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 want to stay as long as we can. As we speak we have had to suspend action in many areas. Tens of thousands of people will not get any assistance because it's too dangerous and it could grow exponentially.
It's a cruel reality. But after a week, very few people survive.
No amount of humanitarian assistance can protect people from being attacked.
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 receive reports now on a daily basis from our own people on the ground in Darfur on widespread atrocities and grave violations of human rights against the civilian population.
Increasingly gang violence and organized crime, together with climate change-driven natural disasters, are displacing more people as wars are fewer on the continent and political violence has decreased considerably, the NRC has decided to treat this as a humanitarian crisis.
We have health kits and school-in-a-box kits that are tailored for immediate use for people that are displace by emergencies, and when such requests come we will answer immediately.
We have seen 2004 and 2005 as the years of disaster,
We have no security for our work. We are witnesses to massive attacks against the civilian population.
We have never had this kind of logistical nightmare, ever.
With the resources made available today and the commitments that will come in the coming days, we will redouble our collective efforts.
We are also assisting the refugees who have fled across the border to Chad. As many of them have been subject to attacks by militia crossing from Sudan, UNHCR is mounting a major logistical operation to establish camps and transfer refugees away from the border zone.
We have reason to fear that 2006 could be as bad as 2005.
The problem with tsunamis is that it takes hours -- or minutes -- for this wall of water to come, and there's just very, very little time.