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 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 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.
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.
It is, in my view, not right to sit with reconstruction money for one year from now if we're not sure whether those people will be alive one year from now.
I think it's a matter of weeks or months that we will have a collapse in many of our operations. As I told the Security Council today, I don't think the world has understood how bad it has become of late.
It could end tomorrow. It's as serious as that.
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,
The people of Zimbabwe are suffering under several big problems. I am hopeful that we will have a more positive partnership in 2006 than we have had in the past.
Past agricultural policies have not been good. Governments understand they must be providing long-term solutions.
Many families are still not in permanent housing and now it's rainy season,
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,
We are trying now to move from saving lives in daily food distribution to doing agricultural work: livestock, water and irrigation recovery projects.