UN Radio

UN and Africa
Programme Number: 144
Week of: Sunday, 18th March, 2007
Recording Date: Thursday, 22nd March, 2007
Topical Issue(s):
• President Laurent Gbagbo of Cote d’Ivoire and the leader of Forces Nouvelles recently signed an agreement calling for the creation of a new transitional government. The Deputy Representative of the Secretary-General for Cote d’Ivoire, Abou Moussa says the deal falls short of being precise on specific issues.

• The World Health Organization and its partners say that the drug resistant tuberculosis is posing a serious challenge in fighting HIV/AIDS, particularly in Africa. UN health officials stress the need to prevent the spread of this type of TB which was discovered in South Africa.

• Minority Rights Group International has issued its report on the State of the World’s Minorities 2007, in which it says there is good and bad news from Africa on the protection of minorities. The spokesperson for the NGO, Ishbel Matheson says Somalia is at the top of the list of countries where minorities are at risk.

Producer/presenter: Derrick Mbatha
Editor/co-producer: Ransford Cline-Thomas
Production Assistants: Zenawit Melese
Studio Engineer: Steve Williams
Duration: 15’00”

RESENTER: This is United Nations Radio in New York.

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PRESENTER:

Hello and welcome to UN and Africa. I’m Derrick Mbatha.

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PRESENTER:

In today’s programme, the Deputy Representative of the Secretary-General for Cote d’Ivoire, Abou Moussa says an agreement recently signed by leaders of Cote d’Ivoire has loopholes.
CLIP 1: ABOU MOUSSA
“The agreement falls short of being precise on specific issues such as what is the role that the UN will be playing beyond the role they have assigned to the impartial forces in the agreement which is to help to assist them in overseeing the disarmament process.”

PRESENTER:

Also in this programme the head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Margaret Chan says the campaign to eliminate tuberculosis is facing new challenges.
CLIP 2: DR. MARGARET CHAN

“The first one is co-infection of HIV and TB. The second challenge is the recent emergence of extensively drug resistant TB, what is known as XDR TB.”

PRESENTER:

And later in the programme, Minority Rights Group International, a non-governmental organization says there is good and bad news about the situation of minority communities in Africa.
So stay tuned to UN and Africa.
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UN Envoy Says Recent Accord on Cote d’Ivoire Has Loopholes

PRESENTER;

To a cynical observer, political players in Cote d’Ivoire have been signing agreement after agreement without any real progress in moving the peace process forward. Cote d’Ivoire remains divided between the north which is controlled by Forces Nouvelles and the south under the government since the political crisis started in 2002. The latest agreement was signed a couple of weeks ago by President Laurent Gbagbo and the leader of Forces Nouvelles, Guillaume Soro in Ouagadougou the capital of Burkina Faso. The agreement calls for the creation of a new transitional government leading to elections at the end of the year. So is this another false move or genuine step towards real peace. To get the reaction of the United Nations to this accord, UN Radio’s Diane Bailey spoke with Abou Moussa, the Deputy Representative of the Secretary-General for Cote d’Ivoire. Mr. Moussa says the Security Council is cautiously optimistic about the agreement and there are a number of issues that need to be addressed first before elections are held in the country.
MOUSSA: One of those areas is the question of identification, another one is the question of the military dialogue, another one is the question of disarmament of the militia, as well as the question of a return of the civil administration to al parts of Cote d’Ivoire. So, looking at the linkage is that the new agreement not only takes into account all these issues but also adds a number of issues that needed to be tackled anyway, such as the question of return of the IDPs, the question of civic service, those who are formerly militia groups can now be absorbed and be assisted to live a new life. So this is the package, entire global framework of the agreement.

BAILEY: You mentioned that there were some loopholes in the agreement. What are those loopholes, and how can they be overcome?

MOUSSA: Well the loopholes is simply that the agreement falls short of being precise on specific issues, such as what is the role that the UN will be playing beyond the role of assigned to the impartial for this agreement, which is to help, to assist them in overseeing the process, but I think we can do more than that. We’ve been doing more than that. There is also the question of governor’s issues. It has not been decided upon, but I think this is still continuing. The agreement will say that the negotiations are not completed yet, so there’s a second round of discussions, and I do think that during this second round of discussions those loopholes will then be addressed. The Secretary General has already taken this up with the facilitator and will be formally communicating this number of issues that he would like to see clarified to the facilitator.

