UN says new fund brings fair play to aid 'lottery'

GENEVA, Oct 13 (Reuters) A new emergency fund has succeeded in injecting some fair play into international aid, saving lives in crises from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Lebanon, the UN's top humanitarian official said.

The United Nations' Central Emergency Response Fund has spent 174 million dollars since March bridging ''gaping holes'' in the relief effort for natural disasters and neglected emergencies, said Jan Egeland, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator.

The UN spends some 5 billion dollars per year on aid raised through its regular humanitarian appeals, but not all appeals are equally well financed, leading to so-called ''forgotten'' emergencies which the new fund set out to tackle.

''This year (we were able to) inject some equity for the first time in a system where some emergencies are hopelessly forgotten and neglected whereas others are very well covered by the glaring light of the international media,'' Egeland told a news conference yesterday.

''There is a lack of coherence ... it is too much of a lottery if money reaches this group or that group,'' he said.

Egeland expected the fund this year to spend most of the 273 million dollars pledged so far, and hoped it would have the full target of 500 million dollars in its coffers by 2008.

He also said the fund stood ready to buy food for people in North Korea if aid money dries up for the country, which faces possible sanctions after its reported nuclear test this week.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the fund has spent 38 million dollars and is helping control malaria and cholera, according to Egeland, who was recently in the former Zaire.

''I could see that for the first time we are now covering areas of the DRC that we could never cover before,'' he said.

''It is a shame really that we couldn't do it before, because there is no other country on earth where so many people are dying from neglect and preventable disease as in the Democratic Republic of Congo,'' he said.

The fund stepped in last month to provide 4.5 million dollars for helicopters to ferry food in Darfur, large parts of which were cut off from aid convoys because of carjackings and looting, he said.

In Lebanon, which Israel bombed and invaded last July after Hezbollah militants captured two Israeli soldiers, it gave 5 million dollars for trucks, telecommunications equipment and other aid.

''Lebanon was an exploding emergency -- a million people were displaced in two weeks -- and the fund was very important to jump-start operations...,'' he said.

REUTERS DH PM439