John Elbers

Jan Egeland has led humanitarian efforts during the major international crises of our time: ethnic cleansing in Darfur, the Indian Ocean tsunami, and wars in the Middle East to name a few. But the former U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs—a man who has been called “the world’s conscience”—is also an optimist. We found out why when he talked with Beloit College Magazine during his campus residency in April.

Q. How do you begin to grapple with the gravity of the situations you’ve faced in your career?

A. It is extremely rewarding and fulfilling to direct and lead international humanitarian work, since we see dramatic and positive results. I came out of many years of international peace, human rights, and humanitarian work an optimist, because I’ve seen how we’ve succeeded many more times than we’ve failed. It is not a terrible sort of negative experience if you are able to bring increased assistance, organize relief work, give attention to neglected emergencies, and drum up resources and support and protection.

Humanitarian work has become much more effective and cost-efficient in recent years because we’ve organized it better. We can now feed a child even under extreme circumstances for $2 per day. We can vaccinate a child for a couple of dollars. We can furnish a child with school books and reading materials for just a handful of dollars. There is no investment, private or public, which is as effective and efficient as international global humanitarian work because we work in great quantities—tens of thousands of tons of food; vaccination drives that reach a million children at a time; schools for hundreds of thousands of children.  

The problem is that humanitarian work meets immediate needs very effectively, but it doesn’t solve the crisis. Only a negotiated political solution can bring lasting peace.

Q. How good is press coverage of the world’s trouble spots today?

A. The Internet has been able to bring a wealth of information to everybody. So you can use Google and find tens of thousands of sources on how the situation is really going in Niger, for instance, a very neglected, forgotten country with lots of problems. But there is very little coverage in local and national mainstream media. In 2003, when the Congo was in the worst war in the world, there was more coverage—several hundred times more—of the Michael Jackson case on the U.S. network news. I have no complaints with BBC World or CNN International or Al Jazeera International. I think that coverage has been excellent.

So one strata of the population is becoming more informed in real time about what is happening in Zimbabwe, and Northern Uganda, and Afghanistan, and Gaza, and others are increasingly uninformed because the mainstream media is cutting back coverage.

Q. Beloit prepares students to become informed and engaged citizens. What would you say about the importance of that focus in education?

A. The magic of the small liberal arts colleges in the United States is that it becomes like a community that has ambitions for students beyond academic excellence, which is very positive and interesting for me to experience. It’s my whole purpose in writing my book … to say that the generation now being educated has the potential to do things my generation could only dream about. They have great public and private resources in their hands in more rich countries than ever before. They have better technology and more information and knowledge to employ than ever before. And they have more and better organizations to work in and through than ever before. So I believe that now we can lift out of abject poverty the remaining billion people and end the remaining wars. More rich people have fewer poor people to lift out of poverty now, and more people with resources and tools through international organizations have fewer wars to end than previous generations.

Jan Egeland’s book, A Billion Lives: An Eyewitness Report from the Frontlines of Humanity, was published earlier this year. A citizen of Norway, Egeland directs the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.

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