BAILEY: Now, the issue of identification is, in many ways, at the heart of the problem in Cote d’Ivoire. Can you describe a little bit what that is about and how it might be tackled, or how the agreement foresees it being dealt with?

MOUSSA: Well, when you talk to the Forces Nouvelles, the ex-belligerent that is called the rebellion, they will tell you that the reasons why they took up arms was a question of identification. Many of them don’t have ID cards, in which case they cannot vote, they cannot participate beyond voting for elections, they cannot look for jobs, so that became one of their main bone of contentions. And in so doing, they put it on the negotiation table. There has been a little resistance, and if you listen to the other side, they will tell you “We don’t want to give ID cards to foreigners,” so it has been back and forth for the past three, four years now, but at the end they managed to sort it out. Both sides made concessions. They made concessions in putting the place all the mechanisms to able to identify people who are bona fide Ivorians so that they can then obtain their ID cards. The concession is also that there are a series of procedures we need to go through, and I think those procedures have now been breached so as to be inclusive of all those who really deserve and have right to ID cards.

BAILEY: Now, the security situation is pretty difficult in Cote d’Ivoire. What is being done to make things better?

MOUSSA: Well, the security situation in Cote d’Ivoire is linked to the political developments. The more it develops positively, the more you see the positive aspects, but that doesn’t exclude regular crimes that are being committed. But in terms of security linked to political upheavals, we’ve seen that since the discussions, these have subsided, and I think this will continue. The importance of this is that individuals will be able to return home, for humanitarian workers to be able to assist those who are in need, and we hope for the best.

PRESENTER:

That was Abou Moussa, the Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Cote d’Ivoire speaking with UN Radio’s Diane Bailey.
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Drug Resistant TB Threatens HIV-Infected People in Africa
PRESENTER:

Tuberculosis is second to HIV/AIDS as the world’s leading infectious killer disease in the world. More than one an a half million people die of this curable disease every year. To mark World Tuberculosis Day on Thursday March 22, the World Health Organization released its report on Tuberculosis. The day itself is observed on the 24th of March. This year’s theme for World TB Day is TB anywhere is TB everywhere. UN Radio’s Ransford Cline Thomas reports.
NARRATOR:
CUT 1: DR. CHAN

In 1993 the World Health Organization declared tuberculosis a global emergency and since then we have been working very hard with partners and donors to bring the epidemic under control through an effective control strategy called DOTS.

That was Dr. Margaret Chan, the Director-General of the World Health Organization speaking to reporters on World Tuberculosis Day. The DOTS strategy she referred to stands for Directly Observed Treatment Short-course which ensures that TB patients regularly take their medicine under supervision. Dr. Chan says that today, for the first time since the 1993 declaration of TB as a global emergency, there is evidence of positive results in the fight against the disease. And, according to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS Tuberculosis and Malaria, more than one million people are alive today thanks to efforts in more than one hundred countries to tackle TB. However, Dr. Chan cautions that there are still challenges that remain.
CUT 2: DR. CHAN

The first one is co-infection of HIV and TB. The second challenge is drug resistance, and in particular, there is an emergence of extensively drug resistant TB, what is known as XDR TB. The third challenge is the ageing of the global population.

NARRATOR:
The extremely drug resistant Tuberculosis is of particular concern to health experts on the African continent because of the lack of infrastructure and insufficient health workers. Dr. Mario Raviglione, Director of the Stop TB Department at the World Health Organization says the drug resistant TB is a serious threat to people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
CUT 3: DR. RAVIGLIONE
Well it is certainly a threat when it hits the high HIV-prevalence communities as it has happened in South Africa because in HIV-positive individuals, in people living with HIV/AIDS you have an acceleration of anything that concerns tuberculosis. So as soon as they get infected they can actually go straight towards active disease as opposed to people that are non-infected that may hold the organism and put them under control for years.

Dr. Peter Piot, the Executive Director of UNAIDS, says that drug resistant TB, which first emerged in South Africa is a major problem in the global response to HIV and AIDS. He argues that one of the factors that has contributed to the development of this type of tuberculosis is the fact that governments have not invested adequately in basic programmes to control the disease.
CUT 4: DR. PETER PIOT
And it’s able to spread rapidly among communities of people living with HIV because of poor health infrastructure and inadequate access to HIV prevention and treatment services. So really all the problems of both TB control and of AIDS treatment are coming together here.

