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
The United Nations is grateful for the additional pledges so far of 525 million dollars to the assistance efforts in northern Pakistan.
I would salute the very effective American efforts to warn the populations of the imminent danger and the very successful evacuation.
I have been working, as emergency relief coordinator, on an international scale, very hard to build a wider alliance of partners in assistance efforts.
We need better coordination on the international side, just as they need better and more effective efforts on the Somali side. We have too many reconstruction and development assistance plans.
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 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,
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 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.
The insecurity in Sri Lanka has claimed over 100 lives in recent weeks with increasing civilian casualties.