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
This is a very major earthquake but it's really aggravated a thousand times by the topography. An earthquake is bad anywhere, in the Himalayas it becomes much worse,
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.
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 good news is that we have very good pledges, but the bad news for us is that too little is committed to the UN's flash appeal.
We're in a bad year. There have been more international disasters than usual. All the wars are continuing. The Pakistan situation will have an effect elsewhere.
We have reason to fear that 2006 could be as bad as 2005.
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.
The big non-governmental organizations, the ones with which we work all over the world, understood the value of coordination. The same cannot be said about all the newer players on the ground.
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.
That had been one of our fears. I think it has not been the case.
They will now have their sixth, seventh night out in the cold. Perhaps even without a tent. They will also not have water because their spring is gone,
It's no good saving people today just to see them killed tomorrow. They need help to escape the vicious cycle they find themselves in.
It's really been a terrible year in terms of suffering and in terms of challenges. But it ends with a glimmer of hope.
It's by far the biggest humanitarian catastrophe of the Western hemisphere, and yet the plight of these people remains a largely untold story.