A United Nation’s statement has revealed recently that about 41 million people remain displaced worldwide because of conflict and natural disasters, an increase of more than a million individuals in a single year.
The finding, by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), a partner of the UN, points to ongoing clashes in Syria, along with often under-reported tensions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ethiopia and Cameroon.
“Let me give the example of Cameroon, I was just there inside the west of the country,” said NRC’s head Jan Egeland. “The southern and western anglophone parts of Cameroon, there is an armed conflict; nobody is talking about it, nobody is engaging to end (it) there’s no mediation, there’s no humanitarian programme commensurate to the scale of the suffering. But there’s hundreds of torched villages and there is now between four and five hundred thousand people displaced within the anglophone part of Cameroon,” he explained.
Apart from conflict, extreme weather events and natural disasters were also responsible for people fleeing their homes. Some of the worst storms and tropical cyclones were in China, India and the Philippines, NRC’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre said, with 10 million people displaced in those three countries alone.
In many countries, conflict and natural disasters combined to create mass population shifts, not least in Afghanistan, where drought has triggered more displacement than armed conflict. Similarly, the security crisis in north-east Nigeria has been aggravated by flooding that has affected 80 per cent of the country. (UNI)
