Examination of Witnesses (Questions 152-159)
MR JAN
EGELAND AND
MR OLIVER
ULICH
9 FEBRUARY 2005
Q152 Chairman: Mr Egeland, thank you
very much for coming and giving evidence to us this afternoon.
I know that you need to get away fairly promptly and so, if it
is convenient to you, we will start fairly promptly. I suspect
that a number of my colleagues will join us shortly. If you do
not mind, we are going to take this in two parts, although a lot
of the answers may have read across, but we will start, if we
may, with Darfur and go on to the tsunami. On Darfur, as you know,
most of the Committee (six of us) were in Darfur last week. We
spent a day, respectively, in North, South and West Darfur. We
were, I think, as distressed by what we saw as we were impressed
by the response of the international community: distressed by
the huge numbers of internally displaced people, impressed by
the work being done by the international community, NGOs and others.
During the time we were there the International Commission of
Inquiry reported, and we noted the very careful wording of their
report, that, whilst not being genocide, these were crimes against
humanity, war crimes as heinous as if they were genocide. My understanding
is that the UN Security Council was meeting, I think, both yesterday
and today on Sudan. I do not know whether you have any information
on where they have got to on a referral to a special prosecutor
on all of that, or do you have any further information about what
the UN Security Council has done so far as Sudan is concerned,
either yesterday or today?
Mr Egeland: Thank you very much,
first of all, for inviting me and the United Nations here. I am
joined by Oliver Ulich, who is heading the Sudan desk in OCHA
(the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs). The
situation in Sudan and Darfur is bad, and I fear it is going to
be even worse in the future unless the security situation improves.
The Security Council has, in dealing with it over the last couple
of days, discussed the new UN operation there. They have certainly
also been looking at the Commission of Inquiry. The attitudes
in the Council vis-a"-vis the International Criminal
Court are well-known. One of the main recommendations of the Independent
Commission of Inquiry of the UN is to refer the situation in Darfur
and the crimes against humanity there committed to the International
Criminal Court. There are key Member States in the Security Council
who do not recognise the court, and I believe they are still consulting
on the issue. Seen from the humanitarian point of view, what is
happening in Darfur certainly amounts to crimes against humanity,
it is on-going, it is armed men fighting defenceless unarmed civilians
and it has to stop.
Q153 Hugh Bayley: Can you just give us
an overview, your assessment of the international humanitarian
response, its speed, its effectiveness, and how within that the
UN itself has performed?
Mr Egeland: Yes, I would be delighted
to do so. I may actually refer briefly to the note that we have
prepared for you and which I have just distributed. It was made
by my office in the last couple of days for this occasion.[1]
Q154 Chairman: I will make sure that
this note is attached as part of the evidence to the Committee.
Mr Egeland: Thank you very much.
First, I believe it is important to see over this two-year period
that the emergency has been building. We have developed a time-line
for you, and you will see that in the course of the year 2003
it started as an insurgency. There was a disproportionate reaction
by the government and their allies, the Janjaweed militia. The
UN alerted the world, together with non-governmental organisations
like the MSF, from September onwards, that this was indeed the
worst humanitarian crisis in the world, which I called it and
my colleagues and the Secretary-General in November and December.
We did already in September of 2003 launch the first Great Darfur
Initiative, which was an appeal for $23 million from the international
community. It was a slow donor response, unfortunately. The world
had not yet woken up to the gravity of the situation. In 2004
this situation slowly changed. I was still myself feeling it was
hard to get attention in January and February. Our special envoy,
Ambassador Tom Vraalsen, repeatedly visited Darfur. We did, however,
have complete access failure in the sense that the Government
of Sudan denied the humanitarian community, including the UN,
to operate freely within Darfur, and people were dying at an increasing
rate. Finally, I had success in appearing before the Security
Council on 2 April, and I believe that was a very important turning
point, because the Security Council, which before had been reluctant
to hear about Darfur, then had a full briefing in an informal
session. I went to the noon briefing and it was very well attended
by the international media and we got headlines. In April we asked
for $150 million. Many countries started to react very positively,
including the United States and the United Kingdom, the European
Union. The Security Council started to discuss the possibility
of sanctions. I think that was crucial in the access restrictions
being lifted finally in May and June, first for the UN agencies
and then for our non-governmental partners. In the course of the
summer and the early autumn our response built, in my view too
slowly. We had too little money and some of the humanitarian partners
were too slow in deploying when access restrictions were lifted.
