TEXT OF DAILY PRESS BRIEFING BY THE OFFICE OF THE SPOKESMAN FOR THE SECRETARY-GENERAL OF THE UN

Federal News Service
September 7, 2006 Thursday

United Nations, New York City, New York, September 06, 2006

STEPHANE DUJARRIC: Good afternoon.

Ibrahim Gambari, the Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs,
as well as David Hamburg, the Chair of the Advisory Group on
Genocide Prevention, will be joining us today to brief on the
Secretary-General’s report on conflict prevention.

[parts omitted]

Q: There’s been an item that the General Assembly was supposed to
vote on yesterday, and today, and now it’s going to be tomorrow,
about Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan and Armenia. So, part of the
dispute is this request that the Secretary-General do a report on
the area. Is the Secretariat involved in these discussions at all?

MR. DUJARRIC: It’s before the General Assembly. Once they vote and
instruct the Secretary-General, then we’ll follow that resolution.

But we’re not involved in those discussions.

Q: Is it possible to describe the United Nations activities in
Nagorno-Karabakh? Which agencies are providing services?

MR. DUJARRIC: We can look on the humanitarian side.

(The Spokesman later added that the Office for the Coordination
of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) did not have a presence in Nagorno-
Karabakh. Nevertheless, it had recently worked with the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP) to support efforts by the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to control the forest
fire situation there.)