War and persecution driving people from their homes

A new United Nations (UN) report said wars and persecution have driven more people from their homes than any time before since the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) started to keep records. The UN Refugee Agency released the report on June 20, 2016 marking the World Refugee Day 2016. The UN said the number of refugees and others fleeing their homes worldwide hit a new record, spiking to 65.3 million by the end of 2015.
The report, titled Global Trends, noted that on an average 24 people were forced to flee their homes in each minute of 2015, four times more than a decade earlier, when six people fled every 60 seconds. Bangladesh is home to 32,000 documented Rohingya refugees and they have taken shelter in two camps in the southeastern district of Cox's Bazar. But, their number is dwarfed by the almost 300,000 who are living illegally in the district, according to the primary results of government census, held from February 1 to 23, 2016 to identify Rohingya families in Bangladesh.
The detailed study, which tracks forced displacement worldwide based on data from governments, partner agencies and UNHCR's own reporting, found a total of 65.3 million people displaced at the end of 2015, compared to 59.5 million just 12 months earlier. It is the first time in the organisation's history that the threshold of 60 million has been crossed. The UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi said, "More people are being displaced by war and persecution and that's worrying in itself, but the factors that endanger refugees are multiplying too. At sea, a frightening number of refugees and migrants are dying each year; on land, people fleeing war are finding their way blocked by closed borders. Closing borders does not solve the problem".
Grandi said that politics is also standing in the way of those seeking asylum in some countries. He declared, "The willingness of nations to work together not just for refugees but for the collective human interest is what's being tested today, and it's this spirit of unity that badly needs to prevail". The report found that, measured against the world's population of 7.4 billion people, one in every 113 people globally, is now either an asylum-seeker, internally displaced or a refugee - putting them at a level of risk for which UNHCR knows no precedent. The tally is greater than the population of the United Kingdom - or of Canada, Australia and New Zealand combined. It is made up of 3.2 million people in industrialised countries who, at the end of 2015, were awaiting decisions on asylum - the largest number UNHCR has ever recorded. Another record for the UN Refugee Agency also in the tally is a record 40.8 million people who had been forced to flee their homes but were within the confines of their own countries. And there are 21.3 million refugees.
Europe's high-profile migrant crisis, worst since World War II, is just one part of a growing tide of human misery led by Palestinians, Syrians and Afghans. Globally, about one percent of humanity has been forced to flee. The figures, released on World Refugee Day, underscore twin pressures fuelling an unprecedented global displacement crisis. The UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi said as conflict and persecution force a growing number of people to flee, anti-migrant political sentiment has strained the will to resettle refugees. Displacement figures have been rising since the mid 1990s, but the rate of increase has jumped since the outbreak of Syria's civil war in 2011.
Of the planet's 65.3 million displaced, 40.8 million remain within their own country, while 21.3 million have fled across borders and are now refugees. Palestinians are the largest group of refugees at more than five million, including those who fled at the time of creation of Israel in 1948. Syria is next on the list, with 4.9 million refugees, followed by Afghanistan with 2.7 million and Somalia with 1.1 million. A mixture of worrying factors has led to rising displacement and narrowing space for refugee resettlement.
The agency said, "Situations that cause large refugee outflows are lasting longer", including more than 30 years of unrest in both Somalia and Afghanistan. The UNHCR said, pointing to South Sudan, Yemen, Burundi and the Central African Republic, aside from Syria, new and intense conflicts as well as dormant crises that have been "reignited" are further fuelling the crisis. Beyond the refugee hotspots in the Middle East and Africa, UNHCR said there were also worrying signs in Central America, where a growing number of people fleeing gang violence led to a 17 per cent rise in those leaving their homes through 2015.
Faced with a growing need to resettle those facing persecution, the answers are not always obvious. The UN Refugee Agency said, "The rate at which solutions are being found for refugees and internally displaced people has been witnessing a falling trend since the end of the Cold War". Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council and a senior UN diplomat, said refugees "are the victims of a general paralysis" among nations who are not meeting their responsibilities to the world's neediest. Turkey - which struck a controversial deal with the European Union (EU) in March 2016 to stem Europe's migrant crisis - hosted the highest number of refugees through 2015 at 2.5 million, mostly Syrians. Germany received the highest number of asylum requests, 441,900 over the 12-month span, demonstrating the country's "readiness to receive people who were fleeing to Europe via the Mediterranean".
Forced displacement has been on the rise since at least the mid-1990s in most regions, but over the past five years the rate has increased. While the spotlight last year was on Europe's challenge to manage more than 1.0 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 biggest host country, with 2.5 million refugees. With nearly one refugee for every five citizens, Lebanon hosted more refugees compared to its population than any other country.
According to the data UNHCR was able to gather, distressingly, children made up an astonishing 51 per cent of the world's refugees in 2015. Many were separated from their parents or travelling alone. An official at the UN's Refugee Agency in Bangladesh has questioned the "global silence" over the refugee issue, which he says is a "humanitarian disaster". Senior Protection Officer Khaled Fansa expressed his ire over the "inaction to tackle the issue" at a programme in Dhaka to mark World Refugee Day on June 20, 2016. The UNHCR official said the number of refugees is getting larger everyday due to wars, natural disasters and man-made catastrophes. He asked, "What are the international groups doing in response to this humanitarian crisis? Why this silence"?
Fansa said his organisation was doing its best for the refugees despite a lack of funds. According to him, 1.0 million refugees have taken shelter in Lebanon, 150,000 in Pakistan and Turkey each, 650,000 in Jordan and Ethiopia each, and 900,000 in Iran. He said around 88,000 Bangladeshi migration-seekers take sea routes to Thailand and Malaysia every year. He lauded Bangladesh for providing shelter to Rohingyas from Myanmar despite its own problems. Fansa said the number of Rohingya refugees was 13,000 at Kutupalong camp and 19,000 at Noimparha camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh.
Speakers at the programme of World Refugee Day, held at the Liberation War Museum, Dhaka, recalled their days in Indian refugee camps in 1971. They included Satyajit Roy Majumdar and Pritikana Das Nupur, who were refugees during the war, and former Oxfam official Julian Francis, who worked at the camps. Bangladesh's foreign friend Francis said, "Sometimes in my nightmares I see the body of a dead child lying in the rain, its arms and legs gnawed off by dogs, its eyes pecked out by crows. I will never forget the babies with their skin hanging loosely in folds from their tiny bones - lacking the strength even to lift their heads". He also said it was right to celebrate Bangladesh's "remarkable" development success over the years. He added, "But we must never forget the pain and suffering that was invested into the foundation of this beautiful country. Remembering the birth of Bangladesh should help us redouble our efforts to see that the world shows more kindness to all the refugees".  
The only way to save people from accepting the fate of great misfortune as refugees is to stop wars, persecution and deprivation nationally and internationally so that people can live safe in their own "sweet" homes.     

The writer is a retired Professor of Economics, BCS General Education Cadre. E-mail:[email protected],[email protected]