NARRATOR:
Dr. Raviglione stresses the need to provide the necessary resources to meet the challenge of the drug resistant tuberculosis.
CUT 5: DR. RAVIGLIONE
All of this has been estimated, for instance for 2007, to be about $650 million which represents I believe a tripling, if I remember correctly what was estimated originally because we need more laboratories. We need better procedures, we need new diagnostic tests. I would also like to underline that XDR TB for the moment is relatively rare. It has emerged in many countries but is not common. What we have to do now is actually to face the challenge and make sure that this doesn’t expand.

NARRATOR:
And as part of the effort to make sure this type of tuberculosis does not expand, experts from the World Health Organization are expected to begin helping the authorities of the KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa who are investigating the origin and the spread of the extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis. Other countries in Southern Africa, including Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland and Zimbabwe have submitted their national plans to respond to this strain of tuberculosis. Reporting for UN Radio, I am Ransford Cline-Thomas.
STING/JINGLE: UN AND AFRICA THEME
PRESENTER:

The plight of minorities in Africa remained bleak during 2006. That’s according to Minority Rights Group International, a non-governmental organization dedicated to monitoring and reporting on the conditions of minorities around the world. The spokesperson for the organization, Ishbel Matheson launched the latest State of the World’s Minorities report at United Nations Headquarters this week. When I caught up with her after the launch of the report she told me there is good and bad news from Africa regarding the protection of minorities.
MATHESON: To deal with the good news first, we wrote a special analysis this year of which parliaments and legislatures around the world are most representative of minority groups and we discovered that the top three countries in the world which are most representative are South Africa, Namibia and Tanzania.. Out of all the countries in the world are much better than say, the UK, France or the U.S. which are much farther down the list. Those three countries, South Africa, Namibia and Tanzania do really well.

MBATHA: And how are minorities defined in these countries?

MATHESON: Essentially what we are looking at is groups which identify themselves as distinctive groups. So really in Africa that means most ethnic groupings or tribes. In Kenya, for example, one would be talking about the Kikuyu, the Luo, the Masaai. None of these groups have a numerical majority in the country. They are minorities albeit some of those minorities are more powerful than others.

MBATHA: Now let’s get to the bad news. What is the bad news?

MATHESON: The bad news is that half of the countries in the top twenty of places most at risk are in Africa and top of the list is Somalia, where you have a potential for much greater warfare and therefore much greater danger to the people who live in Somalia, different clans but also different ethnic minorities such as, for example, the Somali Bantus. The situation in Somalia poses difficulties not just for people within Somalia but also for ethnic minorities along the border with Ethiopia, especially those of Somali descent who are perceived by the Ethiopian government to support the Union of Islamic Courts in Somalia and therefore placing them in some risk, but also the attacks on Somalia by the U.S. perhaps threaten minority Muslim communities along the east African coast which have been feeling under pressure from this war on terror and feeling that they have been targeted simply because they are Muslims rather than because they support extremist Islam.

MBATHA: Let’s talk about the Bantus. What is their situation in Somalia? Are they facing discrimination and if so, how, what kind of discrimination are they facing?

MATHESON: Well traditionally they lie outside clan structures. The Somali Bantus were taken into Somalia as a consequence of the slave trade. So they themselves are incomers into Somalia, you might say. The special position of the Somali Bantu has been recognized. Many of them in past wars already fled the country and some were subsequently resettled in Tanzania but, in fact, some of them were resettled here in the United States but there are many still living in Somalia and during the upsurge of violence, they are at extreme risk of being pushed off their land and of being at risk of extreme violence.

MBATHA: What do you think should be done on the African continent to guarantee the protection of minorities?

MATHESON: Government should give specific attention when drawing up new constitutions, when drawing up electoral systems, we all know that there are some groups within various countries who are more politically marginalized, weaker and less rich, live out far away from the centre such as, for example, in northern Kenya the nomads, similarly in Uganda with the Karamajors, it has to find ways of bringing these people into the centre to give them their equal share and the benefits that being part of their country can bring and that way, there is a positive dividend from doing that. You get greater stability and stronger nations.

PRESENTER:

Ishbel Matheson of the non-governmental organization, Minority Rights Group International.

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PRESENTER:
And that’s all for this edition of UN and Africa. Our Production Assistant was Zenawit Melese and our sound engineer was Steve Williams. And from me Derrick Mbatha, bye bye.

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