Jan Egeland Quotes (125 Quotes)

All humanitarian organizations are acutely aware that our window of opportunity for action is closing with the onset of the severe winter.

I would salute the very effective American efforts to warn the populations of the imminent danger and the very successful evacuation.

We are humanitarian workers, we are apolitical, impartial. We hope to be successful in our dialogue (with Pyongyang) so we can have a phased end to the program.

My heart goes out to the children of North Korea.

I am again appealing for the eviction campaign to stop, there is not enough shelter ready to house those who have been evicted.

This appeal, ... is truly forward-looking in that it attempts to avert hunger and at the same time promote sustainable recovery of livelihoods. Investing in prevention will prove much more cost effective than providing emergency assistance year after year.

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,

Finally, I also come in recognition of the great work that has been undertaken by the NGOs and UN agencies that have been active for many years here, especially through the local staff and international staff here in Somaliland and in Somalia at large.

This year has really been the year of natural disasters, with nature at its worst and humanity at its best.

The important thing is that we give and that we as citizens also demand that our countries give generously to those who have been so hard hit.

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.

More is currently at stake in terms of lives saved or lost in Africa than on any other continent. As humanitarian workers, we cannot accept that so many lives are lost every year on this continent to preventable diseases, neglect and senseless brutality.

I think it's a matter of weeks or months that we will have a collapse in many of our operations. As I told the Security Council today, I don't think the world has understood how bad it has become of late.

Secondly, the Government of Sudan should commit to the disarmament and control of the Janjaweed militia and ensure that the targeting of civilians ceases immediately.

It is unconscionable that the LRA is carrying out these vicious attacks on unarmed humanitarian worker,

One of the possibilities we could have is international helicopters operating across the border.

But certainly the Pakistani army is continuing to look for people.

I think we have to make some progress and I think we will before he visits.

We have in Somalia, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, been individually targeted by extremist groups, which nearly made us leave Somalia completely.

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,

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.

We're doing too little combined as an international community because it's too vast. We have 140,000 tents now in the area. Normally, that is more than enough for even large-scale emergencies. This is probably only one-fourth of what is needed.

I think now Somalia is turning a corner and we can, with the new political development, build on momentum - really build a peaceful future.

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.

It will take billions of dollars to rebuild ... To reconstruct this will take five to 10 years,

I think in many ways we can some up now the one year anniversary of this terrible natural disaster that the emergency relief went better than we feared but the reconstruction and rebuilding is taking more time than we hoped. There was no second wave of death and disease as was feared but too many people have their first anniversary in the same tent they were given in the first months.

I had, in my capacity as a state secretary in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the 1990s, many contacts with the Somaliland authorities.

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.

In a world full of competing emergencies and disasters, it really helps if there is an international locomotive that can help us bring attention - help us bring resources.

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.

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.

Nowhere else on earth is so much at stake as in Africa. It is here where most lives are at stake.

We estimate that humanitarian agencies have access to about 350,000 vulnerable people in Darfur - only about one third of the estimated total population in need.

In terms of the human lives lost, this is the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today. It is beyond belief that the world is not paying more attention.

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,

I have been working, as emergency relief coordinator, on an international scale, very hard to build a wider alliance of partners in assistance efforts.

I've already said I thought it would be well above 150,000 total. How many tens of thousands more, we don't know.

We needed the money yesterday.

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.

North American pets get more investment per month than we have money for all our humanitarian operations in the world.

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.

It is only the Somalis themselves - and I don't hide that fact when I meet the political leaders here - they themselves have to stop their old practices of fighting each other every time they have a problem. They have to learn how to do peaceful conflict resolution.

It could end tomorrow. It's as serious as that.

We, as internationals, deal with mass natural disasters around the globe a number of times a year, so we have well-tested systems which have now been appreciated by many of these U.S. agencies.

These are atrocities of incalculable proportions. The whole world...must increase pressure on the government of Sudan to stop fighting and improve access for humanitarian groups.

three times the strength they have today.

Tens of thousands of people will not get any assistance today, because it is too dangerous.

Conditions here are totally unacceptable. It has to change because people have to live a better life and have a better future.

What is particularly difficult in Kashmir is that people (will) freeze to death if they don't get assistance in weeks, ... It's even more urgent than it was in these other hurricanes or tsunamis.

Malawi is losing the world's attention.