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UN relief chief underlines the need to address multiple challenges

People being vaccinated against cholera in a camp for the displaced in northern Idleb, Syria. Syria’s Humanitarian Response Plan is only 12 per cent funded. 7 March 2023. Photo: OCHA/Bilal Al-Hammoud

Press briefing by Martin Griffiths, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator

Thanks for this opportunity. I'll do the usual few opening remarks and, of course, be eager to take questions.

I was in Syria last week, had meetings with the authorities in Damascus – President [Bashar Al-] Assad and his Foreign Minister [Fayssal Mekdad] – and also in Amman on the way in with Foreign Minister [Ayman] Safadi. And the focus of these discussions was, of course, the cross-border resolution negotiations that are now very much underway here, very active at the moment. We're three days away, I think, from the decision point for renewal of that resolution, which we are all very clear about, and the Secretary-General has been very clear about what he has as a strong position, a good 12 months and as many crossing points as possible – a natural position.

Also, looking into ensuring that we can look at increasing funding for Syria. Syria is 12 per cent funded in terms of its Humanitarian Response Plan halfway through the year. It’s a deeply, deeply shocking situation. And Syria is not the only place, as I will say in a while, where we have these very grave funding gaps – but 12 per cent funding, for example, means in the Syrian context, the World Food Programme, as they told me in Damascus, looking to cut food rations by 40 per cent for lack of $200 million. And UNRWA [UN Relief and Works Agency] as well, of course there's a large Palestinian refugee population in Syria as elsewhere, I think they are 18 per cent funded at the moment halfway through the year. So, it’s very real, these are real impacts, so we talked about how we could leverage a few more funds, particularly for the issue of early recovery. But the Syrian economy, of course, is suffering. The numbers of people beneath the poverty line, and we say it every month to the Security Council, now about 90 per cent of the Syrian population is below the poverty line. So, the big story for me on Syria, among many, many other aspects of the tragedy of that conflict, is this absence of sufficient aid.

I won't say anything to duplicate or amplify the statement by the Secretary-General, which I think Farhan has provided on the Black Sea Initiative. We’re in the middle of that negotiation. I should just say it’s been about a month since the Kakhovka Dam, and we have managed to deliver many, many, almost daily convoys of clean water and medicine to the population in that area. We never managed to get across the line into the populations on the other side of the river, despite our best efforts. And, as I said at the time, including to Edie [Lederer], I think, that we haven’t seen the full consequences of that terrible act as yet because of the damage to that breadbasket, for example – never mind the worry about mines being removed and floating. It's a hugely mined area. So, I don't think we've seen the humanitarian outcome yet from that terrible, terrible morning.

I want to say something, simply because it’s come recently very strongly to me in my daily life. I had the opportunity to discuss, in recent days, the situation with colleagues from the Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC]. As you know, there was a Security Council discussion last week, I think it was. My colleague, [Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator] Bruno Lemarquis was here. And, in all the terrible, terrible tragedies of that country – I grew up there, in fact, myself, many years ago – in all those terrible tragedies, if you want to pick invidiously one, it would be the gender-based violence that is so utterly rampant in parts of the eastern Congo, the displaced people from Ituri. And I don't want to repeat the statistics and the stories of the daily lives, of the women and girls who are suffering so much from the heedless behavior of those in control of their lives. But it's a terrible shock, I hope, even to all of us who are used to hearing about shocks and tragedies and horrors. This is beyond, for me, imagining. This is beyond imagining.

I spoke a couple of days ago to Natalia Kanem, [Executive Director of the UN Population Fund], as well as to Cindy McCain, [Executive Director] of the World Food Programme. We need to shine a light on this issue because it's not just the DRC: the Secretary-General spoke about it in the context of Haiti, it's also in Sudan. But the DRC, for me, epitomizes the appalling nature of man's inhumanity, mostly to women and girls. I will give you one statistic on this [in] DRC: if the rate of gender-based violence, instances that we know about would continue, and it's obviously going to be much more than what we actually know about, it would reach an extraordinary 125,000 cases this year. And a “case” is a terrible word, I think you would agree, to be used for what we are looking at.

