TALKING POINTS

Update on the Loya Jirga

As we have previously announced, phase II for the Mazaar region started two days ago. It was scheduled to conclude yesterday. They still have three districts to go. We do not have results of how many final delegates there are in the region. Maybe tonight that will be available. There are 52 districts still to go on phase I countrywide. In addition to the elected seats there are seats for special categories for example, women, refugees, IDPs, university people etc. Yesterday at Kandahar university the professors elected two of their peers, in other words, two other Kandahar university professors for the reserved seats for the university.

I would like to give you some information on the phase II elections in the different regional centers. Mazaar was basically concluded yesterday; Bamyan starts today, the 23rd and the 24th of May; Ghazni will be the 27nd and 28th of May; Jalalabad will run from the 27th to the 30th; Kunduz, the 1st and 2nd of June and Kandahar is scheduled to begin on the 2nd of June and may go on until the 5th of June. We don't have a very firm schedule yet. Kabul region, as I mentioned to you before, though there have been a number phase II elections already on the district level, they are likely to have between the 31st and the 1st of June a phase II bringing together several districts.

I have additional information regarding Jalalabad. On the 27th they are planning on holding phase II for Nooristan and Laghman and that would be some 650 representatives so far. Then on the 28th they plan to do the Kunar representatives - 650 of them. Ningarhar will happen in two halves on 30th of May with 750 delegates each.

Bamyan Flooding Update

The flooding has subsided. The road from Waras to Punjab is almost completely passable apart from one section where only heavy trucks may be used.

A helicopter carrying medical supplies leaves today for the site.

Alejandro Chicheri from WFP will tell you about a food for work programme that will start there in response to these needs.

Afghan National Workshop on the establishment of the Independent Human Rights Commission

On Saturday, here in this room, a national workshop on the establishment of the Independent Human Rights Commission for Afghanistan and the development of a two-year programme of activities for that commission will be held this coming Saturday, 25 May.

It is an all day workshop starting at 8.30 a.m. The people who will be gathering here are expected to agree on a draft decree for the establishment of the Commission. This will be presented to the Interim Administration. The Administration in accordance with the Bonn Agreement, will establish the Commission. The United Nations will present the proposed two-year programme of action to the donor community.

The workshop is expected to bring together some 75 Afghans from all over the country and it will be opened by Simar Samar, the Vice-Chair of the Interim Administration, Minister of Women's Affairs and the focal point in the Administration for human rights. Mr. Brahimi who is due to arrive back on Friday, will be participating in the opening of this gathering.

There will a number of representatives from several ministries of the Interim Administration as well as individuals like professors, teachers, women judges, medical doctors and human rights activists.

Due to space limitations and the number of people expected, we will not be able to open this to the press. We will only be able to accommodate text, one camera video, one camera still and radio. David Singh will be here to help the media who come and I feel pretty confident that you will have interview possibilities outside.

On Sunday in our regular briefing Craig Mokhiber, the Senior Advisor to Mr. Brahimi on Human Rights issues will be a guest at our briefing here to give you some information on the different workshops, working groups and meetings on human rights. He will be able to give you an overall picture including the results of the meeting.

WFP Update on the Women Bakery Project - Alejandro Chicheri

WFP flood assistance on Bamyan
Following last week floods in Waras (Bamyan Province) a Rapid Emergency Food Need Assessment have been conducted on the area. Initial conclusions include the need to provide the district with Food For Work/FOODAC and School Feeding initiatives, as well as a possible one-off free food distribution.

Two medical doctors were part of the assessment team and stressed the need for fortified and complementary foods, as prevalence of both micronutrient and protein energy malnutrition was seen.

Waras is part of the "hunger belt" and is considered highly food-insecure by the 2001 WFP Vulnerability Analysis Mapping assessment. For the last 4 months our implementing partners in the area, OXFAM, and Action Contre La Faim have distributed 1,099 MT of food for 5,500 families. The district has a total population of 118,039 people, 60% of who are considered vulnerable.

