The Norwegian Refugee Council – a frontline organization assisting refugees and displaced people in wars and crises: Jan Egeland returns from a trip to Somalia
While Jan Egeland speaks in a calm fashion, he becomes more animated when discussing the record number of people being displaced because of humanitarian crises.
He heads the Norwegian Refugee Council, which helps those affected by the war inUkraine, the Afghanistan earthquake and the ongoing famine in his home country of Somalia.
In recognition of these efforts, the council this year has been awarded the world’s largest annual humanitarian award for a nonprofit — worth $2.5 million.
Conrad N. Hilton will present a Humanitarian Award on October 21.
Egeland is a former Norwegian foreign minister who held positions at Human Rights Watch, the Red Cross and the United Nations before becoming secretary general of the council. He spoke with NPR about overlooked crises and other issues when he returned from a trip to Somalia in June.
We are a frontline humanitarian organization assisting refugees and displaced people in conflict areas. The liberation of Norway from the Nazis in 1946, gave birth to us. At the time, Norway was a poor country receiving Marshall Aid assistance from the United States, but our founders saw that the situation was even worse for most of the rest of Europe. Our early relief efforts focused on refugees in Austria, Germany, Poland and the Balkans — and it grew from there. There are 16,000 field workers in today’s wars and crises, from Libya to Venezuela and from Ukraine to Columbia.
We issue an annual report measuring the number of people in greatest need versus the corresponding international media coverage, money directed toward the crises and diplomatic efforts to halt hostilities. Last year the top 10 of the most neglected conflicts and displacement crises in the world were in Africa. The Democratic Republic of Congo is a colossal emergency where more than 25 million people are in need, yet it receives scant attention. The same is true for Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Chad and Somalia.
And now much media attention and global funding is going to Ukrainian refugees. In February, the Russian invasion began. What has been done to the Ukrainian refugees?
The NRC has been in Ukraine since the 2014 Donbas conflict, but now the situation is much worse, with trench warfare and the destruction of entire cities engulfing millions of civilians. Some of the areas we can help the internally displaced are more stable, and Ukrainians are returning from abroad after fleeing. Others were driven out of the south and east of the country. I fear for the winter. Millions will be freezing soon so we are preparing a winterization program and strengthening logistic lines from the neighboring states.
It’s a good thing that we want to help our neighbor who looks like us, has the same religion and can easily integrate in our societies but we should give protection according to need. In Europe people from the Middle East or Afghanistan are met with a cold shoulder and barbed wire whereas Ukrainians are welcomed. It’s the same in the U.S., where women and children fleeing horrific violence in central America are not always well received. This is a battle of values, and we must stand squarely on the side of those who need protection.
We live by the principles of impartiality and independence. This means we teach our colleagues not to take sides and not to get close to a government which is a party to the conflict. But at the same time, we still need to have the respect, and the protection, of those parties. We want to work on both sides, but we are not able to do so in the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.
It is now over a year since the West left Afghanistan, leaving behind 40 million mainly women and children, and they need our solidarity now more than ever. There needs to be more engagement between the defacto authorities and the donor countries on certain issues. The proper response is not to impose sanctions that will not take away food from Taliban soldiers but to make women and children go without food.
Yes, I’m afraid of that. One hundred million people have now for the first time in recorded history been displaced by war and violence. In 2011, it was 40 million. There has never been in modern times as many children going to bed hungry as there are this year. It is important for some countries to realize that their high energy prices and nationalist tendencies are worse in the places where we operate.
It is truly dramatic. I saw mothers and fathers walking for hundreds of kilometers to seek water and food. We need development, investment, resilience and better use of existing resources. We are part of the Building Resilient Communities in Somalia (BRCiS), a group of nine national and international NGOs created to balance short-term humanitarian needs with longer-term community preparedness. People can feed themselves on their own if bore holes are built with solar-powered pumps.
You can support the international NGOs. To live in accordance with rules of compassion and solidarity, write to politicians. Help those people who are refugees and migrants integrate into our communities.
It is a horrible time. More than one million people have been displaced by conflict and violence, and many of them have no chance to feed their families. Climate change, COVID and conflict have merged to create a lethal cocktail. But the good news is that never have there been more effective national and international humanitarian and development organizations, better technological advances and greater resources. The bottom two billion people have never been elevated due to the fact that there’s never been as many billionaires. Those at the very top have astronomical resources and they alone could have helped us reach people in great need.
When I visit my colleagues in tough situations, I return with a renewed optimism. We have helped more than a million children go to school and when I inquire about what they want to do when they are older, they all want to be doctors, engineers, farmers, and builders.
Editor’s Note: Thomas Sadoski is the Founding Ambassador for War Child USA, a charity supporting children and families in conflict areas across the globe. He is a stage, film and television actor whose many appearances include the HBO series “The Newsroom.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. CNN has more opinion on it.
“We are born dead” is graffitied, in English, on a wall across from the razor-wire sewn bulwark of the United Nations compound in northern Yemen. It’s a story of a plea from the abandoned and discarded.
Being involved in the suffering of Yemen’s women and children, as well as the extent of Discrepancy, makes it a reasonable subject for candid discussion. Aid is the only means to ensure this catastrophe doesn’t end up being a complete failure of humanity.
Yemen has the lowest levels of hunger in the world. According to the doctors in those areas who I spoke to, millions of kids suffer from acute malnourished in some places.
The resulting stunted physical development had me convinced that I was in a kindergarten classroom when in fact I was meeting with eight and nine-year-olds. And those children were, as a colleague unnervingly put it, “the lucky ones.” More than 2 million children in Yemen don’t attend school, and it’s a problem.
More than two-thirds of Yemen’s population (the equivalent of some 21.6 million people) are reliant on humanitarian assistance for survival, and that assistance can be scarce. The overwhelming majority live outside of city centers and the heart-rending decisions NGOs make every day of which lives to save in an environment of evaporating resources leaves that majority too often unattended. The imposition of unconscionable mahram restrictions on women, which prohibits them from traveling anywhere without a male family member, further confines and degrades.
The Syrian crisis: Why we need a dinosaur, not a thesaurus. “We’re fighting to survive from morning until night,” says a Yemeni woman and doctor
Having been in Washington with members of Congress for the past week concerning the crisis, it’s clear that political calculations flourish when media attention is fleeting and outrage low. During our meeting, a senator sterilely offered, “That is a lot of money.” A huge amount, indeed. The near $110 billion the US has pledged toUkraine in the last year makes one want to use a thesaurus.
Everywhere is the ache of terminal starvation – the nightmarish effects of which include the inability to regulate body temperature, to produce tears when weeping and then a final decline into ghastly, emaciated, lethargic death.
Have you seen Hyperbole? Not hardly. Millions of children must suffer the terrible effects of severe malnutrition until a state of death-by-famine takes them. To watch indignity and agony heaped upon each other is completely inhuman.
What remains is this, delivered by a Yemeni woman and doctor who asked not to be named for her own safety: “We are fighting to survive from morning until night. We fight for 24 hours a day. We must awaken in time.