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
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.
I would salute the very effective American efforts to warn the populations of the imminent danger and the very successful evacuation.
This appeal, ... is truly forward-looking in that it attempts to avert hunger and at the same time promote sustainable recovery of livelihoods. Investing in prevention will prove much more cost effective than providing emergency assistance year after year.
I don't know how you evacuate hundreds of thousands of people from the Himalayas -- the most effective military alliance in the world should be able to know that.
I have received assurances from the government that this will never be repeated and that the government has taken a number of actions to prevent such an event in future. This is good new for us, because we don't want to leave Cote d'Ivoire - we want to stay and continue our effective actions for all the Ivorian people.
I think it would be a massive undertaking to actually have a full-fledged tsunami warning system that would really be effective in many of these places,
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.