Another of our partners, the local NGO Development and Humanitarian Services for Afghanistan (DHSA) is going to devote 135 MT of WFP food, to start a Food for Work project that will reestablish the access and repair the 15 km of the main road between Waras and Panjab.
The project with duration of 1 month will assist 2,600 families resident in the area.

Coordination Meeting
For the last 2 days WFP had organized and hold a Food Aid Coordination meetings under the motto "Linking nutritional surveillance information with food security information"

The meetings where intended to optimise nutrition survey information and modalities, and to formulate a concrete plan of action for further developing a national strategy to link nutritional surveillance and food security monitoring information in Afghanistan.

Methodologies, and approaches of WFP, Unicef, and the participant NGOs, Save the Children-UK, Action Contre le Faim, Mercy Corps International, ICRC and AIMS, were discussed.

UNHCR Update on Returnees - Yusuf Hassan

The number of Afghans returning home topped the 700,000 mark today. On Tuesday, 21,000 Afghans repatriated home - the single largest return in a day. The Afghan repatriation is shaping out to be one of the swiftest voluntary repatriation in recent years.

Since the start of the Afghan Interim Administration and UNHCR assisted return programme on 1 March, 637,473 Afghans have entered Afghanistan from Pakistan through the Torkham, Nawa Pass and Spin Boldak border crossings.

During 2002, AIA, UNHCR and the Government of Pakistan had planned to help repatriate 400,000 Afghan refugees from Pakistan. We exceeded that figure in the first eight weeks of the operation and have now surpassed it by 237,000.

More than 52,000 refugees have crossed from Iran through Islam Qala border post in north-west since 9 April, and Zaranj in the south-west since 4 May, while close to 10,000 have come home from Tajikistan. Yesterday,

AIA, UNHCR and the Government of Iran signed a joint programme to facilitate the return of 400,000 Afghans from Iran on 4 April.

UNHCR has assisted 1,029 internally displaced people from Spin Boldak to return to their villages. Last week, we completed the return of 15,458 IDPs from the Hesar Shahi camp near Jalalabad.

Since December, UNHCR and IOM have helped more 160,000 IDPs to return home. There are more than 1.2 million IDPs in Afghanistan.

Questions and Answers

Q: Can you tell us something about the state of play in terms of complaints about the Loya Jirga process so far?
Spokesman: I know a little. I don't know how many. I know there are a number of complaints. They go to the Commission and the Commissioners have to examine them. The Commissioners are meeting on Saturday. I don't have the exact agenda to give to you. Nor do I know how long they will be in Kabul to meet. But I would imagine that this would be one of the issues that they would perhaps take up.

Q: Do you have any additional information on Mohammed Rahim, the delegate from the Ghor province who was killed? There was some reports yesterday that turned out not to be true - another delegate having been killed here in Kabul, and I just wondered if know of any incidents in Kabul that might have produced that rumour?
Spokesman: No, we are expecting that between now and the Loya Jirga, it is natural like in many countries, that you have more and more rumours. We all have to be very careful and pay a lot of attention to ensure that we have the right facts and the accurate information and don't contribute to confusion by unintendedly spreading rumours so I am glad that you checked with this case in Kabul.

In the case of Mohammed Rahim, we do not have new detailed information. There is, at this point, no evidence of political motivation but we are still looking into it.

Q: I have just come back from ISAF. ISAF have told me, and I don't know if this is true, but the plans for televising the Loya Jirga at the moment are only of the opening and closing sessions and that at no stage is the actual site going to be open to the press. What is the UN's view on that?
Spokesman: ISAF, the Commission, myself and others met yesterday on this matter. We are trying to find the best way to make as much available and accessible to the media. We are going to have another meeting on Sunday afternoon, and the question, more than anything at this point is technology.

I think that I can, fairly confidently tell you, I don't want to contribute to rumours or miss-information. The Loya Jirga will take place at the Polytechnic University, which is near the Intercontinental. That complex of buildings has suffered quite a bit during the years of conflict and fighting and destruction here. A small potion of it has been renovated in order to accommodate the Loya Jirga and the delegates that will be staying there. You can imagine, it is quite a logistical arrangement. The Delegates alone are 1,500 people. It also includes, as you can imagine support staff, catering services, places to eat, toilet facilities, communications.

