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Refugees at Levels Not Seen Since World War II U.N. Reports Sharp Increase in Refugees as Civil Wars Cripple Nations
(about 7 hours later)
GENEVA — The number of people displaced by violent conflict hit the highest level since World War II at the end of 2013, the head of the United Nations refugee agency, António Guterres, said in a report released on Friday, warning, “Peace is dangerously in deficit.” In Central African Republic, they ran from home and slept under the trees. In Colombia, they dared not return to their villages. From Syria, they fled by the hundreds of thousands, escaping barrel bombs and summary executions.
Pushed up dramatically by the war in Syria, the total number of people displaced by violence reached more than 51 million at the end of 2013, according to the agency’s annual Global Trends report. This included 33.3 million people who fled violence but remained in their own country and 16.7 million refugees who fled to neighboring countries, it said. Civil war had forced a staggering 51 million people worldwide to leave home by the end of 2013, according to the United Nations, and that was before they started fleeing Iraq in droves last week as fighters from a Sunni extremist group swept through the north.
“We are not facing an increasing trend, we are really facing a quantum leap,” Mr. Guterres told reporters in Geneva, noting that close to 11 million people were newly displaced in 2013. Half the world’s population of displaced people are children, he added, the highest level in a decade. According to the United Nations annual report released Friday, most of the forcibly displaced worldwide are homeless in their own countries and are known as internally displaced persons. An additional 16.7 million people are refugees in another land.
“There is no humanitarian response able to solve the problems of so many people,” he warned. “It’s becoming more and more difficult to find the capacity and resources to deal with so many people in such tragic circumstances.” Astonishingly, half are children.
The number of refugees who had fled across borders by the end of 2013 was a fraction of the tens of millions of refugees left at the end of World War II and lower even than in 1993, when conflicts in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Mozambique swelled the global refugee population to over 16 million, refugee agency records show. Although the refugee numbers were higher after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, what distinguishes this report is the sharp increase in the ranks of the internally displaced since their numbers began to be tallied about 20 years ago.
But when combined with those fleeing to other places within their own countries to escape violence, the total number of displaced people reached a level unprecedented since the war, said Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the refugee agency. Syrians today make up the single largest group of internally displaced persons, with 6.5 million displaced within the country by the end of 2013. In Colombia, although bitter rebellion is on the wane, 5.4 million remain displaced, and another 3 million in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The agency looked at records from the wars in Korea, the Middle East, Vietnam and southern Asia and found that “none had comparable levels of displacement” with what the agency is now reporting, Mr. Edwards said. It is the war in Syria that most dramatically illustrates how quickly a country’s fate can be upended by civil war. In 2008, it was the world’s second largest refugee-hosting country. By 2013, it was the world’s second largest refugee-producing country. The vast majority of Syrian refugees have poured into Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, while another 6.5 million remain displaced inside Syria’s borders, including those who remain beyond the reach of humanitarian agencies.
Alexander Betts, a professor of refugee studies at Oxford University, said in a telephone interview, “It’s certainly an unprecedented number since the end of World War II.” He added that the total reflected shifts in the patterns of conflict and in counting methodologies. In the postwar and Cold War years, when conflicts were largely between states, international agencies counted as refugees only those fleeing across borders. “There is no humanitarian response able to solve the problems of so many people,” the United Nations refugee agency’s head, Antonio Guterres, warned in a news conference in Geneva. “It’s becoming more and more difficult to find the capacity and resources to deal with so many people in such tragic circumstances.”
Internally displaced populations were not counted until the early 1990s, when the United Nations refugee agency recognized them as an area of concern. Until 2005, the number of internally displaced hovered around the five million mark, agency records show. But it has risen dramatically with a sharp escalation of internal insurgencies in this century. Close to 11 million people were newly displaced last year, the report noted. Conflicts this year in the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Ukraine and now Iraq threaten to push levels of displacement even higher by the end of this year, Mr. Guterres added.
Africa, which with Syria accounts for most of the world’s internally displaced, had more continuing conflicts in 2012 than at any other time since World War II, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center in Geneva reported last year. The number more than doubled in four years, from 15 million people in 2009 to more than 33 million in 2013. “The 2013 levels of forcible displacement were the highest since at least 1989, the first year that comprehensive statistics on global forced displacement existed,” the report states.
Conflicts this year in the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Ukraine and now Iraq threaten to push levels of displacement even higher by the end of 2014, Mr. Guterres said. In 2013, Afghans, Syrians and Somalis accounted for more than half the total number of refugees. Most refugees worldwide do not end up in the world’s rich countries. Pakistan and Iran hosted the largest numbers of refugees, with 1.6 million and nearly 900,000 respectively, from a succession of wars in Afghanistan over the last 35 years. Syria’s neighbors too have felt the strain of so many newcomers over the last three years.
“The international community today has very limited capacity to prevent conflicts and to find timely solutions,” Mr. Guterres said. “We see the Security Council paralyzed in many crucial crises.” Money for humanitarian aid lags behind. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said this week that it had asked donor countries for a record $16.9 billion this year, with the largest single share of that for Syria. Only 30 percent of that had come in.
To make matters worse, the consequences of past conflicts “never seem to die,” Mr. Guterres said. Over six million people have been in exile for five years or more, and the number of refugees returning to their countries in 2013, 414,000, was one of the lowest in years, the refugee agency reported. Just 98,400 people were taken in for resettlement by other countries. Humanitarian organizations that cater to the needs of the displaced find new challenges. For instance, said Sophie Delaunay, the executive director of the United States chapter of Doctors Without Borders, heightened insecurity had increasingly made it difficult for aid workers to reach the displaced in places like South Sudan and Syria. “Either they are stuck or NGOs can’t go because it’s too risky,” she said.
In addition to refugees, more than 1.1 million people applied for asylum in 2013, the highest number in a decade, Mr. Guterres reported. Other times, she added, there are remarkably few aid agencies that operate even in accessible places where huge numbers of displaced people congregate, like the airport in Bangui, the capital of Central African Republic.
He was quick to puncture any illusion that developed countries of the North were hosting most of the world’s refugees, despite mounting anxiety in Western countries over the flow of migrants to their shores. The movements of refugees are a glimpse into the trouble spots of the world. In 1975, the agency counted just over 3.6 million refugees, with the largest number from Ethiopia. By 1992, there were nearly 18 million refugees worldwide, with over 4 million of them from Afghanistan alone. By 2004, the total number had dipped to about nine million, but by then refugees from Darfur had begun to flee Sudan.
“The truth is that 86 percent of the world’s refugees are living in developing countries,” he said, a much higher proportion than 10 years ago. “The trend is not only to have more and more refugees but more and more refugees in the developing world.” The shifting flows of the displaced reflect also the changing pattern of war, which has gone from pitting countries against each other to warring factions vying for control within countries, often with guns and gunmen from abroad, as in the case of both Congo and Syria. “The nature of displacement is very different,” said Alexander Betts, a professor of refugee studies at Oxford, in a telephone interview. “The cases of displacement are very different, and the needs of the displaced population are very different.”
The total number of refugees also include the long-term displaced, like the five million Palestinians who were uprooted starting in 1948. Also among the 51 million are over a million asylum seekers, the largest numbers of them in Germany, the United States and South Africa.