MuseumDESCRIPTION:
United Nations Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland, recently presented an ominous report to the Security Council on the humanitarian situation in Darfur. He discusses this report with Jerry Fowler.
TRANSCRIPT:
NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your host is Jerry Fowler, Director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience.
JERRY FOWLER: Before I introduce today’s guest, I want to start with a programming note. We have now added a Voices on Genocide Prevention blog to our website to compliment our interviews. For the many of you that get the interviews directly by subscription, I encourage you to check it out at blogs.ushmm.org. Hope to see you online.
Our guest today is Jan Egeland. He is Undersecretary General of the United Nations for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. He was one of the first to raise a red flag about Darfur, well over two years ago. On April 20th, he provided a new Darfur report to the Security Council, and it can only be called alarming. Mr. Egeland welcome to the program.
JAN EGELAND: Thank you; happy to be on your show.
JERRY FOWLER: Mr. Egeland, there is much more aid going to Darfur now than there was two years ago, yet you told the Security Council that you could repeat key parts of your first briefing to them in April 2004. What did you mean by that?
JAN EGELAND: It is really disheartening that what is happening in 2006 resembles so much of what of the killing fields of the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2004, and that so much of what we achieved last year in making progress is now being lost because we have no security for the civilian population that we try to assist; we have no security for our humanitarian workers on the ground who are being harassed, attacked, and having their provisions looted. We have a government and the ethnic militias as well as the guerilla not helping us, but making it difficult for us to help the people. Finally, we have much less money than we had last year from the international donor community. At the same time, we have more mouths to feed in the desperate situation in Darfur.
JERRY FOWLER: When you say more mouths to feed, how many people depend on international aid in Darfur now?
JAN EGELAND: About three million people depend on international assistance where the life line really to about 1.7 internally displaced, but there are more than one million more war victims, as we call them that have lost their livestock; they lost their agricultural land, lost everything due to the fighting. More than half of the population of Darfur now depends on international assistance.
JERRY FOWLER: How much do you need in terms of funds to provide assistance to that population of more than 3 million?
JAN EGELAND: Altogether in Sudan, where we also have large programs in Southern Sudan and increasingly in Eastern Sudan, altogether we are asking the international community for 1.7 billion dollars. About 650 million of those are for the operations in Darfur. More than half of that again is for food aid, but we also have large programs for water and sanitation, for shelter, for emergency health to the civilian population that are now in more than 200 camps, some of them as large as 100,000 displaced people strong. It is a desert; it is a very inhospitable desert. I was, myself, prevented from going there now recently. I have been there two times before in 2004 and 2005, and I hope to be back there next week in Darfur.
JERRY FOWLER: I want to come back to the government preventing from going, but before we get away from the funding issue, of the amount of money that you need for Sudan, and specifically for Darfur, how much are you short?
JAN EGELAND: Now, we have twenty percent of what we need, and we needed about 60 percent, 70 percent of the total year budget by now because the rainy season always comes in June in Darfur. They have an intense period of rains in June, July, and early August. The rest of the year it is desert. When it rains, it is very hard to truck in provisions, which means we have to pre-position our food and our supplies before the rainy season. This year we have too little even to keep the pipe line alive, so the World Food Programme has now started to cut rations because virtually all nations who gave us generously last year—and the United States was by far the most generous—all are this year behind what we needed for more mouths to feed.
JERRY FOWLER: Why are they behind? What is causing that?
JAN EGELAND: I think number one, the United States gave more than half of everything last year and it was in many ways imbalanced. The United States will come with more through important supplementals in Congress, but the Europeans, for example, except Britain which has been very generous, have not compensated for funding coming later this year from the United States. I think the main reason may be that we were successful in averting a humanitarian catastrophe in 2004; we were very good in giving assistance to everybody there in all of those camps, and the international limelight was gone for a large part of last year, and then when the world wakes up again to the situation deteriorating with more attacks, more ethnic cleansing again, more rapes of women and abuse of children. Then, it is sort of too late because the pipe line. It is a very large operation with nearly 14,000 humanitarian workers, with 1,000 trucks, with tens of thousands of tons of supplies that has to be given to the people there.
