community works to seal a peace between the two parties. And during his stay, Egeland will visit both sides of the Ivorian divide. He will visit Bouake, once Cote d’Ivoire’s second biggest town and now headquarters to the rebel New Forces movement, which has been demanding the returning of civil servants to the north in the public interest. Northern Cote d’Ivoire has been largely without doctors, teachers, judges, police and even road-workers since the start of civil war in 2002, with UN and other agencies such as Caritas, the International Committee of the Red Cross or the medical aid charity Medecins Sans Frontieres running hospitals and keeping the water clean. But Egeland, who has been in his job since June 2003, will also travel to the volatile government-held western town of Guiglo, scene of some of the worst of the anti-UN violence in the mid-January protests. The Guiglo offices of 10 UN and humanitarian agencies were destroyed and looted and hundreds of peacekeepers forced to beat a retreat. The UN food agency World Food Programme last week resumed food aid to thousands of people living in the volatile western region, including children suffering from malnutrition and people living with HIV/AIDS. The food was delivered with the help of Caritas, MSF-France, the Red Cross and the International Organisation for Migration. The densely forested region around Guiglo is home to a refugee camp for 6,000 Liberians and a camp sheltering some 7,000 Burkinabe farmers, driven off their plantations in Cote d’Ivoire during three years of conflict. Damage to UN property in the riots last month is estimated at over US $3 million, according to UN officials, and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has sent the bill to President Laurent Gbagbo, according to Annan’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric on Friday. Asked by journalists in New York whether Annan would follow up on the request, Dujarric said UN officials had already recovered some of the equipment taken from their offices in Guiglo. Abdoulaye Mar Dieye, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Cote d’Ivoire, said after visiting Guiglo last week that the local authorities “have all regretted what has happened and have given the assurance that they would try to put a minimum of security arrangements in place to enable us to have a good strategy for the resumption of humanitarian operations as quickly as possible.”