Thread: 60 MILLION People Fleeing Chaotic Lands, U.N. Says

60 Million People Fleeing Chaotic Lands, U.N. Says

By SOMINI SENGUPTA JUNE 18, 2015



Syrian children crossing into Turkey this week. The U.N. says the war in Syria is the world's biggest source of displacement.
Credit Bulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


UNITED NATIONS — Nearly 60 million people have been driven from their homes by war and persecution, an unprecedented global exodus that has burdened fragile countries with waves of newcomers and littered deserts and seas with the bodies of those who died trying to reach safety.

The new figures, released Thursday by the United Nations refugee agency, paint a staggering picture of a world where new conflicts are erupting and old ones are refusing to subside, driving up the total number of displaced people to a record 59.5 million by the end of 2014, the most recent year tallied.

Half of the displaced are children.

Nearly 14 million people were newly displaced in 2014, according to the annual report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In other words, tens of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes every day and “seek protection elsewhere” last year, the report found.

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That included 11 million people who scattered within the borders of their own countries, the highest figure ever recorded in the agency’s 50-year history.

Tens of millions of others fled in previous years and remain stuck, sometimes for decades, unable to go home or find a permanent new one, according to the refugee agency. They include the more than 2.5 million displaced in the Darfur region of Sudan, and the 1.5 million Afghans still living in Pakistan.

When refugees flee their own countries, most of them wind up in the world’s less-developed nations, with Turkey, Iran and Pakistan hosting the largest numbers.

One in four refugees now finds shelter in the world’s poorest countries, with Ethiopia and Kenya taking many more refugees than, say, Britain and France.

As the report states, “the global distribution of refugees remains heavily skewed away from wealthier nations and towards the less wealthy.”

Even so, there has been a sharp backlash in European capitals against the waves of people coming across the Mediterranean Sea, including many who are fleeing conflict and repression in countries like Syria and Eritrea.

For now, the European Union has shelved its plans to get approval from the United Nations Security Council to target human smugglers who operate in lawless Libya and to destroy the ships they use to bring migrants across the sea.

Instead, the European Union is scheduled to meet on Monday to discuss whether it will start military operations in the international waters of the Mediterranean Sea, for which it does not need the Council’s blessings.

European Union leaders are still squabbling with one another over how to split up at least 40,000 asylum seekers across their 28 member states. And they have stepped up search-and-rescue operations after intense public pressure stemming from a sharp increase in the deaths of migrants crossing the Mediterranean this year.

Australia has felt no such compunction. Its prime minister, Tony Abbott, has pledged to turn around migrant boats before they enter Australian territorial waters, including those with minority Rohingyas fleeing persecution in Myanmar. His administration faces scrutiny over allegations that it paid smugglers to turn a boat back to Indonesia after it was intercepted on the high seas.

“For an age of unprecedented mass displacement, we need an unprecedented humanitarian response and a renewed global commitment to tolerance and protection for people fleeing conflict and persecution,” António Guterres, the high commissioner for refugees, said in a statement accompanying the annual report.

Amnesty International, in a report issued this week, accused governments and smugglers alike of pursuing “selfish political interests instead of showing basic human compassion.”
The United States offers permanent resettlement to roughly 70,000 refugees each year, though its plans to admit 2,000 Syrian refugees this year have drawn scrutiny from Republican lawmakers who worry that some among them might be terrorists.

The war in Syria is the largest source of displacement. By the end of 2014, 7.6 million Syrians were displaced within the country itself, and nearly another 3.9 million were refugees living outside the war-torn nation.

But Syria is the not the only country where conflict is forcing people to flee. The latest of 15 new conflicts to erupt in the last five years have arisen in Burundi and Yemen.

Older conflicts, like the ones in Somalia and Afghanistan, are nowhere close to a lasting peace, which means that refugees and internally displaced people remain in limbo for years.

The agency said that in 2014, fewer than 127,000 refugees returned home, the lowest number in 31 years.

Those who live in refugee camps are extremely vulnerable to hunger, unemployment and sexual violence, if they make it to one at all.

“We don’t have the capacity and we don’t have the resources to support all the victims of conflict around the world and to provide them with the very minimal level of protection and assistance,” Mr. Guterres told reporters in Geneva on Tuesday.

The nearly 60 million displaced people across the globe are, of course, not the only ones who have left their homes because of hardship. The refugee agency’s numbers include only those who say they have fled conflict and persecution, not poverty or lack of economic opportunity.

Often, refugee experts say, life is more complicated than that. People flee their homes for a host of entangled reasons, including hunger, gang violence, or even the havoc climate change wreaks on local economies.