JERRY FOWLER: You mention that the World Food Programme has reduced the rations—I understand they have cut in half the amount of food per person that they are delivering to 1,000 calories per person per day. Can you tell us in human terms, what does that mean?
JAN EGELAND: The daily ration that we have set for people in that kind of condition is 2,100. They will start now to have to half that to 1,050 calories which means that there will be too little grain, too little salt, too little sugar, too little oil in the food baskets that we give these families. For some it might still be possible to compensate with food from elsewhere; for most, there is no possibility of compensating which means that most people will go to bed hungry. Not only will they have lost their home, their future, their family members, but they will also have lost half of their food. It should not be like that. We hope that that pipe line can be restored because at least that is possible to do for richer countries in Europe and the Gulf States and in North America to keep up that life line to the people. It is more difficult to provide security in a situation where these groups are fighting each other.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me turn to that because in your report to the Security Council you spotlighted the funding shortfalls which caused the problems in the pipe line that you mentioned, but you also said that access to the population in need is in danger. Let me ask you first, of the three million or so that need aid, what percentage do aid agencies actually have access to?
JAN EGELAND: As of today, we may have access to two and a half million, so half a million people we have either very limited access to or no access to at all. Some two to three thousand people, we have lost contact with because it is too dangerous to go there. We are blocked from going there. We have lost colleagues in our efforts to get there. In other instances, we try to get through and then we succeed in one out of three attempts it takes to get through to the camps. That is the kind of a situation that aid workers now live under. The Norwegian refugees camp which was responsible for camp coordinator and camp management as we call it—the largest camp in Darfur, in Kalma in Southern Darfur—were thrown out because the local authorities felt that they were too eager in defending and speaking out on behalf of the civilian population.
JERRY FOWLER: Is there a connection between their being thrown our and your not being allowed in as you are also Norwegian?
JAN EGELAND: It happened at the same time, and they used the same ridiculous argument against both things—blocking me and throwing out the NGO—namely that in Denmark these famous cartoons that were found to be very offensive to Muslims had been published, but we are not even Danish and we had nothing to do with what they are doing. We work for the United Nations and for an aid group respectively, so I find that a totally ridiculous accusation. I think the main reason is that we were doing strong advocacy work on behalf of the civilian population in a situation where they need us to defend them.
JERRY FOWLER: One characteristic of the early part of this crisis—when you first started speaking out in 2003 and early 2004—was the government actively blocking access of humanitarian workers and humanitarian aid to people who were being displaced. As I understand from your report on April 20th, that they are starting to impose new restrictions on access.
JAN EGELAND: Indeed; many of the same problems are now starting to reappear—there are problems to get travel permits; there are problems with visas again—many of those issues that we really struggled to overcome, and then in the end, were able to overcome, especially connected with the visit of Secretary General Kofi Annan and myself in May. We got a moratorium as we called it on restrictions. These restrictions are back this year, and it particularly difficult for many of the non-governmental organizations, that are doing the majority of the actual ground work for the international community—the United Nations may be doing most of the diplomatic work and much of the coordination and facilitation and access negotiations, but it is the courageous non-governmental organizations, many of them North American, many of them also local Sudanese organizations that do the actual work—and those are now being treated horrendously, and some of them say, “We are giving up. We may have to leave Darfur.” That again would have catastrophic consequences for the women and the children in the camps.
JERRY FOWLER: You mentioned in your report—along these lines of the pressure that these aid groups are under—you referred to a constant stream of threats and a climate of intimidation created by the government. What do you mean by that? What kind of threats does the government use? How do they intimidate aid workers?
JAN EGELAND: Among other things they say, “You will have to leave unless you refrain yourself.” Several individual aid workers have been asked to leave, and of course, this is their career. If they are asked to leave as an aid worker, you lose your job, so people find that very intimidating. Elsewhere they say, not only say but physically block us from going places, and they also threaten to throw out whole organizations. This is part of the climate of intimidation which is not only linked to the government. Also the guerilla—the SLA/M and other guerilla groups—are harassing and are high-jacking car, and are making it difficult for us to work.
