Record numbers of displaced
Print Edition
THE number of people forcibly displaced across the world is likely to have “far surpassed” a record 60 million this year, mainly driven by the Syrian war and other protracted conflicts, the United Nations said yesterday.
The estimated figure includes 20.2 million refugees fleeing wars and persecution, the most since 1992, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, said in a report.
Nearly 2.5 million asylum seekers have requests pending, with Germany, Russia and the United States receiving the highest numbers of the nearly one million new claims lodged in the first half of the year, it said.
“2015 is on track to see worldwide forced displacement exceeding 60 million for the first time — 1 in every 122 humans is today someone who has been forced to flee their home,” it said. The total at the end of 2014 was 59.5 million.
An estimated 34 million people were internally displaced as of the middle of the year, about 2 million more than at the same time in 2014. Yemen, where civil war erupted in March, reported the highest number of newly uprooted people at 933,500.
“Never has there been a greater need for tolerance, compassion and solidarity with people who have lost everything,” Guterres said.
Developing countries bordering conflict zones still host the lion’s share of the refugees, the report said, warning about growing “resentment” and “politicization of refugees.”
The report, based on official figures before the influx of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean to reach Europe peaked in October, extrapolates from trends to estimate the global total.
Syria’s civil war that began in 2011 has been the main driver of mass displacement, with more than 4.2 million Syrian refugees having fled abroad and 7.6 million uprooted within their shattered homeland as of the middle of the year, Guterres said.
Together, nationals of Syria and Ukraine, where a separatist rebellion in the east erupted in April 2014, accounted for half of the 839,000 people who became refugees in the first half of 2015, his report said.
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