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.
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.
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,
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,
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,
The United Nations is grateful for the additional pledges so far of 525 million dollars to the assistance efforts in northern Pakistan.
The world wakes up when we see images on the TV and when we see children dying,
The whole world has been really shaken and moved by the images of widespread damage and suffering.
The way it is now it can not continue. We need security, which we do not have. We need a government that enables us to work and does not create obstacles to our work. We need a guerrilla (force) that does not specialize in hijacking relief trucks and fighting each other and displacing new people, which has happened in the past few weeks. And we need funding.