FEATURED IMAGE above shows a Yemeni refugee family in Darwin Camp Photo Credit: UNHCR/Yahya Arhab
The number of refugees and displaced people spiraled to unprecedented 65.3 million last year, the United Nations said in another grim milestone for suffering humanity amid anti-refugee rhetoric, barbed fences, xenophobic walls and political failure to end wars and persecution.
Six in ten Syrians are now displaced, seeking asylum or refuge as the lingering conflict continues to scar civilizational progress. Between 2014 and 2015 more than five million more people were pushed out of their homes, the UN refugee agency’s The Global Trends report documented.
While some countries like Canada, Germany and Turkey have shown the brighter side of humanity with their generous hosting of the refugees, countries in Eastern Europe, the Gulf and elsewhere have faltered badly with apathetic response to refugee crisis. Even in the United States President Barack Obama’s plan to take in more refugees has been blunted by political opposition in the election year. Washington has also been facing criticism for not doing enough to stop Bashar al Assad’s genocide of Syrians.
According to the sobering UNHCR report, 65 million figure comprises 21.3 million refugees, 3.2 million asylum seekers, and 40.8 million people internally displaced within their own countries. Measured against the world’s population of 7.4 billion people, one in every 113 people globally is now either a refugee, an asylum-seeker or internally displaced – putting them at a level of risk for which UNHCR knows no precedent.
Some of the details that must rouse the world out of inaction follow, as released by the United Nations.
On average, 24 people were forced to flee each minute in 2015, four times more than a decade earlier, when six people fled every 60 seconds. Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia produce half the world’s refugees, at 4.9 million, 2.7 million and 1.1 million, respectively.
Colombia had the largest numbers of internally displaced people (IDPs), at 6.9 million, followed by Syria’s 6.6 million and Iraq’s 4.4 million.
While the spotlight last year was on Europe’s challenge to manage more than one million refugees and migrants who arrived via the Mediterranean, the report shows that the vast majority of the world’s refugees were in developing countries in the global south.
In all, 86 per cent of the refugees under UNHCR’s mandate in 2015 were in low- and middle-income countries close to situations of conflict
Worldwide, Turkey was the largest host country, with 2.5 million refugees. In terms of the refugee-to-population ratio, Lebanon has the highest proportion, with nearly one refugee for every five citizens.
Distressingly, children made up an astonishing 51 per cent of the world’s refugees in 2015, with many separated from their parents or travelling alone, UNHCR said.
“Our responses to refugees must be grounded in our shared values of responsibility sharing, non-discrimination, and human rights and in international refugee law, including the principle of non-refoulement,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki moon said. “World Refugee Day is a moment for taking stock of the devastating impact of war and persecution on the lives of those forced to flee, and honouring their courage and resilience,” he added.
Last year, more than one million refugees and migrants arrived in Europe across the Mediterranean, in unseaworthy dinghies and flimsy boats. “Thousands did not make it – tragic testimony to our collective failure to properly address their plight,” the UN chief said.
He stressed that meanwhile, “divisive political rhetoric on asylum and migration issues, rising xenophobia, and restrictions on access to asylum have become increasingly visible in certain regions, and the spirit of shared responsibility has been replaced by a hate-filled narrative of intolerance.
“With anti-refugee rhetoric so loud, it is sometimes difficult to hear the voices of welcome. But these do exist, all around the world,” he said, acknowledging an extraordinary outpouring of compassion and solidarity shown by host communities.
Meanwhile UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, said that each year, UNHCR seeks to find a glimmer of hope in the global statistics, but “this year the hopeful signs are hard to find.”
He warned that instead of burden sharing, nations are closing their borders and that instead of political will, there is political paralysis. And humanitarian organizations like his are left to deal with the consequences, while at the same time struggling to save lives on limited budgets.
Yet, there is cause for hope. Citing host communities, individuals, and families opening their homes, he said “these ordinary people see refugees not as beggars, competitors for jobs, or terrorists – but as people like you or me whose lives have been disrupted by war.”
“UNHCR sees 2016 as a watershed moment for the refugee cause,” he stressed.
“World leaders can no longer watch passively as so many lives are needlessly lost,” he said.
Mogens Lykketoft, UN General Assembly President, said the numbers do little justice to the pain and trauma that this crisis is causing for individual women, men and children across our world.
“They fail to capture the hardship of those who flee and the fear of those who wait anxiously behind. They fail to capture the hopelessness of those held in detention centres or the final thoughts of those lost at sea without even a whisper,” he said.