I want to say a couple of words on Sudan and then something on climate, maybe climate first and ending with Sudan.

As you probably know better than me, and we all know it from here, June has been the hottest month in the history of meteorological data globally. And you know, for those of us with the work that I do, this is no surprise, because look at the extraordinary effect of climate on places like the Horn of Africa - it’s the sixth failed rainy season in a row. As we keep saying, it's unprecedented, and it isn't over yet – and that's just drought. We're still coping with the earthquakes coming out of Syria and Türkiye. And, of course, Pakistan, kind of off the news, but is still coping with a massive rebuilding challenge in Pakistan from those floods that we visited with the Secretary-General last year. As a result of this very, very clear and unequivocal impact of climate on my world, on humanitarian needs, Oxfam, I think, has said that the impact of climate events on humanitarian needs has grown by 800 per cent in the last 20 years. I'll make sure that we get the exact quote there for you on that.

We have stepped up, not just OCHA, but the Inter-Agency Standing Committee of the humanitarian agencies that I represent, have stepped up our activities with relation to the COP [ meeting of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] process. And there is talk about possible field travel with the Emirati COP [ COP28 in Dubai] leaders before the COP and of course, going to the COP. And you know, with a man like our Secretary-General, there is no place in this building that isn’t aware of the terrible effect of climate on daily life. And our emphasis in the humanitarian [realm] going into COP will be to try to maximize the use of climate funds for frontline communities around the world, which are directly impacted by climate. So, it's about adaptation and resilience. And our offer being made in the discussions now with Member States is also to offer humanitarian funding channels – our own funds that we oversee and manage, which are very rapid disbursement mechanisms, as you can well imagine, being in the humanitarian world – as places where you could put through green climate funds to deliver to frontline communities. And as much as anything else, and I think perhaps I take this as even more important, to bear witness to what actually is the case in places like Somalia and elsewhere of climate on families displaced, destroyed, livelihoods eroded for good, and so forth. So, we are putting a lot more emphasis on climate.

And now finally, Sudan. I shall in fact be leaving tomorrow to join [Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Sudan] Volker Perthes in an IGAD [Intergovernmental Authority on Development] Quartet meeting in Addis Ababa on Sudan. Sudan, and you will know all this better than me, but Sudan is a story which has not gotten any better in the last weeks at all. I was fortunate enough to have some direct exposure to it some weeks ago, but it just hasn't gotten any better. Access to Darfur remains virtually nil. Getting in from Chad, Chadian authorities are being extremely helpful and cooperative to get us into West Darfur, they’re great, [but] the security situation in West Darfur is still extraordinarily dangerous. And getting aid from Port Sudan across Sudan, through El Obeid and into Darfur from the east is made all the more difficult by the fact that the battle zone, of course, has also moved south towards the Kordofans and the SPLM [Sudan People's Liberation Movement].

So Sudan is, from my perspective, a place of no hope at the moment – and a place where there is only everything to do. And everything to do includes mobilizing the funding. We did make a splash, we did a funding event, and it brought in money. We need the money in the bank. Number two, access – cross-border access, definitely, from Egypt, from Chad, from Ethiopia, I'm sure that will be discussed on Monday – but access internally as well. And on that regard, number three, the complete partnership that I’ve talked before with you about between ourselves, the humanitarian agencies and civil society. Civil society is the frontline deliverers, for example, in Khartoum, those extraordinary people who’ve risked life and limb daily to help their local communities and their neighbourhoods. We are lucky because they’re also helping us to deliver the aid that is being delivered, and aid is being delivered. ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] and MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] have been present in Khartoum for some time, despite the dangers. The UN moved up towards Khartoum from Port Sudan. But it's just not a pretty sight. It's really, really, really, for me, in my position, not a place of greater safety. It's a place of great terror, and the appalling crimes that have been carried out, and the displacement which has now reached just short of 3 million people – 2.8 million people have left their homes in Sudan in a matter of weeks, not all out of the country, but displaced. And we all know from everywhere that we work, displacement is the cri de coeur of these families because it leads them to much greater needs and much greater dependency.