In the course of the autumn, however, we got a bigger humanitarian
response and we were at one point close to being able to cover
all needs. At the end of the year the situation worsened, and
you will see that in the course of this winter the situation has
actually worsened again. On page 5[2]
you will see a very important indication of the number of new
internally displaced people. There are three very bad periods,
the one period of November to December of 2003 where in North
Darfur the number of IDPs really exploded, then the period from
March to April of last year where in West Darfur the Janjaweed
militia burnt down countless villages and we reached one million
internally displaced by June of last year. Since last autumn there
has been a relentless increase in the number of new internally
displaced, both in South Darfur and in West Darfur, and we now
have 1.8 million displaced in Darfur. We have also mapped for
you our access to the internally displaced. We had our best access
defined as restrictions, or lack thereof, of both a political
and security nature last June, July when we were able to reach
90% of the people in need. This has worsened of late and we are
now able to reach 88% of a much greater population. Altogether
we are not reaching some 400,000 civilians. The international
response, and I was very pleased to hear that you were impressed
by the work of my humanitarian colleagues on the ground, have
been able to employ around 1,000 new aid workers, Sudanese and
international, every month since April of last year and we now
have 9,100 humanitarian workers on the ground. Still we are behind
in many areas, as you will see on page 8[3],
in terms of food, clean water, primary health, etc. We are covering
it from half to three-quarters. The area where we are really behind
is outside of the camps where the general population are seeing
worsening conditions. In terms of food, we have been able last
month (January) to reach 1.2 million. Our capacity would be to
actually give more than two million people food, and, as you will
see, also in sanitation we are behind, mostly because of security
problems in these regions.
Q155 Hugh Bayley: Could you say a little
bit about how the UN coordination operations work? I know you
have OCHA and they are doing a good coordination job, but in practice
in an individual camp—I think we visited five—what
you see on the ground appears to an outsider visiting briefly
to be a case of whoever got there first gets on and organises
things. Is that inevitably how things work when you face a humanitarian
crisis: you deploy different people to different areas, or you
look at how people deploy themselves and then capitalise on the
capacity they have on the ground? Are there lessons the UN should
learn from the way you have responded to this very large crisis?
Mr Egeland: There are a number
of lessons, and I will be very blunt, open and frank with you.
I have not been satisfied either with the donor response nor with
the humanitarian community's response to the Darfur emergency.
I think we were late as a UN community, I think the donors were
late, I think the Security Council were late, I think most of
our Member States were late in recognising the gravity of the
crisis and really addressing it in a forceful manner. In terms
of coordination, I think, however, it has not been as bad as it
may seem. Already in February of last year, OCHA (the Office for
the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) deployed a sizable group
of people within 48 hours after we got our first access to the
area thanks in a large part to DFID here, who provided much of
the stand-by personnel that we used. Since that time we have had
coordination teams in all Darfur capitals, the three provincial
capitals, and now in several other areas. Camp management has
been one of the gaps in our response. There is no one agency with
responsibility for internally displaced as there is for refugees
through the High Commission for Refugees. What we have done, however,
is to assemble all the non-governmental organisations and all
the agencies from that February response and urged, requested,
recommended agencies to take on camp management in the various
different areas; and I would say now we have much better, not
ideal in any way as you could see, camp management in all the
major camps in Darfur, and we are blessed with a good relationship
with the non-governmental organisations who are providing 80%
of the personnel on the ground.
Q156 Hugh Bayley: You said that it was
fortunate that DFID had a stand-by team of people to work on humanitarian
crises which you were able to deploy. Is that something that there
is a shortage of? How many major donors have similar teams and
why was DFID able to deploy their people but other donors were
not able to deploy in the same way?
