Examination of Witness (Questions 275-279)
MR JAN
EGELAND
17 JULY 2006
Q275 Chairman: Good afternoon, Mr Egeland,
nice to see you again. I think we have all met you on different
occasions. The Committee met you and were briefed by you in New
York in November, for those of us who were there. Thank you very
much for coming to give evidence to us. As you know, we are looking
at humanitarian response to natural disasters. Inevitably, we
have had discussions and representations about UN reform and humanitarian
reform and your name, clearly, comes up quite often in that context.
If I can perhaps straightaway say that what a number of people
have said is that we have seen the cluster approach, we have seen
the appointment of humanitarian coordinators, but some people
feel that the wider issues of humanitarian reform and issues like
benchmarking, so that one can evaluate what one is doing, have
been perhaps slightly sidelined. I wonder how you can respond—and
I appreciate you cannot do everything at once, you are having
to drive an agenda—to those who say, "It is all very
well going along those tracks, but you seem to have left other
things low down on the priority list".
Mr Egeland: Thank you very much,
Chairman, for having me again. I am delighted by the sustained
interest of the British Parliament in the furtherance of humanitarian
work and quality enhancement in international humanitarian work,
and we need your gentle prodding to keep on improving. Natural
disasters are very important for you to focus on because I feel,
like today, all the time my attention is having to go to the last
of the man-made disasters. Today it is Lebanon and Gaza, where
we are struggling to help a beleaguered civilian population, but
certainly seven times more people are struck by natural disaster
than by conflict. The tendency is going in the direction of, in
relative terms, more and more people affected by natural disasters
and, fortunately, fewer people are affected by war. The humanitarian
reform effort tries really to make itself more predictable, that
is the number one word. We were great, in my view, in the Pakistan
earthquake, a major humanitarian catastrophe, 3.3 million people
were without a roof in October just before the merciless Himalayan
winter. When we take stock now, we see that thanks to, in order
of importance, what the Pakistani people themselves did, the Pakistani
Government and the Pakistani army, but then also what the international
humanitarian community was able to do, we came out of that winter
with no noticeable increase in malnutrition, no increase in epidemic
diseases, more girls in school than ever before in northern Pakistan
and no noticeable increase in mortality except for the days of
the earthquake itself, which is quite an achievement really and
it could never have been done 15 years ago. What the Pakistani
Government and all our Pakistani counterparts also say is that
the international response was enhanced by our effort to organise
ourselves in more predictable clusters, one around each area of
challenge, including shelter. In short, Pakistanis were more happy
with us internationals than the Indonesians and the Sri Lankans
were after the tsunami really, because it was a better-organised
and more predictable response when we said to all the NGOs, to
all the UN agencies, to all the Red Cross partners and to the
government partners we were going to meet systematically and predictably,
like-minded, faced with one challenge each whether it be shelter
or in other areas. To your question, have things fallen to the
wayside, I think not. One of the tasks of the clusters is really
to get benchmarks in each area, to get better standards and to
do better assessments. Clearly, we have a problem in also being
predictably good at assessments, sometimes we are very good, sometimes
we are not so good. Under the leadership of my office and with
the World Health Organisation, the World Food Programme and UNICEF
in particular, we have started a process of preparing for a predictable
set of assessments that we can always employ: nutritional surveys,
mortality surveys, some health indicator surveys and then we will
also make the clusters become responsible in systematic capacity
in each of these subject areas that the clusters are responsible
for and not only have immediate response and coordination as a
task of the clusters.
Chairman: We will come back both to the
cluster approach and what we learned from Pakistan just a little
later in the evidence session. I am going to bring in my colleague,
Joan Ruddock, who apologises that she will have to leave shortly
through no fault of her own, a clash, and I am anxious that she
is able to ask her question.
Q276 Joan Ruddock: One of the things
that we have identified, which probably will be of no surprise
to you, is that there seems to be some reluctance between different
UN agencies to fully cooperate with each other—you are nodding
as though that may be your observation as well—and in terms
of the humanitarian system of reform that is very important. I
wonder how you think that there could be a system to incentivise
cooperation and coordination between agencies in order to improve
the delivery of the humanitarian response.
Mr Egeland: Of course, this is
my main challenge. I am the global Emergency Relief Coordinator
and I am also Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs.
One task is to get big and independent agencies to cooperate,
partner up and say, "Our flag is not so important as the
actual product we can deliver together to the beneficiaries",
but it is equally tough to get the non-UN actors, of which there
are more and more, to cooperate with us in the UN family and there,
I think, we have two challenges. We have to get some UN people,
especially at country level, to be less arrogant and some of the
NGOs to be more rational in their way of behaving as one out of
maybe 300 or 400 actors. Then it is not a question of adopting
the best possible village in the shortest possible time to deliver
the best video back to your local church or constituency, it is
to go into a larger whole. I think I would venture that cooperation
though has never been better in the UN than it is today. All of
my predecessors probably had bigger problems than I have. Several
of the instances were against the post of an emergency relief
coordinator, post of an under-secretary general, which was something
that the countries, the member states, wanted to have after the
first Gulf War in 1992. It is crucial that you, the member states
and the donors, help us, however, in telling agencies, NGOs and
other partners that there has to be more a coordinated whole.
