Refugee report big ‘wake-up call’

– Confl icts in places like Syria and Ukraine have displaced a record 38 million people inside their own countries, equivalent to the total populations of New York, London and Beijing, a watchdog group said yesterday.

Nearly one third of them – about 11 million people – were displaced last year, with an average of 30 000 people fleeing their homes every day, the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) said in a report.

“These are the worst figures for forced displacement in a generation, signalling our complete failure to protect innocent civilians,” said Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which is behind the IDMC.

Internally displaced people (IDPs) are those who remain in their homeland but are forced to leave their homes, as opposed to refugees, who flee across borders.

There are nearly twice as many IDPs in the world as refugees, the IDMC report said, without providing an exact figure for refugees.

According to the UN, 16.7 million people were living as refugees worldwide at the end of 2013.

The numbers of people internally displaced last year marked a 14% rise over the year before and dwarfed figures seen at the peak of the Darfur crisis in 2004, the spiralling violence in Iraq in the mid-2000s, or after the Arab Spring in 2011, the IDMC said.

“This report should be a tremendous wake-up call,” Egeland said.

About 60% of newly displaced people last year were in just five countries: Iraq, South Sudan, Syria, Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria. Iraq was the hardest hit, with 2.2 million people forced to flee from areas seized by the brutal Islamic State group. – AFP

Geneva