UN sending ship to accommodate Monrovia staff

The UN World Food Programme is sending a ship to the Liberian capital, Monrovia, which will serve as a floating hotel for up to 32 UN international staff who will be able to work on shore by day and retreat to the safety of the ship at night, Carolyn McAskie, deputy director of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said on Friday. She told a news conference in Dakar that the UN system currently had sufficient food stocks in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, to feed 250,000 people for three months and more were available in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, which could be shipped in quickly. But she added that medical supplies were urgently needed in the beleaguered city of one million people. McAskie was in Senegal to chair a meeting of UN officials, donors and non-governmental relief organisations to draw up a common strategy for tackling the humanitarian crisis in Liberia and neighbouring West African countries. She said all the heads of UN agencies in Monrovia, who were evacuated in early June following a rebel attack on the city, would return to their posts by the end of this week. However, because of continuing insecurity in the Liberian capital most UN international staff would live aboard the WFP ship, which would be able to move offshore at short notice in the event of further trouble, she added. Liberia is awaiting the arrival of West African peacekeeping troops to enforce a June 17 ceasefire agreement between government and rebel forces. Aked how long it would take for the situation in Liberia to stabilise, McAskie said: "My own assessment is that that is going to take several weeks, if not months." McAskie said the accommodation ship was due to arrive in the port of Monrovia next Friday, but WFP was still arranging donor funding for the vessel, and if this was not secured soon, its deployment could be delayed. It would mainly house staff of WFP, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), she added. She said the Dakar meeting had decided that OCHA should establish a regional support office in Dakar to coordinate the relief efforts of UN agencies, NGOs and donors in Liberia and the neighbouring countries of Sierra Leone, Cote d'Ivoire and Guinea. These countries have all been destabilised by 14 years of near constant civil in Liberia. The new regional support office would also help to coordinate relief efforts in Burkina Faso, Mali and Ghana, which have absorbed hundreds of thousands of refugees and returning nationals from the civil wars in Liberia and Cote d'Ivoire, she added. McAskie said that, subject to funding being made available, the Dakar regional support office should be up and running within two to three months. OCHA's existing regional support office in Abidjan, she added, had become fully engaged in tackling the humanitarian crisis triggered by the civil war in Cote d'Ivoire, which broke out in September last year. McAskie, who was appointed as the UN Secretary General's Humanitarian Envoy to Cote d'Ivoire last January, said the OCHA office in Abidjan would henceforth become a country office dedicated solely to coordinating relief work in Cote d'Ivoire. She said that given the continuing volatility of the situation in Cote d'Ivoire and the fact that that the UN Special Representative for West Africa, Mamadou Ould Abdallah, was already based in Senegal, it made sense for the regional support office to move to Dakar. There it would function alongside Ould Abdallah's office so that the UN could coordinate its political and humanitarian efforts in the region more closely, she added. Sources at the Dakar meeting said the representatives of several donor countries and NGOs had pressed the UN to show stronger leadership in coordinating relief work in the region. McAskie told the press conference she was disappointed that donors had only provided 10 percent of the US $45 million sought by the UN in an emergency appeal earlier this year, whereas they had donated hundreds of millions of dollars for relief work in Afghanistan and Iraq. She said this was partly because donors were still unable to see a solution to the crisis in Liberia, where two rebel movements have seized more than half the country and unruly government fighters had repeatedly looted the property of relief organisations in the capital. But she stressed that more aid was urgently needed. "Our message is always that no matter what the situation, you always have the capacity to help a certain part of the population," McAskie said. She added that with the prospect of West African peacekeepers being deployed in the country soon, the UN would launch a fresh aid appeal for Liberia in two or three weeks time. The Dakar meeting discussed proposals for the UN to negotiate the opening of humanitarian corridors from Monrovia into the interior so that relief agencies could reach people living outside the capital. It also looked at the possibility of the UN negotiating cross-border relief operations into rebel-held areas of Liberia from Sierra Leone, Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire. "There are tens of thousands of people to whom we have no access," McAskie said, stressing that a drive to open secure corridors to reach all civilians in need of help would be a major plank of future strategy. There is no piped drinking water or mains electricity in Liberia. Most schools, hospitals and health centres have been burned down or closed, the economy is in shreds and hundreds of thousands of people displaced from their homes by fighting. Relief workers reckon that virtually all of the country's three million population is in need of urgent assistance.