This is an exceptional year for us, the international humanitarian
community.
It began as the horrific reality of the tsunami sank in. It
continued with a realisation that a food insecurity crisis in
Sahelian West Africa was turning into a famine. Then followed
the dramatic series of extreme hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico
and floods and devastating landslides in Central America.
And now we are struggling to provide relief in one of the logistically
most difficult operations ever in the northern mountainous region
of Pakistan. And looming is another type of natural disaster
- the threat that mutations in a virus will turn an epizootic
into a global human disaster.
The humanitarian community is a very stretched system today.
But this is only the tip of an ice-berg. What the world's public
has not seen are the untold smaller scale local disasters and
emergencies that affect the daily lives of communities in risky
and disaster prone environments across the world.
For every disaster that you will read about or see on TV, there
are nine others where local organisations such as the Red Cross
and Red Crescent with its volunteers will rescue and assist.
And without exception, it is the poorest of our brothers and
sisters who are the most affected, those with no margins, who
live in hazardous and exposed environments, who have no insurance
to protect them.
This we saw along the coasts devastated by the tsunami, in the
mountains of Pakistan and in the Super Dome in New Orleans.
And without exception, their poverty will only become deeper
and more desperate from these disasters.
This we cannot and should not accept. Every time it happens
we ask ourselves, what would have protected the victims from
such a tragic fate? What concrete and specific measures would
have saved their lives and property, their hopes and dreams?
To underline the seriousness of this question, I would like
to quote from the report of the United Nation's Special Representative
for the Human Rights of Internally Displaced, Prof Walter Kählin,
when he had visited Thailand and Sri Lanka after the tsunami.
He wrote: "Disaster risk reduction is not just a matter of good
governance, but is an issue of human rights of populations at
risk". "…national law should empower affected individuals to
assert these rights, for example, through mechanisms to claim
compensation where public officials have failed to take reasonable
measures to protect populations and prevent displacement due
to disasters."
That is how we should understand this issue - it is about the
protection and human rights of millions of people around the
world.
And we know what should be done. It is about building houses
that don't collapse on their inhabitants. It is about early
warning against real and present dangers. It is about knowing
what to do when the warning sounds.
But if it is that simple, why still these millions of victims
every year? Why these billions of dollars of losses? What is
needed to go the extra mile, to make a real difference?
Part of the answer is this: to make buildings withstand the
earthquake we need parliaments that legislate and establish
building codes, and we need honest and capable authorities that
will make sure that codes are enforced, and we need incentives
for ordinary people to want and afford safe houses, and we need
local people who will encourage and support their neighbours
to protect themselves and their children.
In other words, this is not a technical problem. We need advocacy,
we need accountability and transparency, and we need the local
capacity to act.
In all these aspects the Red Cross and Red Crescent plays a
role, at the local, at the national and at the global level.
But the whole point is that no actor and no part of society
can accomplish this alone.
We must have partnerships between governments, international
organisations, the aid community, science, media, civil society
and the private sector.
These partnerships must be based on the awareness from each
single actor of its contribution to the whole. It is not until
we have those partnerships that we can make a real difference.
I hope and trust that this Symposium will help us make that
difference.
I would like to conclude by informing you of the outcome of
the General Assembly of the International Federation, just concluded
in Seoul, South Korea.
Against the kind of background that I have described here, the
Assembly adopted a Global Agenda, with the primary goal to "reduce
deaths, injuries and impact of disasters on peoples' lives".
In order to achieve this, two things are needed. First, we must
scale up the many successful community-based disaster reduction
projects that we now conduct around the world. We must bring
them to another level. Second, we must enter into new partnerships,
into new operational alliances.
That is why I would like to invite Munich Re and other organisations
represented here to work with us, to scale up and to achieve
our primary goal, to reduce deaths, injuries and impact of disasters
on peoples' lives.
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