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
Tens of thousands of people will not get any assistance today, because it is too dangerous.
Had there been better prevention, better early warning, better schools, earthquake-safe buildings - tens of thousands of lives would have been saved both in the Indian Ocean tsunami and in the South Asian earthquake,
Tens of thousands of people's lives are at stake and they could die if we don't get to them in time.
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.
It's like nature strikes back on people who have treated nature badly and we see hundreds of thousands dead after these last two years and hundreds of millions of livelihoods lost.
I've already said I thought it would be well above 150,000 total. How many tens of thousands more, we don't know.
Are we going to have tens of thousands of people staying in the rubble and in the snow until it's too late? Maybe. It's a logistical nightmare,
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.