The arrangements of press will follow the arrangements that were in place at the Bonn Talks. This means that where the delegates are meeting, there is no physical access to journalists. What we were debating yesterday was the press center. One area has been set aside in the vicinity, but some of us felt that was not the best area for you to feel comfortable and to have access to information. If the Commission and those organizing the Loya Jirga meeting itself decide, and I hope they will decide, that some of the sessions are open and some of the sessions might be closed. This is something that they have to decide, they are in the Commission, and they have to let us know what their decision is. In many parliaments in the world that is how it is. In the UN General Assembly and Security Council, some meetings are open and some meetings are closed.

Q cont: At the moment there is a very good possibility that the opening session which may well be largely ceremonial, is open - they are going to choose the government. And then by the time that it is open again, the final session, this process that is going to be transparent and so forth, it is all being done behind closed doors.
Spokesman: I haven't talked about the opening and the closing yet. I am talking about the actual working sessions which if they agree that some of these sessions, and I hope most of them, will be open. What I meant by technology is that we are working, and I think it will be possible to have a link of the images and sound in the Plenary sessions to the press room so you guys would have access the content of the open sessions. However, you must bring your interpreters, as this is an Afghan process and the meetings will all be conducted in Dari and Pashtu. There will be no interpretation in the Plenary hall into English.

I think it is fairly safe to assume, but still I am making an assumption, that the Commission will agree that the opening and closing sessions should be opened. I cannot imagine that being different, however, they are still to meet on all these issues. However, we can well imagine that all of you would like to be there to have a feel for the mood, for who is chatting with whom. It is totally legitimate and understandable, however, we don't know how many of you will be coming to cover the Loya Jirga, we can expect that it is not only those of you who are here. We are expecting many more to come to Kabul and the tent will not have space for all of you. Once we have clearance that the opening and closing sessions will indeed be open, we will have to work out with you a pool arrangement. I think that in this way, I am responding to your question. I hope, partially at least, to have eased your anxiety.

Q cont: I was just wondering if somebody could impress upon them that it is important from the medias point of view to be able to get inside, not just during the opening and closing ceremony but also during the actual process. I understand that there are security concerns, but if a pool arrangement could be arranged so that journalists could go in to see what it was like, see what it feels like - I would say that it is essential to be able to properly cover the Loya Jirga.
Spokesman: I think that would be very difficult. I am alerting you from the start. As I said, the model that is being followed is the Bonn Talks and it is not only security. It is to preserve the environment of discussions without the influence of comments that go outside that environment. However, if any of the delegates wish to leave the site to give press interviews, of course, they can leave at any time that they want. Some of them have been out of Kabul for a long time. They may even want to go out and see family, who knows?

Q: [inaudible] Question on possibilities to transmit live.
Spokesman: If we have the signal to the press center, you can broadcast live from the press center those sessions that are going to be open. Let us hope that we can bring the political and the technological side together in the best marriage to serve the interest of those who have to do their work in covering this very important meeting.

Q: A different issue - can you say anything about proposal of extending the UN and the ISAF mandates?
Spokesman: Not the UN mandate, the ISAF mandate.

Q cont: So it is just the ISAF mandate?
Spokesman: Yes.

Q cont: They were saying at the ISAF briefing today that somehow they were intertwined.
Spokesman: I do not know what was discussed there, but let me help clarify this. ISAF is authorized to operate, to be here, by a decision of the Security Council. When ISAF came here a few months ago, it was as a result of a decision of the Security Council expressed in a resolution of the Security Council which gave a mandate of six months and will expire, I think, in June. The Council is to meet and to decide on the extension of that mandate.

The UNAMA mandate is totally separate. It is also established by the Security Council, but UNAMA was established on March 28 and has a mandate of one year.

If there are no other questions, I will be away for a couple of day so the briefing on Sunday will be conducted by David Singh with the cooperation and participation of our colleagues from the different UN agencies.

Thank you very much and have a nice day