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 world's response to the tsunami was the best ever. Governments, the private sector, and individuals around the world opened their hearts and their wallets. Private donations for the tsunami eclipsed anything seen before.
The world's response to the tsunami was the best ever.
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.
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 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 have not heard of any tsunami hitting anywhere.
The coast is low, it takes the full blast of the tsunami which was at its highest at that point, and now the villages are gone,
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.