Mr Egeland: The UK is one of our
main partners in emergency response. I have to admit also that
the Norwegian government, which is my own government, has a good
response capacity, as do the Swedes. We are working with the Dutch;
we are working with Canadians. I would say maybe six, seven countries—the
Danes as well—now have that kind of stand-by capacity. This
is not enough, and it is too much north-west. In Darfur we should
have had more Arabic speakers; we should have had more Muslim
staff members to put in early on. This is why I have initiated
a humanitarian response review as well as a real-time evaluation
of the Darfur effort. The latter is specific for Darfur—what
lessons are there to learn?—and the former is a big global
initiative to fill the gaps we presently have in the system. We
have a gap in terms of camp management for internally displaced—glaringly
clear in Darfur in the early days—we have a gap in terms
of water and sanitation, we have a gap in terms of shelter for
IDPs and we have a gap in a terms of stand-by arrangements within
Africa, within the Arab world, Asia and Latin America. I am confident
we will be able to fill several of these gaps in the course of
the next months, and I am in contact with several donors, including
the UK Government, on that. I had a meeting with Hilary Benn this
morning on this precise matter.
Q157 Chairman: You have conceded that
the UN, indeed other donors, were late, but could I take you back
to page 2[4]
of your briefing. On page 2 you very kindly tell us that on 7
November 2003 OCHA warns that Darfur is going to be facing its
worst humanitarian crisis since 1988 and access for humanitarian
workers is non-existent some areas. No-one seems to take any notice
of that. No-one in the international community seems to take any
notice of that. So on 5 December you say Darfur "has quickly
become one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world".
I am not quite sure how you could actually have phrased that more
strongly, and yet again no-one seems to take any notice. We seem
to live in a world where the only way in which people take any
notice is if the television cameras arrive and actually start
to take footage and to put it on our screens. Of course, if you
have, as clearly happened here in Darfur, the Government of Sudan
preventing access, as we know, for a long time humanitarian workers,
NGOs and others, it is very, very difficult for the television
cameras to get in. What I would like your help on is this. How
within the machinery of the UN or the Security Council can we
improve the mechanism whereby if you say, "This is a humanitarian
crisis", there is some kind of flagging, either a red flag
or some sort of alert that no-one can then pretend afterwards
that they did not know the seriousness of what you were telling
them?
Mr Egeland: I think you are pointing
a finger at one of our biggest global problems at the moment.
We have at the same time 20 neglected and forgotten crises and
some of them are appallingly bad. I could now say Eastern Congo
is probably the worst crisis in the world at the moment; 10 or
100 times worse than the tsunami crisis at the moment on the Indian
Ocean beaches. A 1,000 people die every day from preventable disease
in Eastern Congo; that is 365,000 per year; it is more than three
million people dead since the late 1990s, and still our response
is inadequate and the international attention is inadequate. In
a way Darfur of last winter is happening to an extent in the Congo
today. What we need is a predictable response, even though we
do not have the television cameras to help us as we had in the
tsunami response. We need a predictable donor response. We should
be able to push an alarm button and we should then get money,
and we should be able to push an alarm button and then get stand-by
capacity personnel and in-kind resources. That is the whole purpose
of this humanitarian response review, and I am very happy to see
that the UK Government also now has an initiative of looking at
predictable funding. Minister Benn has, for example, proposed
a fund that will be at the availability of the Secretary-General,
me as much as the relief coordinator, that we could use in the
Darfur kind of situation or in Eastern Congo and which would not
have been used in the tsunami response because the money was coming
by itself. I hope we will in the course of these coming months
get such a donor response, a predictable agency response as well
with more stand-by capacity.
Q158 Chairman: But we also need to have
agreement from the UN machinery that there is a mechanism whereby
you can say a particular crisis has got into the red stage or
a stage one stage, or some signalling, flagging up mechanism,
where the whole international community has to recognise this
is extremely serious, this is critical, this is one of the worst
humanitarian crises; otherwise it all becomes very subjective,
often depending upon people's historic associations in a particular
part of the world and it all becomes very hit and miss.
