Global forced displacement in 2012 reaches 18-year high

Some 45.2 million people worldwide are under forced displacement due to persecution, conflict, generalized violence and human rights violations by the end of 2012, said an annual report released by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Wednesday. The UNHCR's annual report, named as Global Trends 2012: Displacement, the New 21st Century Challenge, showed that the 2012 number, an 18-year high, included 15.4 million refugees, 937,000 asylum seekers and 28.8 million people forced to flee within the borders of their own countries. "More dramatic than the total numbers are the numbers corresponding to the newly displaced. In 2012, we had 1.1 million new refugees, (and) we had 6.5 million new people internally displaced by conflicts, a total of 7.6 million people displaced by force, which means one (new displaced person) in each 4.1 seconds. So each time you blink, another person is forced to flee, " said Antonio Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees and head of UNHCR, told an embargoed press conference. War was the main reason for these very high numbers of refugees and people internally displaced, as the chief of the UN's refugee agency highlighted. The latest report showed that 55 percent of all refugees worldwide came from Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Syria and Sudan, with Afghanistan remaining as the world's top producer of refugees. Developing countries hosted over 80 percent of the world's refugees, compared to 70 percent a decade ago, as the report noted, with Pakistan as the country hosting the largest number of refugees worldwide. According to the report, among the asylum seekers, the number of unaccompanied children was on the rise. In 2012 around 21,300 asylum applications were lodged by unaccompanied or separated children, which was the highest number on record since UNHCR started collecting such data in 2006. Guterres said this was becoming one of the most serious humanitarian problems. Meanwhile, the report said 2.7 million displaced people, including some 2.1 million the internally displaced and 526,000 refugees, returned home last year, and 88,600 refugees were resettled in 22 countries. Speaking on the Syrian conflict, Guterres pointed out that in the end of December 2012, about 650,000 refugees fled the Syria conflict, and the number now exceeded 1.6 million. "This gives you an idea of how dramatic the Syrian crisis is," he said. The UNHCR has supported the resettlement of a certain number of very vulnerable people but has not started a massive resettlement program for Syrian refugees, Guterres said. He said the humanitarian admission of Syrian refugees offered by several countries at present represented a more adequate response to the present situation.