Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-9)
9 FEBRUARY 2005
MR JAN
EGELAND AND
MR OLIVER
ULICH
Chairman: We are dealing with the humanitarian
response to the tsunami and I will ask John if he might lead on
questions.
Q1 Mr Battle: Quite often—and
I think sometimes very unfairly—the UN's agencies are accused
of not responding fast enough, appropriately enough and the rest
of it. If I could make an introductory comment: as the tragedy
in South-East Asia was unfolding and of course the media were
there and there was an immediate appeal, I think sometimes we
get it right. I thought the fact that we did not have television
appeals for clothing and toys, as happened in Africa in the seventies,
was helpful: Will you send money? I can recall that in the early
eighties, when there was a hurricane crisis in the Caribbean,
frozen chickens were sent from the European Union to the Dominican
Republic, not realising of course there were no fridges or electricity:
a totally inappropriate response. I would like to ask you, in
the light of what has happened and looking back, how do you get
that balance right between the need to respond quickly and yet
make sure that the response is appropriate and addresses the real
needs on the ground? How did that work in the case of the tsunami
tragedy recently?
Mr Egeland: I think,
indeed, as you are strongly hinting, we have a better humanitarian
system now: better methods, better organisations, better tools
than we have ever had before. It is unpredictable the muscle we
are able to put in. As we just discussed, it was inadequate in
Darfur. It was fully adequate actually for the emergency phase
in the tsunami case: it was like pushing a button. I was myself
leading the effort from the first day: it was like pushing the
button and out come billions of dollars and thousands of aid workers.
I vividly remember in the Darfur case that we were asking the
world for six helicopters. From April to June of last year, the
world did not give us a single helicopter, and in the end we had
to scrape together enough money to charter them at market price
in Sudan. In the tsunami case, we asked for helicopters on the
second day of the emergency, and we got, within days, five helicopter
carriers, ships with hundreds of helicopters available for Sri
Lanka and Indonesia, and we avoided the second wave of death (which
is preventable disease, epidemics, starvation, etc.) because of
a very robust and effective response.
Q2 Mr Battle: Just to
contrast, I think you put a note out on the website asking for
volunteers/aid workers to go—as you do in an emergency crisis,
is that right?—and is it true that you get them for a crisis
such as tsunami, but you could not get any to go to Sudan?
Mr Egeland: We
do not in the UN normally advertise for aid workers, but our non-governmental
partners do. It was not even that necessary: it was very easy
to get all the agencies to deploy immediately. Many people knew,
of course, that they were going to an emergency with all the resources
immediately available, where their heroic work would be followed
minute by minute by television, and where they did not have to
stay for a very long time. We asked in Darfur to go to a place
in the desert for a long time, in a very inhospitable climate,
where you are exposing yourself to a lot of danger.
Q3 Mr Battle: One of the
questions I was asked regularly during, as it were, the commentary
on the crisis—you know: "Would the Government match
the people's money?" and the rest of it—was: "Will
it be new money?" And at the back of my mind was the question,
"Or will it come out of resources that really should be going
to the Millennium Development Goals now?" because we are
so far behind on them and we need to increase the effort. What
can the UN do to build developing countries' capacities themselves
to cope with disasters? I think India, for example, responded
and said they could cope and did not need the resources. But really
it is a question of how spending on disaster prevention can be
tailored with, fitted with efforts also to meet the Millennium
Development Goals? I just wonder, if there is another great natural
disaster, another earthquake, would that not mop up even more
money and put us even further back when it comes to the Millennium
Development Goals? How do you see that tension working out?
Mr Egeland: Number
one, it is very important that you in Parliament help us to make
sure that British and European Union monies, as far as possible,
are fully additional to other monies, because we could end up
with 2005 starting unprecedentedly generously and ending unprecedentedly
stingily, with other and even worse situations; for example the
Congo, where, as I say, already people are dying at unacceptable
levels. Secondly, no, I think the tsunami response has been exemplary
in many ways also by it focusing on disaster prevention, which
is very much related to meeting the Millennium Development Goals.
Early warning has really come on the international agenda. Local
capacity building is on the agenda. In general our television
screens tend to overestimate the international response and not
the local response. People were saved by local Red Cross societies,
by local civil defence, by the local priest or mullah, and not
by search and rescue teams flying in from Europe or anywhere.
We are now embarking on a 10-year action plan for disaster prevention
that came out of the World Conference in Kobe, Japan, which I
chaired on behalf of the UN just after the tsunami, by chance
it was after the tsunami, and we got a lot of attention there
to the importance of disaster prevention. The tsunami should never
have taken as many lives as it did. Had there been an early warning
system, parents would not have sent their children down to the
beach in Sri Lanka, Thailand and elsewhere after the tsunami was
heading towards beaches—and there was enough time to have
early warning. If there had been more local capacity in Aceh,
there would also have been more people saved.
Q4 Mr Khabra: Could I
draw your attention to your proposal that 10% of the $4 billion
to $5 billion spent on disaster relief should be spent on disaster
prevention and mitigation. What savings, in your view, might an
international community make from increased spending on disaster
prevention? What response did you actually get to your proposal?
How would such funds be spent? There are three different important
issues.
Mr Egeland: Indeed.