JERRY FOWLER: What do you think it would take in order to ensure access, assuming funding comes through—an unfettered access—for aid agencies to the civilian population?
JAN EGELAND: There are two things that could really dramatically change matters. One is if we got the whole international community to exert mass maximum on pressure on all parties, but it is not like that at the moment, and I think neither the regime in Khartoum nor the guerilla feel that they are sufficiently being watched. Maybe the very cautious sanctions that were declared against four individuals could be a first kind of example of leverage against people and saying that there should not be impunity for grave crimes against international law. The second thing which could and should happen is a much stronger presence—military presence—on the ground. First the African Union force needs to be strengthened, beefed up. They need to have more soldiers—trained soldiers—and more helicopters; they need to have more trucks; they need to have better communications and facilities; and they need to know that they have a salary from one month to the next that is funded by international contributions, even though the soldiers come from poor African countries. In addition to the African Union force, we need a United Nations force on the ground, and that United Nations force could be strong and robust enough to disarm the many armed groups—the Janjaweed militia and the rebels and the armed mafias and the armed gangs—that are now terrorizing the civilian population.
JERRY FOWLER: What do you think are the prospects for both of those things that you just mentioned in terms of military presence, strengthening the African Union and getting a United Nations force on the ground?
JAN EGELAND: Strengthening the African Union force could happen tomorrow. It is a question of enough parliamentarians and Congressmen and women in enough countries just saying, “We are going to give adequate resources,” and getting enough African states to say, “We will send more high quality soldiers and police to Darfur.” That should have happened yesterday and could happen tomorrow. The United Nations force will take months and months to get on the ground because it needs the green light from the government, which again says that the Abuja peace talks first have to succeed. When there is a green light from the government, the Security Council has to agree to it and fund it, and countries like the United States and Japan who are the major contributors of funding will have to say yes, and all of the other Council members. Then we need to get soldiers from enough countries, and we are overstretched now, in terms of peacekeeping obligations all over the world, so it might be hard to get enough soldiers, or this means that it could take perhaps, nine months realistically, to get a force on the ground. I am the Humanitarian Coordinator for the next nine days, and for the next nine weeks, so we need the African Union which is on the ground today to be strengthened.
JERRY FOWLER: I know this may be a difficult question for you, but given these trends that you have identified—the funding shortfall, the restrictions on access, the threat to the humanitarian operation—if things are not turned around, what could happen over the next couple of months in terms of mortality rates?
JAN EGELAND: It could be much, much worse. In the middle of 2004, our estimation was that among the one million people who were displaced at the time, 10,000 lost their lives every month. In 2005, a new survey showed that mortality had gone down to one-third of those levels, one million, and was on levels probably better than before the emergency in 2003 and 2004. This year, I think it is back to—soon going to be back to—those very bad days of 2004, but in a much larger population. If we go up to the mortality figures of 2004, we would not lose 10,000 a month; we would lose 30,000 per month, because we are now at three million people who are severely affected. It could be even much worse than that if the humanitarian operation had to be folded because of lack of security. All of that I think will not happen because I believe that the parties understand how much is at stake and that they will be held accountable for massive lost of lives among their own people.
JERRY FOWLER: Let us hope so. You are heading back to the region next week or to Darfur?
JAN EGELAND: I am going back to Khartoum and to Darfur and to Eastern Chad where things are also getting worse next week.
JERRY FOWLER: Have a safe journey. I hope, perhaps, we can talk to you sometime after you get back?
JAN EGELAND: Thank you very much for your interest.
JERRY FOWLER: We have been speaking to Jan Egeland, Undersecretary General of the United Nations for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. Thank you so much for being with us.
JAN EGELAND: Thank you so much for having me.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, visit our website at www.committeeonconscience.org.
