Devastating conflicts, violence and persecution in places such as Syria and South Sudan had left a record 65.6 million people uprooted from their homes by the end of last year, the UN said yesterday.
That number marks a jump of just 300,000 from the end of 2015, but is more than 6 million higher than at the end of 2014, according to a fresh report published by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
This is “the highest figure since we started recording these figures,” High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi told reporters ahead of the report launch.
“By any measure, this is an unacceptable number, and it speaks louder than ever to the need for solidarity and common purpose in preventing and resolving crises,” he said.
The figures released ahead of World Refugee Day showed that 10.3 million of the world’s displaced people fled their homes last year alone, including 3.4 million who crossed international borders to become refugees.
“This equates to one person becoming displaced every 3 seconds — less than the time it takes to read this sentence,” the agency said in a statement.
Most people who have been forced from their homes flee within their own country and are defined as internally displaced people.
At the end of last year, there were about 40.3 million internally displaced people in the world, slightly down from 2015’s 40.8 million, with Syria, Iraq and Colombia accounting for the greatest numbers, the report said.
Another 22.5 million people — half of them children — were registered as refugees last year, the report said, adding that this is “the highest level ever recorded.”
Syria’s six-year conflict alone has sent more than 5.5 million people seeking safety in other countries, including 825,000 last year alone, making it the world’s biggest producer of refugees.
Along with the 6.3 million Syrians displaced inside the country, these numbers show that a nearly two thirds of all Syrians have been forced from their homes, the report said.
As the Syrian civil war rages on, desperately needed funding for humanitarian aid in the country has begun to dwindle, Grandi said, adding that very little of the billions promised at an international donor’s conference in Brussels in April had so far materialized.
The Syrian conflict, which has killed more than 320,000 people, “is becoming a forgotten crisis,” he said.
Grandi voiced most alarm over the rapidly deteriorating situation in South Sudan, which he said is the world’s “fastest growing refugee crisis and displacement crisis.”
South Sudan’s civil war, which began in December 2013, has left tens of thousands dead and forced a total of 3.7 million people from their homes — nearly one-third of the population.
Overall, the refugee population from the world’s youngest country swelled 85 percent last year to reach 1.4 million by the end of last year, the report showed.
That number has ballooned by a further half million people since then, the agency said, stressing the most of the refugees had left since the “disastrous breakdown of peace efforts” in July last year.
Syria and South Sudan were far from the only countries where people were being uprooted en masse, with the report also pointing to large-scale displacement in Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan, to name a few.
In addition, nearly 70 years after Palestinians first fled today’s Israel, about 5.3 million Palestinians are living as refugees — the highest level ever recorded, the agency said.
The report also said that, despite huge focus on Europe’s migrant crisis, it is poorer countries that host most of the world’s refugees.
A full 84 percent of refugees are living in low and middle-income countries, the agency said, blaming this “huge imbalance” on “the continuing lack of consensus internationally when it comes to refugee hosting and the proximity of many poor countries to regions of conflict.”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is in “excellent health” and fit for the presidency, according to a medical report published by the White House on Saturday as she challenged her rival, former US president Donald Trump, to publish his own health records. “Vice President Harris remains in excellent health,” her physician Joshua Simmons said in the report, adding that she “possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.” Speaking to reporters ahead of a trip to North Carolina, Harris called Trump’s unwillingness to publish his records “a further example
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
RSS