Many migrants who are not strictly fleeing conflict take as many risks in their search for a better life.

Over the weekend came evidence of how dangerous their journey can be. The International Organization for Migration said on Wednesday that it had found the remains of more than two dozen people, mostly West Africans, who apparently got lost in a sandstorm in Niger and then died of heat and thirst near the border with Algeria.

European Union officials, including the bloc’s foreign minister, Federica Mogherini, met with African foreign ministers in Brussels on Wednesday to discuss ways to help countries of the region tackle migration and youth unemployment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/wo...s-un-says.html

The governments of these countries need to held accountable. Cut off their foreign aid, it only goes into the pockets of the government officials and into Swiss bank accounts Afghanistan is a perfect example. The UN has become nothing but a power aspiring and worthless organization. JMO

As a young man I held high hopes for the UN. I would say that the headline (60 million people fleeing chaotic lands) alone is adequate to prove the UN a failed experiment.

I do not think when any one of 5 nations have veto power that you can achieve world wide harmony.

Record 60 million forced to flee war, violence

By AFP
PUBLISHED: 10:59 EST, 18 June 2015 | UPDATED: 10:59 EST, 18 June 2015

The number of people forced to flee war, violence and persecution has soared to a record 60 million, half of them children, the United Nations said Thursday, warning that the situation was raging out of control.

The huge tide of displaced people has grown by 8.3 million since 2013 -- the highest-ever increase in a single year, the UN refugee agency said in a report titled "World at War".

The situation is "getting out of control simply because the world seems to be at war," UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told reporters ahead of the launch of the annual report.



+4Syrians fleeing the war pass through broken down border fences to enter Turkish territory illegally, near the Turkish Akcakale border crossing in the southeastern Sanliurfa province, on June 14, 2015 ©Bulent Kilic (AFP)

"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," he warned in the report, saying the crisis needed an "unprecedented humanitarian response".

The number of displaced stood at 59.5 million worldwide at the end of 2014, "as a result of persecution, conflict, generalised violence, or human rights violations", the report said.

Last year alone, an estimated 13.9 million people were displaced -- or a startling 42,500 a day.

More than half of the world's refugees are children, up from 41 percent in 2009, while the total number of people who fled their homes has spiked by 40 percent in just three years.

If the world's displaced people were lumped together as a nation, it would be the 24th largest with a population similar to Italy.

Of the total, 19.5 million were refugees, 1.8 million were asylum seekers and 38.2 million had fled their homes but stayed in their country, the report said.

- Can't 'pick up pieces' -

Guterres said the conflicts in Syria and Iraq alone had sent 15 million people from their homes.

But they are far from the only wars forcing people to seek safe haven. In the last five years, at least 14 conflicts have erupted or resumed worldwide -- more than half of them in Africa.

"We do not have the capacity, the resources for all victims of conflicts. We are no longer able to pick up the pieces," the commissioner said.

The report said that in Europe, more than 219,000 refugees and migrants crossed the Mediterranean Sea during 2014.

"That's almost three times the previously known high of about 70,000, which took place in 2011," it report.

Despite fears expressed in European countries and other wealthy nations over the growing refugee and migrant influx, the report showed that developing countries were hosting 86 percent of all those who had fled war or persecution in their countries.

At the end of 2014, the world's top host for refugees was Turkey, sheltering 1.59 million people, followed by Pakistan (1.51 million) and Lebanon (1.15 million).

The number of Syrian refugees taking shelter in Turkey has further risen this year to more than 1.7 million, according to the latest UN data.

Speaking in Istanbul, Guterres urged the world, including Western states, to open up their borders and follow Turkey's "example" in hosting Syrian refugees.

He said Turkey's generosity has a special meaning in a world where "so many borders are closed or restricted and where new walls are being built or announced".

- 'Paradigm change' -

The report said continued turmoil in parts of North Africa following the Arab Spring uprisings that toppled several dictators saw huge numbers risking dangerous Mediterranean crossings to get to Europe.

UNHCR said it has received information of more than 3,500 women, men and children reported dead or missing in the Mediterranean Sea during 2014.

But EU leaders have so far failed to agree on how to deal with the massive influx of vulnerable people from the Middle East and Africa.

The Ukraine conflict meanwhile displaced over 800,000 within the country and sent well over 200,000 to Russia.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of refugees increased for the fifth consecutive year, to 3.7 million in 2014.

Guterres appealed to the world to loosen its purse strings and provide shelter to the displaced.

"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," he said.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp...e-2014-UN.html