Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people fleeing war and persecution continued rising last year, with global displacement climbing to more than 82 million people — double the figure a decade ago, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said yesterday.
The refugee agency said in a report that global displacement figures swelled by about 3 million last year, following record-breaking numbers in 2019, leaving a full 1 percent of humanity uprooted and displaced.
The report highlighted how drawn-out crises like those in Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen were continuing to force people to flee, while eruptions of violence in places like Ethiopia and Mozambique were causing surging displacement.
The fact that the numbers rose for the ninth straight year was all the more devastating because COVID-19 restrictions had been expected to limit displacement.
During the pandemic, “everything else has stopped, including the economies, but wars and conflict and violence and discrimination and persecution, all the factors that pushed these people to flee, have continued,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said.
The agency found that by the end of last year, a record 82.4 million people were living as refugees or asylum seekers, or in so-called internal displacement within their own countries, up from some 40 million in 2011.
Forty-two percent of the world’s displaced are under the age of 18, it found.
“The tragedy of so many children being born into exile should be reason enough to make far greater efforts to prevent and end conflict and violence,” Grandi said.
About 26.4 million people were living as refugees at the end of last year, including 5.7 million Palestinians.
About 3.9 million Venezuelans were also displaced beyond their borders without being considered refugees, while 4.1 million people were registered worldwide as asylum seekers.
While refugee and asylum seeker numbers remained relatively flat from 2019, the number of people displaced within their own countries surged by more than 2 million to 48 million, the report said.
This was perhaps not surprising, given that the factors that generally force people to flee did not disappear during the pandemic, but the possibility to cross borders largely did.
Last year, at least 164 countries closed their borders because of COVID-19, and more than half of them made no exceptions for asylum seekers and refugees fleeing for their lives.
“In a situation of increased conflict and violence, in a situation in which borders have been difficult to cross because of COVID, inevitably the figure ... that has gone up is that of internally displaced people,” Grandi said.
Last year, more than 11 million people were newly displaced — slightly more than in 2019 — with most in just a handful of conflict-wracked countries and regions, the report showed.
They include Syria, which after more than a decade of war counts 13.5 million people displaced either inside or outside the country — more than half of its population and a sixth of the global displacement total.
More than two-thirds of the world’s refugees meanwhile come from just five countries: Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Myanmar.
A number of new crises have also sparked significant displacement, the report said, pointing to Ethiopia’s violence-hit Tigray region, which accounted for an exodus into Sudan of more 54,000 people in the final months of last year alone.
Hundreds of thousands of people also fled violence in northern Mozambique, while hundreds of thousands more were freshly displaced in Africa’s restive Sahel region.
The vast majority of the world’s refugees are hosted in countries neighboring crisis areas, mainly in poorer parts of the world.
Turkey remained the host of the world’s largest refugee population totaling some 3.7 million, followed by Colombia with 1.7 million, Pakistan and Uganda with 1.4 million each, and Germany with 1.2 million.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion