September 26, 2003	Friday	Rajab 28, 1424

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 25: With the bloodshed mounting in Iraq, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on Thursday ordered some UN employees to leave the country temporarily.

The announcement comes as a blow while the United States and anti-war opponents like France debate how great a role the United Nations should have in helping to rebuild the country.

Spokesman Fred Eckhard said the withdrawal had begun and would leave the world body with just a fraction of the roughly 650 international staff it had in Iraq before last month’s attack on its Baghdad compound.

“This is not an evacuation, just a further downsizing, and the security situation in the country remains under constant review,” he said. “This is the Secretary General’s decision. It is for him and him alone to make.”

Mr Annan drastically slashed staff in Iraq after the Aug 19 suicide bombing at the UN’s Baghdad offices that killed 24 people, including top UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.

A second bombing at the Baghdad office on Monday killed an Iraqi security guard.

“Today, there remain 42 in Baghdad and 44 in the north of the country, and those numbers can be expected to shrink over the next few days,” Mr Eckhard said.

But the spokesman underlined that thousands of Iraqis were still at work in Iraq and that the United Nations would keep up its operations to the greatest extent possible.

“We have 4,233 local staff at work so with some international supervision, it’s assumed they can continue carrying the essential humanitarian activities we have going on now,” he said.

He said the international staff pulled out would be kept in Jordan “for a possible return to Baghdad should conditions there permit”.

After Monday’s bombing, the United Nations personnel union issued an appeal for a withdrawal from the country and a suspension of operations.

“The assessment of the security coordinator was that we would be better to downsize and temporarily redeploy many of our international staff in the country, which we are in the process of doing,” Mr Eckhard said.

He said that the United Nations was working with the US occupation to increase security around the compound, and that there was “no 100 per cent guarantee that anyone can be safe anywhere in the world”.

Mr Annan had warned on Monday that the United Nations needed a “secure environment to be able to operate” and that its work would be “handicapped” if the situation continued to deteriorate.

He said the United Nations was ready to play a role in Iraq, but that all its work was “subject to security considerations”. —AFP