**Questions and Answers

Question: Thank you very much, Mr. Griffiths. On behalf of the United Nations Correspondents Association, we always welcome you; come back often. My question is about the Black Sea grain initiative. You're always seen as an optimist. Do you have any optimism that this might be extended? And is there any chance that either you or [UNCTAD Secretary-General] Rebeca Grynspan or anybody else high ranking will go to Moscow to try and push this basically over the finish line? And if you could make a comment on these reports, that the US is going to supply cluster munitions to the Ukrainian Government, it would be appreciated. Thank you.

Martin Griffiths: Not a chance, on the second one. Just sneak in a cluster munitions question. Yeah, it's right up my alley, Edie. Thank you very much. [Laughter] The Moscow visit thing and the optimism: well, I am as you know, I learned to be a professional optimist. That's actually got nothing to do with whether it's going to work or not – it's about will and energy and persistence. I'm also an agnostic, and I learned that in Yemen: try not to know things that you don't know. And I don't really know what's in the minds of the parties who will decide on renewal or termination in the middle of July. I see what they say, and I think what they say is really important. And we hear repeated statements from the Russian Federation saying that there's been no advantage to them and time's up. Well, of course, as the Secretary-General, has made clear, this doesn't deter us from doing everything we can to work for a renewal.

We know, you know, the world has seen the value of the Black Sea Initiative. It’s 32 million tons now and counting, and that even within, you know, a slowdown recently, so this isn't something you chuck away. And we keep saying and Rebeca, very much so, Rebeca Grynspan, very much in the lead here, to say this is, the Black Sea Initiative and the Memorandum of Understanding, between the UN and the Russian Federation, that she leads on and oversees, is incredibly important for global food security. And we've heard that, not from the UN, but we've heard that, for example, when the African leaders went to see President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and President [Vladimir] Putin, exactly that message, I'm sure the same message will come out in the Russia-Africa summit, which is later this month, isn't it? So, you know, we know this is true. And I know from being involved in mediation, that you do not, except at grave peril, stop an agreement and then hope to rework it because it makes it much more difficult.

So yes, we continue, as the Secretary-General has made clear today, to work very hard, and I know that Rebeca, if I could just speak for her, is very keen to get the opportunity to sit down in Moscow in the time that’s available, and I'm also keen to sit down in Istanbul with the parties to the Black Sea Initiative, if that's possible, next week. I know that there's discussion about that. So, we'll keep trying.

Question: Thank you, a follow on to Edie’s questions on the Black Sea grain deal: you’ve just mentioned these potential meetings next week. I mean, are you, are the Russians giving a sense that they're willing to continue engaging? And, at this point, you know, we’re just kind of relying on the goodwill of the Russians because, you know, Rebeca has done all she can to help facilitate their exports, and we've heard about that recent statement.You've been doing all you can, I think, if you could give us any kind of update on the ammonia pipeline, that would be great as well, because I think that one falls under your side, whether it's too damaged to be fixed or what you know about that. That would be great.

Martin Griffiths: Yeah, Michelle, good questions. On the ammonia pipeline first: what, under the leadership of the Secretary-General, we have offered to the parties [is] the opportunity to send in technical assessment of damage to that pipeline. By the way, it's damaged in three places. But it's a very active war zone and that's why it was damaged, in our opinion. And so, to get to those three places to assess damage already requires a certain amount of agreement between the parties to provide a safe – what is it, a window of silence, right, to allow you to get there – so we haven't been able to do that yet, so we haven't been able to do the technical assessment of the repairs needed, despite, I think, a real interest from both parties to get this done so that we get the facts out as opposed to suppositions. If we were to achieve that, and if we were to achieve the repair and all of this as possible, we would then have to have an arrangement to protect that pipeline from the war, and it’s in the middle of one of the most contested areas of Ukraine at the moment, to protect it for the passage of ammonia.

