.bmp)
.bmp)
GENEVA-The number of refugees fleeing to other countries to escape conflict and persecution rose in 2007 for the second year as factors from climate change to over scarce resources threatened to increase the flow, the United Nations refugee agency warned Tuesday.A total of 11.4 million refugees were under the care of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 2007, including some 400,000 feeling conflict in their home countries, the agency said. The report for 2006 numbered 9.9 million.The total was modest compared with the 17.8 million refugees in 1992 at the time of the Balkan wars, but after a steady drop between 2001 and 2005 it represented a worrying trend , the relief agency said.“We are now faced with a complex mix of global challenges that could threaten even more forced displacement in the future,” Antonio Guterres, the high commissioner for refugees, said in a statement.“They range from multiple new conflict-related emergencies in world hotspots to bad governance, climate-induced environmental degradation that increase competition for scarce resources and extreme price hikes that have hit the poor the hardest and are generating instability in many places.”The number of people displaced by conflict but remaining within their own countries also rose in 2007 to 26 million, the agency said, citing statistics provided by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, a private organization.The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan accounted for more than half the world’s refugees in 2007. More than 2 million Iraqis have sought refuge in Syria and Jordan, and 3 million Afghans in Pakistan and Iran, the refugee agency said.More than 45,000 Iraqis returned home in 2007, some of them driven by the hardship of life in refugee camps, but 885,000 fled the country for reasons ranging from violence and sectarian conflict to economic difficulty.More than 4 million Afghans have returned voluntarily in the past five years and another 374,000 went back in 2007 but the rate of return has slowed, partly because of insecurity but also because many of those who want to return have already gone back, the UN agency said.The latest statistics contradicted a number of misconceptions about the impact and distribution of refugee patterns, officials said, starting with the notion that Western countries admit most fugitives from conflict.Instead, 80 percent of refugees remain in developing countries in the immediate vicinity of their own country, the UN agency said.Pakistan accepted more than 2 million refugees and Syria 1.5 million in 2007 while the United States sheltered 281,000, the statistics showed. Moreover, only a tiny proportion find eventual resettlement in third countries — some 49,900 people in 2007 and 821,000 in the decade ending in 2007. “It’s becoming a more and more inhospitable world for refugees,” said William Spindler, a UNHCR spokesman. Developing countries are increasingly unwilling to shoulder the refugee burden and are imposing stricter criteria for acceptance.As in the days of Noah....
