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
Over the last few days, the world has finally woken up, but it took graphic images of dying children for this to happen,
Too often, aid resembles a lottery, in which a few win, but most lose, based on considerations other than need.
The good news is that we have very good pledges. The bad news is that we still have too few concrete commitments to the U.N. flash appeal.
The way it is now it can not continue. We need security, which we do not have. We need a government that enables us to work and does not create obstacles to our work. We need a guerrilla (force) that does not specialize in hijacking relief trucks and fighting each other and displacing new people, which has happened in the past few weeks. And we need funding.
We need more resources to save 2 million to 3 million lives and we need much more resources in the next few days.
It is not slow. The first three or four days there weren't even (open) roads here,
It is not right to sit with the money for reconstruction for one year from now if it is a question of whether people will still be alive.
People are dying as we speak because we're not there in all of these villages where there are wounded people.
We estimate that humanitarian agencies have access to about 350,000 vulnerable people in Darfur - only about one third of the estimated total population in need.
We are trying now to move from saving lives in daily food distribution to doing agricultural work: livestock, water and irrigation recovery projects.
Our biggest concern now is that we will have tremendous bottlenecks. Every day there are 60 to 100 trucks coming in from all over Pakistan.
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 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,
Many families are still not in permanent housing and now it's rainy season,