Rich nations must dig deeper, says humanitarian chief
A year of disasters around the world sparked an unprecedented outpouring of aid, but richer nations still are not giving enough money to tackle lingering humanitarian crises, the United Nations’ humanitarian chief says.
Jan Egeland said, for example, that as many people died in Congo every eight months as in last year’s Indian Ocean tsunami.
He also criticised political leaders for failing to take action to end the wars that created humanitarian crises or invest in disaster prevention to ease the impact of earthquakes, hurricanes and floods.
The work of UN and other relief workers in conflict-wracked eastern Congo, in the Darfur region of western Sudan, and in northern Uganda had become “an alibi for lack of political and security action”, Egeland said.
“We are a plaster on a wound which is not healed because there’s no political action to put an end to the wars, and there’s too little also invested in preventing natural disasters.”
In a wide-ranging interview, Egeland looked back on the response to the tsunami, devastating hurricanes and monsoons, drought and near famine in Africa, and the recent South Asian earthquake.
“This has been really a year of disasters, a year of suffering, but it’s also been a year of compassion and solidarity like probably no other year,” he said.
“The tsunami was world record in concrete solid compassion. We’ve never been as generous – ever – as a world. We feared it would take away from other emergencies and we can now safely say it did not.”
After the Boxing Day tidal wave swept across the Indian Ocean, devastating coastal communities in 12 countries, Egeland urged the world to help those who had lost everything, saying many of the richest countries were “far too stingy” in helping the poorest.
Egeland did not use the word “stingy” again, but he said he was still dissatisfied with the response to helping the world’s less fortunate.
“We have given more than in any other year. Are we giving enough? No,” he said.
If the world’s richest countries continued to keep up to 99.8% of their gross national product for themselves, “they have a big potential for giving more to the poorest of the poor”, Egeland said.
He did not name any countries but according to the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, none of the world’s richest countries donated even 1% of GNP and the US was lowest at 0.14%.