The savings are documented: for every pound you will be spending
for disaster prevention, you get seven- to 10-fold back in savings
in disaster intervention, disaster emergency relief. The reaction
to my proposal has been a very positive one. Actually a number
of donors say they already give one-tenth of their humanitarian
monies to disaster prevention. I would like to see that it is
actually the case for many and that also their development money
is spent according to these principles. We should try to monitor
that now, as we implement the disaster prevention strategy coming
out of Kobe, and especially try to get the rich world, which is
getting bigger and bigger and richer and richer—and it is
not only the north-western corner, it is also many other countries:
Gulf countries, Asian countries, Eastern European and others—now
to participate in building capacity in the most disaster-exposed
communities. In Cuba, hurricanes hardly take lives any more because
they have a great disaster prevention system: they evacuate, they
put people into shelters, they educate, they have systems. In
Haiti, disasters routinely take thousands of lives because there
is no disaster prevention or preparedness scheme.
Q5 Mr Khabra: I wonder
if you could be a little bit more specific with regard to the
nature of spending on prevention. What sort of expenditure you
would like to do on what. Is it something like the early warning
system or whatever?
Mr Egeland: No,
it is a combination.
Q6 Mr Khabra: What would
you include actually?
Mr Egeland: An
early warning system, public education systems, shelters, better
housing. One very important idea we have launched is that all
schools and all hospitals should be disaster-safe areas within
the next 10 years. All new schools could be that and all old schools
should be retro-fitted, so that instead of being death traps,
as they often are now—rooms collapse and so on in earthquakes—they
should be safe areas, so that people can go and use them as shelters
and those who are in the schools and the hospitals are not killed.
Building local governmental capacity, local non-governmental capacity
is also very much part of the disaster prevention strategies.
Chairman: We promised
to get you away by 10 to four but we could not miss the opportunity
whilst you are here of just asking you a couple of quick questions
on the reform of the international humanitarian system.
Q7 Mr Colman: You may
have seen the speech that Hilary made at the Overseas Development
Institute about two weeks before the Asian tsunami, and it is
really to get comment on that, particularly the idea of giving
UN OCHA more power to coordinate humanitarian response. I wonder
how that has gone down with other UN agencies and NGOs. Has there
been any resistance to it? Do you think there are legitimate concerns,
if UN OCHA was given, if you like, the pre-eminent role, in terms
of loss of flexibility? And I am particularly interested, given
your last comment about how local response to humanitarian disasters
is very important, but in this case Hilary is suggesting perhaps
top-down control by yourselves.
Mr Egeland: The
things are not necessarily alien to each other. We need to have
a humanitarian system that works. If it is to work, we need to
have local partners that work. Those local partners have to be
empowered and given enough resources, and usually we have to have
an international input. That input has to be predictable. We have
to have predictable monies coming. Why do we get only 65% of our
too small appeal for the Congo when mass death is happening, and
why do we get 100% of our funding for Iraq and Kosovo and the
tsunami? We are too uneven in our donor response but we are also
too uneven in our humanitarian response. Why were we robustly
and immediately there for the tsunami victims but we were not
there as humanitarian partners for the Darfur victims?
Q8 Mr Colman: There was
a proposal from Hilary to make UN OCHA the sole way in.
Mr Egeland: Yes.
He says that the Emergency Relief Coordinator and the Humanitarian
Coordinator should be more robustly providing humanitarian leadership.
That I think we should. I think it is generally agreed among NGOs
and donors and most of our agencies that they would like to see
that happen. Hilary Benn also proposes a fund for this. That we
will discuss among UN agencies. I would foresee agreement on funds
being put at my disposal for joint logistic services, joint transport,
joint communication, joint shelter for the early deployment of
field operatives, and so on. Funds for those who have a clear
mandate, I do not necessarily want. Why should I be a channel
for money from the UK to the World Food Programme to buy the food
that they are mandated to buy, for example? I think it is more
those gaps where we could have a stand-by fund. A fund was created
after the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. You will remember
the Kurdish refugee crisis: hundreds of thousands of refugees
were up in the mountains and on the TV screens every night in
1991. I was then the Deputy Foreign Minister of Norway. It was
horrendously frustrating—much worse even than the Darfur
one has been for us now. They did not get a blanket within the
first 10 days but there were all of these television cameras there.
Then the Emergency Relief Coordinator, OCHA or the Department
of Humanitarian Affairs was created and the Central Emergency
Revolving Fund to be quick money for these kinds of emergencies.
That fund does not work well because it is a loaning institution.
You have to pay back. And the agencies, especially the less well-funded
ones, cannot guarantee that they will be able to pay it back,
so they do not use it. Therefore, we need a fund, at least for
the joint logistics services and to fill some of the gaps, by
camp management protection and other things that we have discussed
here today.
Q9 Chairman: Thank you
for coming and talking to us. These are issues which cause us
considerable concern and we are very conscious of the enormous
responsibility placed on yours and OCHA's shoulders, because when
things go wrong the finger of blame tends to be pointed not at
those who have perpetrated these tragedies but at UN and OCHA.
We are keen to give you whatever help we can. We are very grateful
to you and Mr Ulich having come here today and explained these
issues more clearly. Thank you.
Mr Egeland: Thank
you very much for your interest in this. May I end by complimenting
the British Parliament. It has helped us put a number of issues
on the international agenda. That has been much appreciated by
the humanitarian community. The UK Government has been a leader
in providing money to some of the most important humanitarian
issues, and we thank you for that.
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