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
I've already said I thought it would be well above 150,000 total. How many tens of thousands more, we don't know.
Tens of thousands of people will not get any assistance today, because it is too dangerous.
Tens of thousands of people's lives are at stake and they could die if we don't get to them in time.
We must be acutely aware that all that has been built up by the thousands of relief workers and hundreds of millions of dollars in donor contributions could be destroyed, and we could be on the brink of losing this huge humanitarian operation.
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.
We want to stay as long as we can. As we speak we have had to suspend action in many areas. Tens of thousands of people will not get any assistance because it's too dangerous and it could grow exponentially.
This would mean the saving of hundreds of thousands and millions of livelihoods.
We are humanitarians, we don't know how to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people in the Himalayas. But the most efficient military alliance in the world should be able to.
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,
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,
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.
I've never seen such devastation before. We are in the sixth day of operation, and every day the scale of devastation is getting wider.
The secretary general said it may take as much as five to ten years. We hope it will take much less time.
The United Nations stands ready to help with any kind of disaster expertise that might be required ... in full recognition that the United States is the country in the world that possesses the greatest civilian and military search and rescue and recovery assets themselves,