UNITED NATIONS The Kosovo refugee crisis should not overshadow the fate of 22 million people displaced by wars and civil strife in other parts of world, the head of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said Thursday. Certainly, the Kosovo crisis "merits an immediate and generous response," said UNICEF head Carol Bellamy in a written statement. However, "relatively little attention has been paid to similar conflicts in Angola, Sierra Leone, Eritrea and Ethiopia and many other places where thousands of persons are displaced from their homes, tortured and killed every day," Bellamy said.

Since early 1999, the rekindled civil war in Angola has resulted in 780,000 displaced people, leading to a total of 1.5 million people uprooted by the conflict. Some 550,000 people have been displaced by the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, while some 440,000 others fled a bloody conflict in Sierra Leone, taking refuge in Guinea and Liberia. In total, some seven million people were displaced in all of Africa, she said.

Meanwhile, there are some 2.6 million Afghans still in Pakistan or in Iran after years of conflict in Afghanistan, Bellamy said. In most cases, the people displaced are women and children, Bellamy noted. "There are many situations in the world that rival Kosovo's in the sheer brutality shown toward children and women and in the degree to which populations have been displaced," she said.

She warned against letting news headlines dictate the allocation of humanitarian aid to those crises that seem to attract the most media coverage. UNICEF's appeal for funds for the Kosovo victims has almost been fulfilled, but the organization has only 15 percent of the $180 million needed for urgent assistance in 22 other countries. Bellamy noted, for example, that victims in Tadjikistan and Guinea-Bissau have received no UNICEF funding.

"Commensurate attention should be given to the situation of children and women at risk -- whereever they may be," Bellamy said. (AFP)