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CONFLICT-REFUGEE-DISASTER-IDMC
Ten million people displaced internally by conflict in 2018: monitors
GENEVA, May 10, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Conflict forced more than 10 million
people to flee their homes to live elsewhere within their own country last
year, bringing the total number of people internally displaced by violence to
a record high, monitors said Friday.
The new figure brings the total number of people currently living in
internal displacement due to violence to 41.3 million, an all-time high,
according to a report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC)
and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
“It is really a mind-boggling figure,” NRC chief Jan Egeland told reporters
in Geneva.
“It takes extreme violence and fear of disasters to force a family out of
their home, their land, their property, their community,” he stressed.
Including those uprooted from their homes by natural disasters as well as
conflicts, a total of 28 million people were displaced internally in 2018,
the report said.
A full 10.8 million of new internally displaced people (IDPs) last year
were fleeing conflict, with strife in the Democratic Republic of Congo and
Syria, as well as intercommunal tensions in Ethiopia, Cameroon and Nigeria
responsible for most of the displacements, the study said.
The number of people currently living as IDPs is far higher than the some
25 million who have fled across borders as refugees.
– Countries with the most IDPs –
Surprisingly perhaps, the report found that the highest number of new
internal displacements last year was in Ethiopia, with a full 2.9 million
people fleeing their homes inside the East African country, where communal
clashes, typically sparked by land disputes, are common.
Strife-torn DRC came in second, with 1.8 million fresh IDPs in 2018,
followed by Syria with 1.6 million new internal displacements.
But in total, Syria, ravaged by eight years of war, counts 6.1 million
IDPs, in addition to around the same number of Syrians still living as
refugees.
On top of those forced from their homes by violence, 17.2 million people
were internally displaced by natural disasters last year, Friday’s report
found.
Tropical cyclones and monsoon floods forced nearly 10 million to flee
inside the Philippines, China and India.
IDMC chief Alexandra Bilak told reporters that most of those displacements
were linked to government-orchestrated evacuations ahead of natural
disasters.
“This of course saves lives, but demonstrates that there are still too many
people in those countries who are exposed to extreme events,” she said.
Hundreds of thousands of people were also forced from their homes in
California last year by the most destructive wildfires in the state’s
history.
Some 22,000 people remain displaced by those fires, Bilak said.
BSS/AFP/RY/1752 hrs