World's displaced over 50 million: UN
AP June 21, 2014, 9:22 am
For the first time since World War II, the number of people forced from their homes worldwide has surged past 50 million, the United Nations refugee agency says.
Syrians fleeing the devastating civil war and a fast-growing web of other world crises accounted for the spike in the displaced, the UNHCR said in its annual Global Trends Report released on Friday.
At the end of last year, 51.2 million people had been forced from their homes worldwide, the highest figure of displacement since World War II, said the UNHCR.
That's six million more people than at the end of the previous year, reflecting a collective failure to resolve longstanding conflicts or prevent the eruption of new ones, the head of the UN refugee agency said in announcing the report.
"The world has shown a limited capacity to prevent conflicts and to find a timely solution for them," said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres.
"Today, we not only have an absence of a global governance system, but we have sort of an unclear sense of power in the world," Guterres told reporters in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, where the global report was launched.
The latest figures do not include the half million people believed to have fled violence in Iraq over the past week.
The massive increase was mainly driven by Syria's civil war. By the end of last year, 2.5 million Syrians had become refugees in neighbouring countries and more than 6.5 million had been displaced within Syria, the UN agency said.
The daunting numbers - which are straining the resources of host countries and aid organisations alike - also are a stark reflection of the ongoing conflicts and persecution in other countries, including the Central African Republic and South Sudan.
"These numbers represent a quantum leap in forced displacement around the world," Guterres said.
"For the first time since the second world war, we had in 2013 more than 50 million people displaced by conflict and persecution either crossing borders or within the borders of their countries."
Aid agencies have struggled to keep pace with worsening conflicts in Syria, the Central African Republic and South Sudan, and on Friday the World Food Program, a UN agency, said it was forced to cut rations to refugees in several countries.
"We are being squeezed, other UN agencies are increasingly squeezed, NGOs are squeezed," spokesman Peter Smerdon told The Associated Press.
"This means that ultimately the poor, the most vulnerable, the innocent civilians who have escaped conflicts with their lives and reached refuge in a country which is at peace, they will suffer because their assistance cannot be delivered."
The over-50-million number includes refugees and asylum-seekers who fled abroad as well as people displaced within their own countries. The data was compiled from government, non-government partner organisations and UNHCR's own records.
