During the meeting, several staff members who were stationed in Iraq until recently gave detailed reports on the activities carried out by UNESCO in Iraq in the fields of education, culture and communication.

The speakers first reported on the progress of ongoing activities under the Oil for Food programme, which will close next November, and detailed the measures taken to respond in a timely manner to the additional request made by the local authorities to ensure the reactivation of the Iraqi education system. It will be recalled that in order to carry through such additional tasks aimed at equipping the different Iraqi educational institutions, the Organization was allocated under the Oil for Programme an additional amount of approximately 60 million USD last June.

The project to revise and print nearly 5 million science and mathematics textbooks is still under way, despite the constraints of redeploying international staff to Amman, Jordan, and should be completed by the beginning of the school year. The different activities undertaken on the ground in the field of education will be continued thanks to the presence of numerous Iraqi national staff from the Oil for Food programme. The Director-General recalled his decision to request the Executive Board’s authorization to open a UNESCO Office in Baghdad as soon as the situation allows international staff to be sent again to Iraq.

In order to meet sectoral reconstruction needs in Iraq, an inter agency evaluation process, led by the United Nations Development Group (UNDG), is under way. Its results will be presented to a donors’ conference on 23-24 October next in Madrid, Spain. The World Bank, in charge of coordinating the report for the education sector, has entrusted to UNESCO the evaluation of needs in secondary, technical, vocational and higher education. With a view to elaborating a coordinated strategy of assistance to the media, UNESCO, at the request of UNDG, has also undertaken an evaluation of Iraq’s needs for the development of media and freedom of the press.

For Koïchiro Matsuura, culture should be taken into account in the elaboration of emergency humanitarian assistance policies because it is an essential factor in the reconstruction of a country. He said that his analysis backed up by the support to UNESCO’s activities in this field, both by the Iraqi population and by those in charge of cultural institutions in the country. Accordingly, and following the two UNESCO missions conducted on the ground last May and June, an evaluation report on the needs of Iraqi cultural institutions will supplement the document prepared by UNESCO.

The Director-General expressed his wish to hold talks soon with the Minister of Education and the recently appointed Minister of Culture.

Stressing the quality of the work accomplished by the Organization since the beginning of the Iraqi crisis within its different fields of competence, he saluted the courage and determination shown by all the staff working in the field.