UN Chief to Visit Central Sulawesi Disaster Area After Attending IMF-WB, Asean Meetings in Bali
Nusa Dua. United Nations Secretary General António Guterres is scheduled to visit areas devastated by last month's deadly earthquake and tsunami in Central Sulawesi later this week.
Guterres left New York for Bali on Monday to attend the Asean Leaders' Conference and the 2018 Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group, which are both taking place in Nusa Dua this week.
"The secretary general is traveling to Bali in Indonesia to attend the leaders' gathering of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations [Asean] and the Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group," Guterres's spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said in an announcement posted on the official UN website on Monday.
The Asean Leaders' Conference will take place on Thursday.
Guterres will meet with President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo and other high-level officials attending the IMF-World Bank meetings.
According to Dujarric, the secretary general will participate in discussions of several topics, including sustainable development, climate change and famine.
About 34,000 participants, including central bank governors and finance ministers from 189 countries, will attend the annual meetings, according to the Indonesia Communications Center in Bali.
"On Friday, Oct. 12, together with the vice president of Indonesia, Jusuf Kalla, the secretary general will visit Palu on Sulawesi Island, which as you know, was struck by an earthquake and a tsunami at the end of last month," Dujarric said.
The late Kofi Annan, in his capacity as UN secretary general at the time, visited Aceh in January 2005 to assess the damage caused by a massive tsunami that devastated Indonesia's westernmost province and several other countries in the region on Dec. 26, 2004.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the death toll from the twin disasters that struck Palu and Donggala in Central Sulawesi on Sept. 28 stood at 2,037, the authorities said.
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