So, there are lots of impediments to making that a realistic prospect immediately, and it is about immediate value of it because it’s in the discussions, as you know, with regard to the potential renewal or termination of the Black Sea Initiative. So, the pipeline is complicated. The truth is, and I know this from daily contact with Rebeca Grynspan and her team, is that there has been very significant progress made by the United Nations under her leadership in removing impediments to the export of grain and fertilizer from Russia. And I hear what Moscow says, which is it’s not enough and they need more and the re-SWIFT-ing of the Russian Agricultural Bank is very important, but there is some progress on this.

And it’s very important to note that, that all of these removals of impediments, which Rebeca is so tirelessly negotiating, depend on the cooperation of countries, particularly Europe and the United States. And in the absence of a Black Sea Initiative, I don't think that the level of cooperation is going to remain, so that there is a real advantage globally of food security for both those things, to go to those agreements to be maintained. As many people have said, it’s a single package, and a single package works both ways. So, it's really important that everybody understands that we want both to work to a maximum degree.

And I hope that, while I'm an agnostic, that everybody else will [inaudible]. Türkiye, by the way, is very active on these issues. We speak two or three times a week with Ankara about it. I think President Zelenskyy is due to visit Türkiye today. You know, Türkiye is a big, impressive advocate and diplomatic actor in this.

Question: Just on that note, are you expecting any sort of developments regarding the grain deal out of this meeting between the Presidents of Türkiye and Ukraine?

Martin Griffiths: I don’t know. I really, I genuinely don't know.

Question: Since I have the microphone, USG, good to see you. I’m just looking at your response plans and appeals snapshot for 2023, and the astounding average is that, across the board, the appeals are at, on average, 20.6 per cent funded. What do you see as the root causes of this chronic underfunding? I mean, I was, I moderated that [Horn of Africa] appeal and we hardly made a dent in what you really required, so yes, you want money in the bank, but it’s still not going to be enough. What are the root causes here? We often hear from countries like the United States, that this is a question of burden sharing that isn’t really being spread out as evenly perhaps as it should be. What do you see as the main chronic cause here?

Martin Griffiths: Well, it’s the growing needs. I mean, if you want to pinpoint one factor, which leads, as you say to that terrible 20 per cent funded halfway through the year, which is the first time it’s been this bad, and next year, no doubt, it’ll be worse, it’s because of growing needs. So, the gap, it grows, because, and I’ll talk about why growing needs, but the amount of humanitarian aid funding coming from those relatively small group of Member States globally, has remained more or less the same. There are many Member States who, for example, give a lot of support to Ukraine, who remind us about the fact that this has not diminished their aid donations to other parts of the world. And I think that’s largely true.

There are lots of different consequences from the war in Ukraine on our world, but the growing needs, you know, look at Syria: $5.4 billion this year – that’s massive. And that’s just within Syria. If you add the refugee [element] – this was of course the [Seventh Conference on ‘Supporting the future of Syria and the region’] meeting in Brussels the other day – you know, billions aren’t enough.

Why are the needs growing so exponentially? Climate is clearly a huge factor here. Because of, you know, very obviously, and the fact that the move into resilience, adaptive water supply programmes, for things that into livelihoods for pastoralists who can’t afford, if it’s sensible to buy more animals because they’ve lost, not just their last lot, but the one before and the one before, the move into that kind of protection for communities affected by climate is still a work in progress.

And climate money, as you know very well, for that and that’s what climate money should be for in our view, isn’t coming through with anything like the speed that the promises were, the famous $100 billion. And grants, please, not loans to poor communities in Somalia – don’t be ridiculous. So, you know, this is nonsense. And you know, the Secretary-General has been – what’s the word, eloquent, not strident – eloquent about this, so climate [is a] big deal. Secondly, conflicts. You know, I was a conflict mediator for these many years, and if you look at the pattern of conflicts being resolved, it’s all going in a bad direction, isn’t it?

God knows we hope that Yemen is going to work out, should have worked out when I was there, but it’s gone much better without me, I’m sad to say. [Laughter] I was with [Special Envoy for Yemen] Hans Grundberg the other day and he’s, I mean, he’s been very, very, very adroit and very smart about how he’s deployed his tactics to support what we now see happening, and, I mean, he’s done a fantastic job – I hate to say this, but it’s true. But, you know, it’s the outlier, isn’t it?

