UNAMET: Briefing Summary for Tuesday, 21 September

Ross Mountain, the humanitarian coordinator appointed by the Secretary-General and the World Food Program made another assessment yesterday in Dili of the warehouses where they have rice stored. They found that recent looting has reduced the rice stock from 8000 tons to 2000 tons. That area is not yet secured but we expect it to happen today and Mr. Mountain is also scheduled to meet today with Major General Kiki Syanakri who is the commander of TNI forces in East Timor.

Now as you just heard from Commodore Bonsa there are a lot of flights going into Dili today. I think he mentioned something in the range of thirty. This means that the World Food Program will be unable to carry out any airdrops but there are plans to airdrop tomorrow and once we have those we'll be able to inform you more on that tomorrow.

The UNICEF are reopening their office in Atembua today with three international staff and their Kupang office remains open with 11 international staff. Our staff have visited the UN compound which appears to be intact but needs some repair. There was some vandalism and so on. We have approximately 150 UN vehicles still in the compound but many have suffered damage and they will need repairing. We have water availible for about two hours a day. We have electricity for limited periods of two to three hours a day and fuel is also extremely limited.

Mr. Martin, the head of UNAMET is travelling today to Dare with Australian military, with other UNAMET staff and also a number of journalists and he will be assesing the situation in Dare of the refugees in that area. There also appear to be people returning from Dare to Dili slow movement back to Dili.

The human rights commission in Geneva is to hold an extraordinary session on Thursday to examine the killings and atrocities and there'll be more news on that from Geneva in a couple of days.

Apparently the port is still very heavily congested as the TNI are evacuating soldiers and their families to Indonesia and activity at the airport is extremely limited as you just heard but we think that fairly soon Baucau will be established as an alternative landing site as it can support larger aircraft.

That's all I have at the moment.

ENDS

© Scoop Media