A world of strife and concern, this June 11, 1998
Starting with word on the situation in Southern Sudan. The war-weary, frightened people of the scrublands of southern Sudan, who have seen their families killed and their children stolen into slavery in a seemingly terminable war, are now looking into the abyss. There simply is not enough food on the ground or security from raiders to ensure their survival. This is not the picture presented by Clare Short, Secretary of State for International Development. On Wednesday, she scolded media and aid workers at a conference at London’s Marriott Hotel. She told them their high-profile appeals for cash to aid Sudan were ‘unnecessary’.
She added curtly that the aid effort had sufficient funds. Aid agencies struggling to keep people alive in southern Sudan disagree vehemently. Among them is Medecins Sans Frontieres, one of the charities belonging to Operation Lifeline Sudan. It is warning that the airbridge, far from enjoying enough funds, is in danger of failing in its aim.
The reality was that Short’s well-intentioned chiding of the media and aid agencies was short on facts. Research established that the Sudanese aid effort has barely half the cash it needs. The situation has become so serious that the World Food Programme has been forced to ‘borrow’ food from stockpiles in Mombasa where they are needed to avert starvation by 600,000 in Burundi, inaccessible at present because of washed-out roads and rail to feed the starving in Sudan. And what staff at Operation Lifeline’s headquarters find so extraordinary is that they have briefed British officials in London and Nairobi in detail on the problems they face. ‘We are in meetings with these people all the time,’ said a source at the World Food Programme in Nairobi.
‘We spoke to them last week. I simply cannot understand how they are getting the message so badly wrong. When we saw Clare Short’s speech on Reuters, everybody’s jaws hit the ground.’
Meanwhile in Iraq – The chief UN weapons monitor came back to Iraq with a message for Saddam Hussein’s government: Weapons inspections could be over soon if the Iraqis would cooperate. But Baghdad’s most influential newspaper delivered a message of its own this one for the Iraqi government: Stop “courting this mad dog” Butler and 18 senior UN aims experts arrived in Baghdad armed with satellite images charts and material evidence to back the UN position that Iraq is still hiding information on illegal weapons Butler’s commission has a UN mandate to make sure that Iraq has eliminated all its weapons of mass destruction a process necessary’ for the lifting of sweeping sanctions imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 “What remains is relatively small and with Iraq’s full cooperation we can get this done in a very short time” he told journalists at a news conference hours after his arrival.
And from Kosovo: NATO decided Thursday to flaunt its air power in the face of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, approving a demonstration of allied military fireworks aimed at getting him to back down in Kosovo. U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen and his 15 NATO colleagues authorized a package of measures they hoped would persuade Milosevic to pull back his Serb-led army and police forces in the southern province, where they have been carrying out escalating attacks on the ethnic Albanian majority. “President Milosevic would be rash and foolish if he would ignore the message coming from NATO,” British Defense Secretary George Robertson said. “The message is clear and unambiguous: Belgrade, think again.” Under the measures, NATO will conduct simulated air attacks in Albania and Macedonia, probably sometime next week.
And aside from the ongoing and ever-deepening crisis in Southern Sudan, that’s just a little of what went on, this June 11, 1998 as reported by The BBC World Service.
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