Nearly 24 million displaced worldwide largely neglected

AUSTRIA: Nearly 24 million people displaced by strife around the world are largely cut off in their home countries and have effectively been abandoned by the international community, UN officials and a monitoring body warned.

The number of internally displaced people fell by 1.6 million in 2005, but the figure of 23.7 million remains alarmingly high, the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) said in a report.

"Huge gaps in national and international response systems effectively leave millions of IDPs without adequate protection and humanitarian assistance," the report said.

"Fourteen million live in constant fear, day and night, of being killed. Some 75 to 80 percent are women and children," UN emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland told a news conference.

The head of the IDMC, Elisabeth Rasmussen, said the report showed that most governments "fail to live up to their reponsibility to prevent arbitrary displacement and ensure the safety and well-being of their displaced citizens.

"Even worse, the very governments that have committed themselves under international law to protect and assist their citizens are in many cases the main perpetrators of arbitrary displacement," she added.

In 16 of the 50 affected countries, local governments had forced people to flee their homes, according to the IDMC, which was set up by the Norwegian Refugee Council in 1998.

Those countries include some suffering the worst situations, such as Colombia, Ivory Coast, Sudan and Zimbabwe.

More than half the internally displaced people are in Africa, including some five million in south and western Sudan.

While the fact that four million internally displaced returned home in 2005 provides a "glimmer of hope", about two million were freshly uprooted last year, including some 600,000 affected by the crackdown on shantytowns in Zimbabwe.

A quarter of the world's displaced receive no protection or help, while the United Nations and donor governments are failing to make up the shortfall, the report said.

It said they were too reluctant to wield political pressure and were not providing enough relief aid for the displaced.

"The number of internally displaced, how they live ... is an X-ray of how well we're doing," Egeland said.

"In many ways we're not doing too well, we're doing much worse than we should."

Egeland complained that political back up was "unpredictable", calling for more decisive action to deal with internal conflicts in northern Uganda, Colombia and Nepal.

"We are a big, expensive plaster on an open wound, as humanitarians," Egeland said.

"If there is not a serious effort to put an end to the violence, persecution and conflicts that produce these internal displacements, we will be reporting on a sorry state of affairs forever," he concluded.

UN displacement advisor Dennis McNamara said pledges by countries at the United Nations to protect their displaced populations were not effective.

"The rhetoric of New York is not translated into the realities of Africa," he added.

GENEVA, Friday AFP