Relief Pitcher 
Meet the U.N. bureaucrat who called us stingy. 
by Matthew Continetti 
01/17/2005, Volume 010, Issue 17 
A NORWEGIAN DIPLOMAT, JAN Egeland, is the United Nations' undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and chief emergency relief coordinator. Egeland has worked at the U.N. since June 2003. He lives in Midtown Manhattan with his wife and daughters, and he has written many books and articles. For the most part, he has worked in semi-obscurity--until the great tsunami struck Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, Thailand, Burma, Somalia, and elsewhere, and washed hundreds of thousands of lives away in a few horrible moments.
According to the New York Times, Egeland first heard of the tsunami early that morning of December 26. When the phone rang with news of the disaster, he began holding press conferences. In times of crisis, a commanding voice can soothe fraying nerves. But Egeland veered off topic in his December 27 briefing, starting his own foreign policy crisis. We were more generous when we were less rich, many of the rich countries, he said. And it is beyond me why we are so stingy, really, when we are--and even Christmas time should remind many Western countries at least how rich we have become. And if actually the foreign assistance of many countries now is 0.1 or 0.2 percent of their gross national income, I think that is stingy, really. I don't think that is very generous.
The lecture was only beginning.
And I have an additional point, Egeland said. Politicians do not understand their own populations, because all the populations in the United States, in the European Union, in Norway, which is number one in the world, we want to give more as voters, as taxpayers. People say we should give what we give now or more. Politicians and pundits believe that they are really burdening the taxpayers too much, and the taxpayers want to give less. It's not true. They want to give more.
To a U.N. official like Egeland, such utterances are innocuous, even banal. It might not even have occurred to him that if taxpayers want to give more, they don't have to wait for their governments to do it for them. (By last week, for example, private charitable donations by Americans for the relief effort amounted to an estimated $350 million.)
To the editors of the Washington Times, it seemed Egeland was biting the hand that feeds East River bureaucrats like himself. U.N. official slams U.S. as 'stingy' over aid, ran that paper's breathless front-page headline. The article underneath began: The Bush administration yesterday pledged $15 million to Asian nations hit by a tsunami that has killed more than 22,500 people, although the United Nations' humanitarian-aid chief called the donation 'stingy.' Other papers followed the Times's lead. Egeland was famous.
The backlash was swift and fierce. The United States is not stingy, said Colin Powell. We are the greatest contributor to international relief efforts in the world. A reporter read Egeland's quotes from the Washington Times story to President Bush and asked for his reaction. The person who made that statement was very misguided and ill-informed, the president replied. On cable TV and in the op-ed pages various pundits used the occasion to harrumph and gesticulate. Egeland was forced to apologize. He said he never meant to criticize America. He said he never meant to conflate foreign aid with disaster relief.
He had a point. Look at the transcript, and one sees that Egeland refers to we, or to the rich countries, or to the populations of the United States and European Union. He isn't singling any country out. Nor, when he uses the word stingy, is he talking about the tsunami. He's just specified that he's referring to foreign assistance in general. Egeland was taken out of context.
It is Egeland's context, however, which deserves a closer look. Indeed, an examination of his career brings home a simple lesson:If you need shipments of food and clean water, emergency deployment of medical professionals and facilities--the hard infrastructure of disaster relief--it turns out that real world powers (notably the United States and Australia, in the present case) are still where you have to turn.
Egeland, you see, is the very model of a modern multilateralist. In high school, he worked for Amnesty International. When he was 19 years old he went to live with an Indian tribe in Colombia. He was a talented student and received a Fulbright scholarship to Berkeley, where he wrote a thesis contrasting U.S. and Scandinavian diplomatic models.
The thesis later became a book, entitled Impotent Superpower, Potent Small State: Potentials and Limitations of Human Rights Objectives in the Foreign Policies of the United States and Norway. Despite the title, it flopped. As an academic work, it was no good, the Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad told the Christian Science Monitor in 2000. But much more important was the fact that Egeland believed it, and he used it as a basis for his activism.
