Jan Egeland
Jan Egeland
Jan Egelandis a Norwegian politician, formerly of the Labour party. He has been the Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council since August 2013. He was previously the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch and the Director of Human Rights Watch Europe. Egeland formerly served as director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and Under-Secretary-General of the UN. Egeland also holds a post as Professor II at the University of Stavanger...
NationalityNorwegian
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth12 September 1957
CountryNorway
We're still racing against the clock and we need to get more helicopters, more water, more tents and more money.
probably be many billions of dollars. However, we cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies and the nameless fishermen and fishing villages that have just been wiped out.
Then we could have not only a tsunami-style casualty rate as we have seen late last year, but we could see one hundred times that in a worst case.
These are people who have a strong attachment to their ancestral homes,
This has never ever happened before, that two weeks after a disaster that we have $717 million that we can spend on the immediate emergency effort.
I think with all its local and regional flaws, it was the most effective, efficient and response-oriented relief effort ever. We had never faced a challenge like this in our history, with a dozen countries on two continents hit at the same time.
The insecurity in Sri Lanka has claimed over 100 lives in recent weeks with increasing civilian casualties.
I had, in my capacity as a state secretary in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the 1990s, many contacts with the Somaliland authorities.
The backdrop is a dramatic one in Zimbabwe, one of the most dramatic in the world. Life expectancy has plummeted from around 63 years in the late 1980s and early 1990s to 33.9 years in 2004. This is a meltdown. This is a nearly halving of life expectancy.
I did say this was one of the world's neglected emergencies. The victims of the terror are still neglected to a high degree and the situation unabated. We need to do more.
Our assistance in Somalia has been remarkably effective and successful, and we have helped with very small resources - a large group of people and we can now do even more.
The coast is low, it takes the full blast of the tsunami which was at its highest at that point, and now the villages are gone,
They are in a desperate situation. We need more helicopters to reach them. We need more helicopters soon. Those who have given helicopters, thank you. Others, give us more.
It is, in my view, not right to sit with reconstruction money for one year from now if we're not sure whether those people will be alive one year from now.