There are a couple of things in the UN we should think about in this regard. The relationship between our work and political solutions needs to be, you know, you need to crush those walls between these two. This idea that humanitarians shouldn’t go anywhere near politics, you know, I don’t know a single humanitarian agency – I remember Sérgio Vieira de Mello being very, very vocal on this 20 years ago when he was in my job. We want political solutions because otherwise, we have to do things which we don’t have the money for or the capacity for. Yes, we also want the partnership with development, but what that means for humanitarians, I think, we are doing some stuff on this.

[The Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on Solutions to Internal Displacement] Robert Piper is doing really groundbreaking work on this with IDPs [internally displaced people]. Look in your programming and in your planning in places, look to solutions. Look to solutions rather than to reruns and reruns and reruns of appeals. Be judged as much by your attendance to solutions as by your attendance to lifesaving programming. Now, I don’t want to exaggerate it, but we have certainly got to get the balance right. Look at the Sahel – Niger, working so hard to maintain the gains that they have made through great leadership and being threatened by non-State armed groups coming over their borders. And, of course, they got climate. We’ve talked about DRC. So I think conflict and climate together are a killer combination. Then, of course, there’s high prices of energy, food and so forth, those things.

Food security is revealed to be not a very efficient global framework and needs a huge amount of attention. So that’s basically it – needs are growing. And you know, you need to spend your money far quicker. What the donors keep telling me is, and they told me from the day I started this job, is you need to prioritize more. Well, no, I don’t need to prioritize more – they can prioritize more. But I’m supposed to be loyal to needs. And if I start, we start, the humanitarian agencies start saying, well, we’ll cut down because, you know, we’ll cut the cloth – that’s not the business model that we’re in. I understand why they say it, but the obligation primarily, I don’t think, resides with the humanitarian community. We have to be honest about what we think are the needs and what we can do.

Question: Mr. Griffiths, on your trip to Damascus, you met with the President as well as senior government officials there. We know that the Syrian government greenlighted three extra border crossings, other than the one in the resolution.

Martin Griffiths: Two.

Question: Two, okay. So, what’s the sentiment when you talk to them about the extension, another possible extension of their own border crossings? And also you just mentioned about the bad economy in Syria. From the perspective of humanitarian workers, how would the lifting of sanctions might make a difference on that? Thank you.

Martin Griffiths: On the crossing points, which is the easy question, I’ll tell you what I think, and I hope I’m proved to be right. Those two crossing points have been renewed until mid-August, as you know, by President Assad and his Government, and they were communicated to me some weeks ago. I have every hope that they will continue to be renewed. I see no reason why not. They’re important. Bab al-Hawa, which is squarely within the cross-border resolution discussions, still takes the lion’s share of goods going up into the north-west of Syria. It is very, very important indeed. But, as the Secretary-General said, we want as many crossing points as possible, and I hope that Damascus will continue to renew those extra ones and maybe add more. That’s the first thing.

On the issue of sanctions, well, you know, humanitarians, and I don’t think you’ll find in a group of humanitarians – if you find yourself unlucky enough to be spending time in a group of humanitarians – that you’ll find a huge amount of support for sanctions anywhere. Because sanctions – the most targeted of which, and of course there’s huge progress on that – still have an impact, unintended consequences, an impact on the lives of ordinary people. I would say that in Syria, what’s been very important and it came out of the earthquake as you’ll remember, is that the US Government, for example, immediately and very actively, and we worked very closely with them to understand what they were doing to [inaudible] to issue new licenses.

So there has been a huge amount of work done about that. We'd like to see that regime of new licenses maintained because I don’t think we’re out of the hills yet on the earthquake, let alone on the economy. And as is there and elsewhere, you know, addressing the chilling effect of sanctions, particularly on business activity, is I think what’s really important to understand. Washington does understand it. There’s no doubt about it. And I must say, the people in the humanitarian office of USAID [United States Agency for International Development] led by Sarah Charles are remarkable in their attention to it, but it doesn’t mean to say that the job is over yet.

