Life’s no walk in the park for Africans displaced in ‘often overlooked’ conflicts
NAIROBI: Sub-Saharan Africa had 3.7 million refugees, and 11.4 million inter nally displaced persons (IDPs), 4.5 million of whom were newly displaced last year, the UN refugee agency says.
According to a 2014 report from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) received yesterday, the refugees were primarily from Somalia (753 000), Sudan (627 000), South Sudan (615 300), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (487 800), the Central African Republic (410 400), and Eritrea (239 600).
The figures, collected by the UN agency for its latest Global Trends: World at War report, show a 17 percent overall increase in the number of refugees. They exclude Nigeria, while Ethiopia has replaced Kenya as the largest refugeehosting country in Africa and the fifth-largest worldwide.
“We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said in a statement.
According to the report, often-overlooked, Africa’s many conflicts, including those in Central African Republic, South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, the DRC and elsewhere, produced immense forced displacement totals last year, on a scale only marginally lower than in the Middle East.
Globally, the number of people forcibly displaced during the reporting year swelled to a staggering 59.5 million compared with 51.2 million the previous year.
The report suggests one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum.
“With huge shortages of funding and wide gaps in the global regime for protecting victims of war, people in need of compassion, aid and refuge are being abandoned,” Guterres said.
The report notes the outbreak of violence in South Sudan triggered a major outflow into neighbouring countries. The overall number of South Sudanese refugees grew from 114 400 to 616 200 in 12 months.
By the end of last year, those fleeing South Sudan had found refuge predominantly in Ethiopia (251 800), Uganda (157 100), Sudan (115 500), and Kenya (89 200). As a result, South Sudan has become the fifth-largest source country of refugees worldwide.
The plethora of crises and conflict has provoked a dangerous and worsening trend in irregular migration as millions worldwide are pushed into an uncomfortable, deadly dynamic with human traffickers as they seek safe passage.
Sea crossings from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe have surged, with official figures on June 8 showing 103 000 refugees and migrants had arrived in Europe. – Xinhua