A Record 38-million People Displaced

"This is the equivalent of the combined populations of New York City, London, Paris and Cairo grabbing what they can carry, often in a state of panic, and setting out on a journey filled with uncertainty."
"Put another way, around 66,000 people abandoned their homes every day of 2015."
Jan Egeland, the Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC)

"Having comprehensive and accurate figures is essential to efforts to alleviate the suffering and needs of tens of millions of highly vulnerable people. National governments have primary responsibility for collecting this data, and for protecting and assisting internally displaced people. Sadly, this responsibility is not fulfilled in many contexts."
"This report illustrates the many challenges to addressing this global crisis of internal displacement. It also highlights the glaring absence of political solutions to address displacement, and constitutes an important wake-up call to national governments and global policy-makers alike." 
"By reporting on all situations of internal displacement, regardless of their cause, our intention is to provide an ever more holistic picture of what has truly become a global crisis."
Alexandra Bilak, Director, IDMC [NRC's Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre] 

Photo: IDMC

What could appear more staggeringly tragic than to see the classic picture of people forced to abandon all they hold dear, their homes and neighbourhoods, jobs, schools, every element of comfort and security, leaving all their possessions behind to flee for their lives in the hope that they will find haven elsewhere. The bleakness and hopelessness of people trudging away from the familiar, from all they have worked to attain, leaving their aspirations behind in a bid to sustain their lives is heart-wrenching.

The warning issued by the humanitarian group to national leaders to pay attention to the needs of their populations is rather redundantly absurd under the circumstances where tyrants and their cohorts, where fanatical sectarian imperialism mandates that those not of their persuasion must die, where corrupt governments haven't a thought to spare for the welfare of the indigenous poverty-stricken, rule, and prosecute their wars. The plight of those they oppress is of no concern to them whatever; their obligation is only to their ruling aspirations.

According to the figures amassed for this major aid agency, the Norwegian Refugee Council, a truly staggering 38-million people globally have been internally displaced as a result of ongoing conflicts, along with the dislocation that occurs when natural disasters strike. This global crisis expresses the consequences of both conflict and nature delivering extenuating catastrophes in the space of a single year. Ten countries have been identified as being the source of the highest number of internally displaced people through conflict. Of that ten, five have been on the list annually since 2003.

Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, South Sudan and Sudan have taken their place on the list for the past dozen years. Natural disasters added to the fallout and displacement in 2015 that occurred in 113 countries with the numbers affected through internal displacement estimated at 19.2 million. In the space of the past eight years, according to the data released by the report, disaster-related displacements record a total of 203.4 million people. South and east Asia have been the most seriously affected. India, China and Nepal account for 3.7 million, 3.6 million and 2.6 million respectively.


Yemen, states the group's report, accounted for one quarter of conflict-related displacement globally in 2015, the result of the country's grip in yet another sectarian Muslim war, with the Shiite Houthi rebels, supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran, battling forces loyal to the internationally recognized government whom Saudi Arabia's intervention is supporting, in an obviously proxy war between the two regional sectarian antagonists, Iran and Saudi Arabia. In Yemen's case, 2.2 million people have been uprooted in that impoverished country.

Displaced people from the minority Yazidi sect, fleeing violence from forces loyal to Islamic State in Sinjar town, walk toward the Syrian border, on the outskirts of Sinjar mountain (Photo: Stringer Iraq / Reuters, August 2014).

Syria, with its 1.3 million displaced, and Iraq with 1.1 million, round out the top three conflict-riddled countries responsible for the greatest number of internally displaced. Which doesn't address those having left the geographic boundaries of their home countries to become refugees, currently flooding European nations in their attempts to escape the dysfunctional dangers of their countries mired in ongoing conflicts that have their genesis in tribal, sectarian antipathies leading to massively bloody assaults.

Nepal's earthquakes represented the dangers of geophysical hazards created by unsettling natural environments, while other weather-related hazards such as catastrophic storms and floods created their own issues of frantic internal displacements. Criminal violence in Mexico and Central America, tied to illegal drug cartels and prevailing corruption have been another source of internal displacement affecting an estimated million people.