Bosnian Refugees. © Corinne Dufka

Forcible Displacement: A Global Crisis

Fifty years ago, in the aftermath of the second world war, the international community established an agency to protect and assist the world's refugees. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), marks its fiftieth anniversary on December 14. Although UNHCR was first established with a limited three year mandate, the forced movement of people has become increasingly more complex over the past fifty years. Today, no continent, and barely any country, in the world is untouched by the global refugee crisis. At the beginning of 2000 an estimated 14 million people were living as refugees, uprooted from their homes and forced to cross an international border. Nearly six million people were refugees in the Middle East, the vast majority of them Palestinian refugees - the world's largest and oldest refugee population; and there were more than three million refugees in Africa - every country on that continent has been affected by refugee movements.

Huge though they are, the global refugee numbers hide an even greater displacement crisis: that of the internally displaced, those people who are forced to flee their homes, often for the very same reasons as refugees - war, civil conflict, political strife, and gross human rights abuse - but who remain within their own country, do not cross an international border, and hence are not eligible for protection under the same international system as refugees. There are an estimated 30 million internally displaced persons in the world - the number may be even higher. The largest internally displaced population is in Sudan - where four million people have been uprooted by the civil war that has gripped the country for the past 20 years; an estimated 2.5 million people have been displaced by the civil conflict raging in Angola; 1.6 million people are displaced by conflict and human rights abuse in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC); and 1.5 million people have been uprooted by the violence in Colombia.

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