Mr Egeland: You are so right.
If I am, as Emergency Relief Coordinator with the General Assembly
mandate, the one supposedly in charge of coordinating humanitarian
efforts in the world, if I say it is one of the worst humanitarian
crises in the world we should have gotten more money from donors
to our already issued appeals, we should have seen an initiative
from the Security Council in asking for a briefing and we should
have ideally seen pressure on the Sudanese government to giving
access. I think the trend line is a positive one. I have more
and more governments now coming to us saying, "We recognise
that there are too many forgotten and neglected emergencies and
we are willing to give more attention to it." I have been
invited, for example, much more in the last few months to the
Security Council than in my first months to address such crises,
and I have also alerted them to some early warning situations,
and I could say that Chad and Guinea in Africa are rapidly deteriorating
and could become crises.
Q159 Chairman: I do not in any way want
to add to your work load, but I think we would be interested in
knowing from you by way of a written note what you now consider
to be significant humanitarian crises which are not being followed
through and the early warning system: because I think some of
the things that we are going to have to try and work out is how
do countries such as the UK make the situation different.[5]
We are all conscious when a crisis blows up the response of the
UN Secretary-General or the lead agencies is to appoint a representative
in the country concerned, who, by hook or by crook, has to bludgeon,
bluff and cajole everyone to coordinate and actually get something
going. When DFID submitted evidence to us on Darfur they said,
and I think it is only fair to put this quote to you in full,
"The UN in Sudan suffered a leadership vacuum between March
and June 2004 and the work of the various agencies needed much
more effective coordination (Ev 71)." They also said
in their evidence to us, "The change of local UN leadership
at critical times with no real plans to bridge the gap made it
hard for the UN Country Team to reorientate themselves towards
Darfur." I appreciate that Dr Kapila leaving the Sudan as
the humanitarian coordinator is an internal matter for the UN,
and I am not particularly interested in the details about why
he left. What I am concerned about is that four months, according
to DFID, seem to have passed with no-one actually having an effective
grip on what was happening in Darfur. Is there not a lesson to
be learned here? If one of the Secretary-General's personal representatives
or the key player is not, for whatever reason, gelling with the
government, those sorts of changes should happen more quickly
and that having a situation where it is limping along is really
unacceptable?
Mr Egeland: Again, you are right.
We should fill all leadership gaps immediately in that kind of
situation. There should even be an overlap between humanitarian
coordinators, as we call them. I think DFID's account is incomplete,
however. Mukesh Kapila left at the end of March. Before that time
we had identified his successor, another Briton, Alan Doss, who
was perhaps the most experienced humanitarian coordinator and
had led very successfully the effort in Sierra Leone, which is
one of our success stories. We asked the Sudanese government,
as we have to in the case of resident/humanitarian coordinators,
for the approval of the Sudanese government and they rejected
his candidature because he was British, being from one of the
troika of the coordinators of the peace process. This was a completely
new thing, that Norwegians, Brits and Americans could not be accepted
as such. I think it was because they did not want necessarily
a strong leader in place at the time. We did also put, from OCHA
Headquarters immediately in March, Kevin Kennedy in charge. He
is the most experienced field operator we perhaps have had. He
was the one who took over all operations the day after the bomb
killed our Sergio Viera de Mello in Baghdad and has a lot of experience.
Again, the Sudanese government did not recognise his credentials
in this period and they said, "No, he is American and he
is interim", and so on. So this was the bleakest period for
us. We had no access to Darfur and they, the government, made
all sorts of problems for us. The Security Council had not really
started to put the kind of pressure they should have on the Sudanese
government, which they later did when they threatened with sanctions,
and, when they did that, immediately we got more access and we
got also the humanitarian coordinator (which was the second or
the third we had nominated) approved, which is Manuel da Silva,
who is there now.
1 Ev 159 Back
2
Ev 162 Back
3
Ev 163 Back
4
Ev 159 Back
5
Ev 165 and 166 Back
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