Middle East hosts 19.5m refugees, an all time high

Due to regional conflict more than 51 million people were displaced as of the end of 2014.

DUBAI // Forced displacement across the world has risen dramatically during the past few years, reaching an unprecedented peak last year, according to a senior United Nations official.

Amin Awad, the regional refugee coordinator at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said more than 51 million people were displaced by the end of last year – 40 per cent of whom originated in the Middle East.

He told the Dubai International Humanitarian and Aid Development Conference on Wednesday that people were “forcefully displaced because of conflict in their countries internally, or they crossed international borders and became refugees”.

“This number marks a new record [as] the largest number of displaced people since the Second World War, and when we look around us in the Middle East and North Africa, we see it has become an even more prominent characteristic of the region, which hosts two of the world’s largest refugee populations.”

There are more than five million Palestinian refugees and four million Syrians who have been displaced outside their country. Another 7.5 million are displaced internally. An additional three million displaced in Iraq brings the total to 19.5 million.

“That’s a big number for a small region like the Middle East,” Mr Awad said. “Our key message on causes and consequences of forced displacement is [it is] largely caused by armed conflict.

“The impact on the protection of civilians has been well documented by international humanitarian law advocates and organisations, and there is clearly a need to strengthen accountability and address impunity when it comes to human rights violations.”

He also said conflicts had increasingly become interconnected. “Today, the conflict in Syria and Iraq generated the most horrific spillover into neighbouring countries in recent history.

“We have seen a phenomena of armed groups that have the ability to be mobile and move [to other countries] and have subsidiaries. That is the spillover and a threat to international security.”

Last year, 205,000 people crossed the Mediterranean into Europe from North Africa. “The numbers are horrific,” he said. “Most are considered to be economic migrants coming from central and western Africa due to lack of development, opportunities, lack of future, conflicts and utter poverty.

“We also have a number of refugee populations – over 60,000 Syrians who crossed the Mediterranean last year, with them a few thousand from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Afghanistan and over 5,000 Palestinians from Syria. Of those 205,000, 3,600 perished trying to cross,” Mr Awad said.

The first two months of this year registered a higher number of refugees trying to cross than in the same period last year. “So I am sure when the year closes, we will have a bigger number.”

Pierre Kraehenbuhl, the commissioner general at the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, called for determined political action.

“The reality is the instability currently sweeping through the region is going to end up reversing the development achievements of countries themselves, and those we were able to achieve for Palestinian refugees, unless something is undertaken at the political level,” Mr Kraehenbuhl said. “Emerging in this region is a landscape of intensified conflict, repression and a wave of extremism. The [Gulf] is home to 2.5 million Palestinian refugees, out of five million in the region. Today, out of 560,000 Palestinian refugees originally in Syria, 460,000 remain and they are almost all dependent on our assistance, which is a signal of disposition and loss of another generation of Palestinians.”

Christos Stylianides, European commissioner for humanitarian aid and crisis management, said:“We need to find new resources together by joining forces, so that we ensure an effective and coordinated humanitarian response to these needs.”