Question: On the cross-border mechanism, it seems there is no breakthrough or agreement in the Security Council until now on the mechanism. If the mechanism expired by Monday, what are your options? How prepared are you?

Martin Griffiths: Well, you know, I watch politicians answering questions and interviews and I think they always start off by saying, you wouldn’t expect me to answer that question, would you? Or I can’t possibly speculate on it. So, I can’t possibly speculate on what might happen between now and Monday. But I think the second part of your question is totally right. What does it mean? Well, one of the difficulties of having relatively short-term six-month renewals, as you know, has been that it cramps, obviously, the operational timing and planning and programming of agencies working in Gaziantep and sending stuff through. They are used to, because they’ve been forced to be used to, the agencies, I mean, to move pre-positioned stocks in ahead of any possible moment like next Monday of non-renewal. So, there will have been pre-positioned stocks going in.

By the way, that was what was in the north-west at the time of the earthquake because that was the last renewal, wasn’t it? It was, you know, a few weeks between the two. Those pre-positioned stocks, not there to help earthquake victims, as it was quickly pointed out by people in the north-west of Syria, but at least there was something there to draw on. And they will have been doing that for these last months. Staff contracts, just to take an example:

How do you decide to maintain staff contracts longer than the likelihood of the possibility of operation? Agencies have become, with the help many donors, very practical about this and have made arrangements to sustain contracts. But if you are looking for a job and you think it may only be for six months, you may not wish to move. So there will be a rupture, an immediate rupture in, obviously, cessation of supplies going across the border. There will be an immediate set of discussions about ongoing operations, support to NGOs working in the north-west of Syria, in a sort of phase-out process, and there will be an immediate discussion about how to use the supplies that are already in there to the best advantage. We can't do this. We cannot, we cannot do this. It’s intolerable for the people of the north-west and those brave souls who helped them to go through these ups and downs every six months. We need more than six months.

Question: Thank you, Mr. Griffiths. Vladimir Kostyrev, TASS News Agency. Two questions. You said that the grain deal package works both ways, has two ends. Does this mean that if the Black Sea grain initiative ends, then the Memorandum of Understanding between the UN and Russia ends, too? And did any new ships enter the Black Sea since the 26th of June? Thank you.

Martin Griffiths: I'm not going to answer the first question because it’s not my business. This is very much a matter for the Secretary-General Rebeca Grynspan. I would just note that, indeed, all parties are referring to this as a single package. And I would just note that you need the active support of governments in Europe and the United States for the MoU [Memorandum of Understanding] to continue to produce results. And I would just note the obvious, which is that enthusiasm for that support is going to wane very quickly. But you know, this is legal stuff, and I don’t want to enter into that kind of speculation.

On the ships, I don't have the exact numbers, I’ll get the exact numbers to you, Vladimir. [OCHA later clarified that no ships have entered since 26 June.] But it's very clear that there has been a complete slowdown, hasn’t it? And it’s not hidden, it’s about, in that JCC [Joint Coordination Centre] in Istanbul, one party saying that we can’t in all conscience start processing ships into this if we don’t know that they’ll get out of it before the 18th of July, and that’s the reason for it. It’s a bit like the Syrian cross-border resolution – we don’t want to go through this every two months, three months. It's hugely damaging to commercial confidence. It’s damaging to the impact, ultimately, on food prices. And it’s damaging to the people in the global South whom we deal with who depend on a certain amount of reliability of supply. And we are now going through the grain harvesting season, as you know, that’s coming up now. And that will no doubt keep prices somewhat down, but when the harvest comes into the silos and if it doesn’t start moving around the world, the price, I’m sure Rebeca [Grynspan] will know best, will spike again. And that has terrible consequences.

Question: I’d like to go back to your discussion of gender-based violence in DRC. I believe you said there were about 125,000 cases that you were aware of, so to speak. Now were the 125,000 cases just in the DRC or did that include Haiti?

