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UNITED NATIONS: Generosity Should Extend to All of the World’s Victims

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Jan 12 2005 (IPS) - This is an ideal moment to appeal to the generosity of the international community, said United Nations emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland, as he launched an appeal for 1.7 billion dollars to help meet the needs of 26 million people around the world.

Egeland was speaking at a U.N.-sponsored international donors’ conference on tsunami aid, which ended Tuesday in Geneva. The year 2005 “started better than any other year in recorded history in terms of human generosity,” he said.

“We are seeing humanity at its best,” he added, referring to the billions of dollars in aid pledged for the survivors of the Dec. 26 Asian tsunami, which claimed an estimated 160,000 lives.

By comparison, he noted, 2004 was a “mixed year” in terms of aid for the world’s most vulnerable. “Some areas didn’t have more than one third of the funds that were needed to save lives in terms of vaccination campaigns, in terms of feeding children, in terms of sheltering the displaced and the refugees,” he said.

Egeland’s call for donations to fund the U.N.’s humanitarian programmes for 2005 is separate from the “flash appeal” launched by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Jan. 6, aimed at raising 977 million dollars to cover the emergency needs of five million tsunami victims over the next six months.

“We should agree on one basic principle,” Egeland stressed. “It is as terrible to be wounded in Congo as it is in Kosovo, it is as bad to be displaced and a refugee in northern Uganda as it is in northern Iraq, and it is as terrible to starve in Darfur, Sudan, as it is on the beaches of tsunami-stricken nations,” he said.

“And if we agree on this basic premise, that human life is the same, and has as much worth in one country as in another, then we should have the same generosity to all in need,” he added.

Egeland noted that such generosity is a reasonable expectation, given that the world is richer than ever. “There have never been more millionaires and billionaires in Europe, in North America, in Asia, in the Gulf countries, even in Latin America, than today,” he pointed out.

In spite of this fact, however, there are still basically the same 10 “big donors” among the world’s countries as there were a decade ago, even though there are many new growing economies.

“There are some 40 rich nations and there are 30 very disaster-stricken nations, and that majority of nations should be able to foot the bill for feeding and vaccinating all the world’s children this year,” he said.

One of the most critical cases in the world today is the Democratic Republic of Congo, noted Egeland, where at least 1000 people die every day as a result of preventable diseases, war and lack of assistance.

“We estimate that some three million Congolese have died over the last five or six years. You could say it’s like a tsunami every five months, year in and year out, in the Congo,” he noted.

Yet by the end of March 2004, the U.N. and its various agencies had received only 12 percent of the funds it had requested for its programmes in the African nation that year. “We cannot work in this way,” he said.

According to Egeland, there is “no better investment than humanitarian relief.” He provided as an example the work of UNICEF, which inoculated 14 million children in 2004.

He also pointed to the successful repatriation operations that returned refugees to their homes in Africa and the Middle East, thereby decreasing the overall number of refugees in the world.

The World Food Programme (WFP) provided food for some 38 million people in crisis-stricken areas, helping to prevent mass starvation in the world, while the World Health Organisation (WHO) was instrumental in coordinating the health-care response in key emergency areas, such as Haiti, and preventing the outbreak of epidemics.

Nevertheless, the U.N. and its specialised agencies have failed to meet certain crucial needs. Walter Fust, the director-general of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, noted that gender-based violence has not been adequately addressed when it comes to the assessment of needs for humanitarian assistance.

“I’m not here to criticise the U.N,, but this extremely important dimension should also be considered in needs assessment,” he said.

Egeland himself recognised some of the shortfalls in the U.N.’s relief efforts last year. “We were not able to save the lives of women and babies because we didn’t have the money for reproductive health care. We didn’t prevent sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS, we were not able to care for the survivors of gender-based violence as we should have, and we were not able to care for many of the internally displaced and refugees,” he admitted.