That activism led to a career in Norwegian politics. Egeland rose to prominence in the Labor party and landed the number two position in the foreign ministry. In September 1992 he proposed that Norway become the intermediary between the Israelis and Palestinians, which led, through many twists and turns, to the Oslo accords. At Egeland's urging, the Norwegian government smuggled representatives from Israel and the PLO into the country, where negotiations would take place. We gave them, you know, a safe haven for--for talks with absolute discretion and with a--with a trusted, cozy atmosphere by the fireplace into the night if they wanted, Egeland said in 1993. It was his first peace process.
Eventually, of course, it broke down. Throughout the 1990s, often at Egeland's behest, Western governments would hand money over to Yasser Arafat, who would promptly turn around and use what money he didn't keep for himself to finance the intifada. This didn't change Egeland's view of Arafat's politics. There still are only two real democracies in the Middle East, he said in 1996. One is Israel and the other is the Palestinians.
Spurred on by Oslo, Egeland next set his sights on Guatemala, which had been in a civil war for decades. In December 1996 the government there signed a peace accord with rebel guerrillas, and the ensuing peace has held. Looking back over Egeland's long career as a peacemaker, Guatemala remains his one success. We are involved in many peace situations, Egeland told the Glasgow Herald on the eve of the Guatemala accords. Some will remain secret forever, some will never be successful, but in Norway we are certain we want to invest our venture capital in the effort for peace.
Egeland invested in a lot of places. Here is a partial list of the countries where he has intervened, only to see his efforts end in more violence: Zaire, Uganda, Burma, Cuba, East Timor, Afghanistan, . . . the list goes on and on. Indeed, for a time in the 1990s Egeland was the Forrest Gump of post-Cold War diplomacy, always showing up at the hot spot of the moment. His fellow Norwegians eventually tired of all this peacemaking, however, and in 1997 threw the Labor party out of power and Egeland out of a job. He was undeterred. I guess you could say I'm going to be a freelancer for peace, he told the Associated Press.
Egeland's big break as a freelancer came in 1999, when U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan named him special adviser to the secretary general on international assistance to Colombia. His mission: End the civil war pitting the Colombian government against the left-wing FARC. It was a tall order, but a New York Times profile at the time said Egeland has emerged as a trusted intermediary between the Colombian government and left-wing guerrilla groups.
Yet Egeland spent most of his time on the job lowering expectations. We have no formal third party role vis-à-vis the Colombian conflict, nor are we seeking one, he said. And he went on: It may be premature to say that we are facilitating any kind of peace process because none of the parties have asked anyone to really play that kind of an activist role.
And Egeland was right. Four years later, he would tell reporters that Colombia was the biggest humanitarian problem, human rights problem, the biggest conflict in the Western hemisphere. By then, of course, he had been promoted--not once, but twice, first to head the Norwegian Red Cross, then to his current post as U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs.
His record at the U.N. has been mixed. On the plus side of the ledger, Egeland campaigned against U.N. withdrawal from Iraq after the August 2003 bombing of the U.N. offices in Baghdad. And he spent much of 2004 drawing attention to the crisis in Darfur, going so far as to call the Islamist Sudanese government's war against Christians and animists ethnic cleansing. (The U.S. government has classified what is taking place in Darfur as genocide.)
Egeland's first major crisis on the job was the earthquake in Bam, Iran, in late 2003. At the time, Egeland held many meetings, and announced that donors had pledged an unprecedented amount of aid. Nevertheless, according to Egeland's own agency, 155,000 Iranians still live in tents or temporary shelters one year later.
So it is worth asking what exactly a chief U.N. relief coordinator spends his time coordinating. I wish I knew the answer, Joshua Muravchik, who studies the U.N. at the American Enterprise Institute, told me. They often say they are 'coordinating' the efforts of others. What this consists of . . . I wonder.
Perhaps Egeland, who did not return phone calls for this article, has the answer. Perhaps someone should ask him. He is not hard to find. Just look wherever there is trouble, and there he'll be--planted firmly in front of the nearest available television camera.
Matthew Continetti is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.