The red thread through the tsunami evaluation was that there were
too many who wanted to produce things on their own and too few
who really wanted to work together, and Pakistan, I think, was
a step in the right direction, but we still have a long way to
go. Final point: I remember that we were, 15 years ago, about
100 international organisations that would go to a crisis area,
at the most. Now we are nearly 500, as we could see in the tsunami.
In 10 years, we will be 1,000 for sure. There will be many coming
from the south, from the Gulf countries, from Asian countries,
from Latin American countries, from all of the former Comecon[1]
countries, Eastern Europe, and we have to be tougher in enforcing
coordination than we have been in the past.
Q277 Joan Ruddock: Let me come back on
that, because I think others are going to take up the issue of
the NGOs. If we look at the UN agencies themselves and although
you say hundreds were there at the tsunami, we do know of other
situations, other countries, where we have not got hundreds of
NGOs operating, so then the UN agencies themselves can be really
very critical if it is the UN and perhaps a couple of others who
are involved, so are there further incentives, further actions,
that you are proposing to take? How are you going to move this
process on a step further even though you say it has improved
in your time? Is there more to do?
Mr Egeland: There are four things
we are really doing. A fifth would perhaps be more systematic
needs assessments in all crises that are the basis for the consolidated
appeals process, but the number one is the clusters that you know
of. There is now a predictable leadership for each of them, we
have a phone number now for shelter; we did not have that in the
past, we were very unclear who was responsible for the shelter
crisis in Darfur. It was very clear that you came to me and asked,
"Why is there not enough shelter?" when we met last
time and discussed Sudan. Now I have somebody I can call upon
and that is UNHCR, in man-made disasters it would be the Red Cross
and the Red Crescent Movement in natural disasters. The second
thing, of course, is the Central Emergency Response Fund that
Britain has been a leader in establishing and which has already,
I think, been proven through the allocation of the first $100
million. We have only had it for three or four months and already
we are set deeply in motion. We are always asking for common services
to fund in these countries for re-prioritisation by the humanitarian
coordinator and by the country team together. We tell them we
do not want a lot of applications and apparel, we want that country
team to come up with prioritisation, and then we are making the
humanitarian coordinators stronger, better trained, more accountable,
they have a score card with them, so we have performance reviews
for what they do, but they can also now more clearly ask us for
servicing so that they are strong. Fourthly, last week I co-chaired
a meeting in Geneva with one of the three consortia of NGOs which
called the first ever dialogue among the 40 CEOs that are the
most important in the humanitarian area. Again, the UN then all
agencies sitting as equal with the NGOs around the table discussing
together how NGOs, the UN and the Red Cross and Red Crescent partners
can perform better together.
Q278 Chairman: I am going to bring
in John Battle. We did mention briefly at the beginning that you
are inevitably faced with these urgent questions, such as the
situation in Lebanon, and right now as we speak there are statements
in both Houses of Parliament about the situation in Lebanon. I
wonder from your position how does this bear down upon you, how
are you asked to respond and how can you respond to a situation
that escalates, as this one has done, from a long-standing confrontation
to suddenly a slightly unpredictable war?
Mr Egeland: We have been working
all through this weekend with a big task force in Geneva, which
is responsible for humanitarian contingency planning and also
inter-agency planning of an emergency response, and with a team
in New York looking at security, political response, advocacy
and strategy in general, and OCHA has taken an initiative to both
of these large teams. Today we are trying to send teams into Beirut—probably
it will have to be tomorrow—and another team to Damascus
to lead the response effort. The civilian population is disproportionately
suffering in this man-made disaster, both first and foremost in
the Lebanon but also in northern Israel. We are trying, through
all the channels we have, to reach the parties to say that we
can now prepare an elaborate plaster on this wound but they must
heal the wound, they must have a ceasefire. If they do not have
a ceasefire, our ambulances cannot move, as they cannot at the
moment, or very sporadically, we are not able to get medicine
to many other places in the south where it is at its worst, we
are not able to get medicine into health posts, et cetera,
even in southern Beirut in some places. There are supplies in
the country, for example in the health area, but we cannot get
around them. The second huge problem I see is the destruction
of civilian infrastructure means that water and sanitation, which
is linked to also the lack of electricity, will be completely
broken to large populations there, just as we have seen it happen
in Gaza. The Lebanon and Gaza are in a way paradoxically, as you
may know, more vulnerable to this kind of warfare than many African
societies that are not based on water pipes and sewerage systems,
et cetera, and it can easily be a public health crisis
of formidable proportions if it just continues to escalate as
a crisis.
Q279 Chairman: This is not the prime
purpose of our visit but it seems to me it is very relevant. That
implies that your prime objective at the moment is to try and
stop the conflict so that you can then go in and pick up the pieces,
it is a diplomatic effort really rather than humanitarian.
Mr Egeland: Absolutely, and in
my three years in this post I have seen that we are becoming better
and better, and the British Parliament, the British authorities
and so on help us in that. We have more funding non-earmarked
than ever before and we have better stand-by arrangements than
ever before. I can virtually push a button and I have teams anywhere
on the earth within 18 hours, before it was 24 hours and so on,
but we are not making progress, it seems to me, on the political
fronts and the security fronts that we rely upon. In a way we
are in danger of perfecting a humanitarian operation in Darfur
and not at all making progress on the political and security front,
and in the end we keep people alive until they are massacred really
and that is not the right course overall. Between ourselves as
humanitarians, we have to coordinate with political people and
security forces.
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