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
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 not enough. We have never had this kind of logistical nightmare ever. We thought the tsunami was the worst we could get. This is worse.
So it's a nightmare trying to reach community after community which are homeless, roofless, without food, without water. It is this race against time I fear we are now losing for many of these outlying villages.
It's like a lottery, where there are 50 victimized groups always trying to get the winning ticket, and they play every night and they lose every night.
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.
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.
It will take billions of dollars to rebuild ... To reconstruct this will take five to 10 years,
The world is really coming together here in a way we probably have never seen before.