Martin Griffiths: No, DRC. It’s an extrapolation of the current rate of cases in the DRC. So it’s DRC only, which is terrible, isn’t it? At the moment, in the first three months of 2023, we estimate more than 31,000 cases of gender-based violence were registered. Registered, I mean, I think that’s a key thing here. This isn’t exactly, you know, Wall Street down there. And if the rape persists during the period of a year, it would reach 125,000 cases.

Question: And just following up on that – generally, victims of sexual violence tend to be women and girls, but I was wondering what percentage now – has there been a growing emphasis also on men and boys? And any targeting of the LGBT community?

Martin Griffiths: I don't know. I haven't heard that. I could find out and get back to you. [OCHA later clarified that 95 per cent of victims and survivors of gender-based violence in the DRC are female.] But I think the overwhelming picture remains bad luck for being women and girls. And this is true – I mean, gender-based violence is the most horrific end of that spectrum – but this is true of the fate of women and girls more generally in humanitarian disasters.

They are the ones that move to keep the children together with the family while the men try and go and find some sources of income. They are the ones who survive in single-headed households. They’re the ones who, whether an inadequate supply of women-led NGOs and UN agencies, they get hit on every single aspect of humanitarian need. It’s easy to be lulled into the general discourse about women and girls, and their rights are so important. When you look at it in a humanitarian context, for me at least, it becomes completely real. It isn’t a grey concept. It’s an awful reality, and gender-based violence is the worst snapshot of it, of course.

Question: Thank you. Good to see you again, Mr. Griffiths. In the DRC, which I must say I’ve been watching for 20 years off and on, it seems that it’s a home for grifters from neighboring countries, from corporations. And the one thing that that Kinshasa capital cannot do is control this huge country that King Leopold set up as a slave market. Do you see any way out of this? Separate countries, separate kind of autonomy? I know we’ve been through that with Biafra and so forth, but it seems that, in the last 30 years, it hasn’t moved. And it will blame peacekeepers and it would like them out, even though it could hardly control Kinshasa. Do you see any silver lining there?

Martin Griffiths: I have very strong personal views about it because I grew up there. I remember my father, who was British, who was a businessman, arguing in the early ‘60s very strongly against the Katanga becoming an independent country. And of course, one of the first UN peacekeeping operations precisely focused on keeping the country together. I grew up in a family and in a discourse which profoundly believed in the unity of the DRC.

Many years later, in the late ‘90s, I was the UN Regional and Humanitarian Coordinator for the Great Lakes. And this was at the time when the leadership of the DRC changed hands from President Mobutu [Sese Seko] to President [Laurent-Désiré] Kabila – that great move across, I met Mr. Kabila in Goma on the beginning of his arc, which changed the face of that country.

So I’m a passionate believer in that country staying together and not being raided by others, and have had, like you have, direct experience of that, the ease with which, whether it’s in terms of minerals, or whether it’s in terms of conflict, the ease of which that eastern part of the country has become vulnerable to these sorts of outside pressures. And so for me personally, but also professionally, the need to support for example the East African efforts to bring an end to that instability in the east is so important. You don’t break up the country – you solve the problem. And everything I hear about the Government in Kinshasa is that they are keen to do so. And you know, in Kenya, you have a leadership, I know [former President Uhuru] Kenyatta went, didn’t he, to the Kivus, after he left office. That’s terrific. I mean, that is really impressive. Let’s hope.

Question: This is Abdelhamid Siyam from the Arabic daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi. I hope you hear me well. Thank you. Sir, do you have any early assessment of the needs of the refugee camps of Jenin, which has been destroyed by an Israeli aggression in the last few days, leaving many thousands of people homeless. Did you do any assessment or are you planning any, if you don’t have any? Can you share with us any information about the humanitarian needs of the refugee camps of Jenin?

Martin Griffiths: Farhan is telling me that you’ve actually had a report from my colleague, [Humanitarian Coordinator] Lynn Hastings exactly on this issue, and I have nothing to add to that. Lynn is on the ground, Lynn is a very experienced and a very brave person. And that I think focuses on the humanitarian, but also of course, as Farhan knows best, the Secretary-General has been very vocal on this issue as well in the last couple of days. I don’t have anything to add to that – apart from sorrow. Thank you very much.