SMALL ARMS:

The meeting on the United Nations Action Plan for eradicating the illicit small arms trade ended this week. UN agencies called for a "comprehensive, coherent, coordinated and cooperative response to the challenge." In her statement, Hannelore Hoppe, Director and Deputy to the Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs said it was important to "retain the UN's lead role in maintaining the issue of small arms on the global political agenda and encouraging civil society involvement in building societal resistance to violence."

Patricia Lewis, Director of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) said that women, children, tribal elders and other local parties should be included in planning and implementation of programs such as weapons trade-ins for development assistance, "since they knew best how weapons collection could work in their neighborhood and which development projects could be best suited to their needs."

UNIFEM: (From UNIFEM's report)

The work that women do in caring for their family and sick family members is unpaid and unacknowledged, and has not been reflected in the system of national accounts. In view of this, UNIFEM commissioned a guidebook on 'Unpaid Care Work', which discusses tools and methodologies for data collection, production and analysis of unpaid care work and how it can be inserted in the system of national accounts. The guidebook was introduced at a workshop held in Pretoria last month during which participants from Botswana, Mozambique and Zimbabwe developed plans and fundraising proposals for research activities on women's unpaid domestic care work in their respective countries. The research findings will be used as an advocacy tool for the gender analysis of budgets and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) to enable policy makers to formulate and implement gender sensitive policies that will counter the feminization of poverty.

LIBERIA:

In a meeting with Secretary-General Kofi Annan this week, President Bush said "I told the Secretary-General that we want to help, that there must be a UN presence, quickly, into Liberia. He and I discussed how fast it would take to blue helmet whatever forces arrived, other than our own, of course. We would not be blue helmeted. We would be there to facilitate and then to - and then to leave." Mr. Annan had proposed a three step process: a "vanguard" force by ECOWAS (at which time President Taylor would step down) and then a follow on force (here the US would participate) and lastly a longer term multinational force of peacekeepers.

IRAQ:

IAEA reported that uranium compounds dispersed at the Tuwaitha complex pose no danger of proliferation. Barrels were looted and used to carry water by the locals when their water supply was cut off by fighting.

The United Nations is sending an electoral team to Baghdad early next month to help the newly constituted Iraqi Governing Council organize elections for next year, the UN envoy to Iraq reported this week.

This week US Ambassador Negroponte was asked by reporters about the possibility of a resolution on other nations sending troops to Iraq. He said it was not needed as 1483 was sufficient to allow for this. (India had said it would not send troops unless they were under the UN umbrella.) Currently the US has 148,000 troops in Iraq. Other nations have about 20,000 troops there (including about 5,000 British).

Also, this week Secretary-General Kofi Annan was asked by reporters about a document claiming that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from Niger. He answered that this had been discussed in the Security Council and that IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei told the Council the document was fraudulent and the Council "dropped the matter."

AFGHANISTAN:

A new technology in de-mining called the Mechanical Explosive Dog Detection System (MEDDS) is being used in Afghanistan. Instead of taking the mine dogs to the minefield, samples from the contaminated area are brought to the dogs who work in a laboratory. Using a vapor suction method, samples are collected from the surface of the ground and sent to a laboratory in Kabul. Sampled areas are marked using GPS to record where the sample is from. The dogs can detect vapor and particles from landmines and unexploded ordinance by sniffing the samples. Teams with dogs go back to manually de-mine the areas which are shown to be contaminated. This method allows de-miners to cover 5 kilometers a day, whereas manual demining covers one square kilometer a day.

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