‘Refugee figures hit high record’

BEIJING. — On the eve of World Refugee Day, the UN refugee agency warned of “a record high” of nearly 60 million homeless refugees amid increasing global conflicts.

According to data gathered by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) over the course of 2014, the number of people forcibly displaced during the reporting year swelled to a staggering 59,5 million compared to 51,2 million from the previous year.

The figures, collected by the UN agency for its latest “Global Trends: World at War,” suggest that one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. If this were the population of a country, says the UNHCR, it would be the world’s 24th largest.

“We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres declared in a press release issued last Thursday.

“It is terrifying that on the one hand there is more and more impunity for those starting conflicts, and on the other there is seeming utter inability of the international community to work together to stop wars and build and preserve peace,” he said.

The UNHCR report noted that in the past five years, at least 15 conflicts have erupted or reignited.

In Africa, the outbursts of hostilities, many of which are sectarian in nature, have consumed eight countries, including Cote d’Ivoire, the Central African Republic, Libya, Mali, north-eastern Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and, more recently, Burundi, said the report.

In the Middle East, Syria, Iraq and Yemen remain ablaze while, in Europe, Ukraine has spawned a displacement crisis subsuming more than 1,3 million people, mostly across the country’s eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, said the report.

In Asia, meanwhile, the unresolved tensions in Kyrgyzstan and in several areas of Myanmar and Pakistan, continue to force people across the countries’ borders, it said.

The plethora of crises and conflicts, said the UN report, has also provoked a dangerous and worsening trend in irregular migration as millions of refugees around the world are pushed into an uncomfortable and deadly dynamic with human traffickers and smugglers as they seek passage to safety.

The overall forced displacement numbers in Europe for the 2014 reporting period totalled an overwhelming 6,7 million, while the numbers of internally displaced in Asia grew 31 percent to 9 million people in 2014.

Alarming figures released by the UNHCR also showed that over half of the world’s total refugees are children.”

For an age of unprecedented mass displacement, we need an unprecedented humanitarian response and a renewed global commitment to tolerance and protection for people fleeing conflict and persecution,” said Guterres. — Xinhua.