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 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.
We have no security for our work. We are witnesses to massive attacks against the civilian population.
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.
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.
Although we have do not have adequate access to all parts of Darfur we do fortunately have humanitarian personnel, including staff from my own office, in each of the three provincial capitals of Darfur.
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.