Date: 2025-07-02 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00022097
IMPRESSIVE LEADERS
WINSTON PRATTLEY
Sudan Ousts U.N. Relief Official ... October 30, 1986
WINSTON PRATTLEY
Sudan Ousts U.N. Relief Official ... October 30, 1986
Original article: https://apnews.com/article/e7f0a77cb7efef17b9b686cd33b3a6da
Burgess COMMENTARY
I used to travel to Sudan quite frequently in the early 1980s when I was working on UN assignments in Juba in the Equatorial Region of Sudan (now the independent country of South Sudan). Several times. as I was passing through Khartoum, I briefed Winston Prattley who was at the time the UNDP/UN Resident Representative in Khartoum on the work I was doing in Juba.
Winston Prattley had his assignment in the UN system because he was one of the most experienced in handling complex situations.
The situation described in the article below was already developing when I was working in Juba. There was a time when access to Juba by land was completely cut off because of rebel activity on the ground along the Kenya border, the Uganda border and in the are of Sudan between Khartoum and Juba in the Equatorial Region. There was till access by air using Sudan Air ... but even air travel was unsafe ... a small aircraft operated by UNICEF was shot down by unknown belligerants at one point in this period.
While the UN headquarters in New York wanted all the staff to evacuate, most of the staff (inlcuding myself) chose to stay to do the work we were meant to be doing. In my case, I considered it was quite safe to do the work I was doing and in the place where I was doing it. Some others like the UNVs were faced with an impossible financial decision that was completely unfair but written into the UN policy manuals. Both the local UN Res Rep (whose name escapes me) and the local UNHCR official (Margaret O'Keafe) as well as myself were outspoken on this subject at the time ... so much so that the top personnel manager in the UN contacted us to intercede. Neither of us were willing to concede anything, because it was so obviously unjust and inappropriate.
Nargaret O'Keeffe went on to bigger jobs in UNHCR ...
[05] UNHCR SAYS SOLUTION MUST BE FOUND FOR REFUGEES IN YUGOSLAVIA B e l g r a d e, Oct. 11 (Tanjug) - The UNHCR position is that a solution must be found for refugees in Yugoslavia because their repatriation is not going according to plan, the UNHCR Executive Committee has stated in a meeting in Geneva.
Head of the UNHCR Mission to Yugoslavia Margaret O'Keeffe conveyed the Committee's position on the issue to Serbian Refugee Commissioner Bratislava Morina in a meeting in Belgrade on Friday.
Original article: http://www.hri.org/news/balkans/yds/1996/96-10-14.yds.html A statement released by the Serbian Refugee Commissioner's office quoted O'Keeffe as saying the Committee had endorsed the figure of 650,000 refugees and displaced persons registered in Yugoslavia.
O'Keeffe said a delegation of the World Bank would visit Yugoslavia by the end of the year, and said UNHCR and other U.N. agencies would call for funds for the integration of refugees who could not return home.
Some years later I was recruited by the UN to be part of a development planning mission for Afghanistan that was headed up by Winston Prattley who had recently retired from permanent assignments within the UN system. The planning team was based in Islamabad in Pakistan because of the poor security situation on the ground in Afghanistan. We made short visits into Afghanistan to validate our work, but most of the time was spent compiling information at our office in Islamadad. The purpose of the mission was to help plan a post-war reconstruction of the Afghan economy after many years of Soviet occupation which had recently ended as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union. My job was to compile as much socio-economic and economic data as possible about the current state of Afghanistan and how the internatonal community should engage to help support reconstruction.
Prior to doing this work, my knowledge of Afghanistan was quite superficial, but it became very clear very quickly that there were important constraints on socio-economic progress that needed to be addressed. I am still haunted by the issues that needed to be addressed including such things as (1) the deficit in education especially of girls and women, (2) the deep divisions within the country based on tribal ethnicity and region, and (3) the massive role of 'poppy' in the rural economy of the country making food agriculture completely unviable.
At the completion of the first stage of this planning work, the project was abruptly terminated. It turned out that this was due to the withdrawal of funding by major donors to the UN and especially the United States. I was told that the US had chosen to wirhtdraw its support for the work because President Bush was looking to have a 'peace dividend' for the US economy as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union. I saw this as a bad decision at the time, but it got a lot worse during the following three decades with the US and Western allies committing and in the end accomplishing rather little.
Though it its totallity the Western intervention in Afghanistan was something of a failure, I do not want to conclude that nothing has been accomplished in Afghanistan. In fact many of the oridnary people in Afghanistan and especially the women and girls made very significant socio-economic progress as a result of the intervention of Western NGOs and humanitarian aid while at the Government level and military assitance and inter-governmental development assistance the results were costly, fleeting and seriously corrupt ... an advanced lesson in how not to do development.
Peter Burgess
Sudan Ousts U.N. Relief Official
October 30, 1986 (Accessed April 2022)
KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) _ The government has declared a special representative of the U.N. secretary- general persona non grata because of his contacts with rebels to safeguard the delivery of emergency supplies to southern Sudan, a news report said Thursday.
The official Sudan News Agency identified the man as Winston Prattley, the Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar’s special representative for relief operations in Sudan.
″The U.N. official exceeded all diplomatic rules by insisting on contacting the rebel group in southern Sudan about getting relief food there despite the fact that the Sudanese government has secured the three airports in the south and opened them to civil aviation,″ it quoted a government source as saying.
U.N. officials in Khartoum could not immediately be contacted. A U.N. spokesman in New York declined comment, but said Prattley was in New York.
Declaring Prattley officially unwelcome means he can not return to Sudan.
Prattley, who is a citizen of New Zealand, helped organize Operation Rainbow, which was planned to airlift almost $1 million of food and medicine to an estimated 2 million or more Sudanese facing starvation, mainly because of fighting in the south.
Prattley told a news conference Monday in New York that the airlift was suspended last Friday after a plane carrying food to Juba for another relief operation was hit by groundfire.
Egypt’s Middle East News Agency quoted an unidentified Sudanese official as saying Wednesday the government rejected Prattley’s statement and that southern Sudan was safe for the airlift.
MENA said the official accused the organizers of Operation Rainbow of having ″political aims,″ but he did not elaborate.
It said Sudan’s ambassador to the United Nations would give Secretary- General Javier Perez de Cuellar the government’s reasons for expelling Prattley.
Prattley, an engineer, was appointed in June 1985 as Perez de Cuellar’s special representative for U.N. emergency operations in the Sudan.
He previously was regional representative for the U.N. Development Program in Bangkok, Thailand. He also was coordinator of U.N. Border Relief Operations for Cambodian refugees.
Prattley has been with the U.N. program since 1963, and served in Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Uganda, Zambia and Iran. When he was appointed to the Sudan post, a U.N. news released described him as ″one of the most senior field officials of the United Nations.″
The 11-nation Operation Rainbow began three weeks behind schedule because of political and administrative problems.
Prime Minister Sadek el-Mahdy said relief agencies could negotiate a safe- conduct agreement with the rebels, and a U.N. official reached accord in mid- September with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. But the government rejected the pact, which called for alternating flights between a rebel-held town and a government-held town.
Operation Rainbow then announced it would proceed without safe conduct from the rebels, who last August shot down an airliner, killing all 60 people on board. But probelms with insurance for the Indonesian-chartered plane delayed the first flight until Oct. 12.
U.N. officials later told reporters privately that the government was unhappy with the publicized contacts with the rebels, who took up arms in 1983 to demand more autonomy and administrative and economic reforms. You May Like
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