110 million refugees and displaced persons due to the increase in wars and persecutions

Violence, armed conflicts, human rights violations and extreme poverty are among the difficulties that most refugees go through before fleeing their places of origin.

But now new wars have been added to the list of crises, such as those in Ukraine and Sudan, which raised the number of refugees in other countries and internally displaced persons to 110 million. A record number, underlines the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), in his latest report, released this Wednesday, June 14.

“It is a great accusation about the state of our world,” said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi.

This is a serious situation that, given the current circumstances, shows no sign of slowing down, but rather, on the contrary, continuing to grow. And it is that to the long-standing conflicts that are prolonged, such as the one registered in Syria, other massive hostilities have been added in the last year.

Only the clashes in Sudan between the Army and the paramilitary Rapid Action Forces (FAR)who have been fighting for power with arms since last April, leave close to Two million displaced people.

Ukraine, for its part, has been the scene of what became the fastest forced displacement since World War II. Since February 2024, when Russia ordered the invasion, at least 13 million people have been forced to flee their homes.

Of these, more than 8,000,000 fled across the borders of their country and another 5,000,000 were internally displaced, according to data on the situation in the attacked nation, released by the UN last February.

In 2022, 19 million citizens will join the cumulative total of those who are forced to exodus.

But the Ukrainian territory and Sudan are not the only ones that swell the unfortunate figures. “We are constantly facing emergencies,” Grandi said.

The conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia and Myanmar they were also responsible for the displacement of more than 1 million people within each country last year.

“The rhetoric that many refugees flee to rich countries is very wrong”

The report highlights that the majority of displaced people worldwide seek refuge within the borders of their own country. However, and as the months go by, in many cases the persecutions, violence and precariousness become increasingly unsustainable, which is why those affected decide to move abroad.

It is an urgency to save their lives, but the host nations, often neighboring territories, have little to offer: as they face severe economic difficulties, drought problems, food security and even their own armed conflicts.

“The rhetoric that many refugees flee to rich countries is very wrong, in reality it is the opposite,” explained Grandi, who remarked that 76% of those people take refuge in low- and middle-income nations, in Asia and Africa, not in rich territories of Europe or North America.

The UN representative added that a vast majority of refugees, 70%, move to nations bordering their country of origin.

An example of this is Sudan, that limits to the north with Egypt, to the east with the Red Sea, Eritrea and Ethiopia, to the south with South Sudan and to the west with the Central African Republic, Chad and Libya, nations with great economic or humanitarian challenges.

Türkiye, with the largest number of refugees in the world

That Eurasian nation currently hosts the largest number of refugees on the planet, 3.8 million people, mostly Syrians who fled the civil war unleashed since 2011.

He follows closely Iranwhich hosts 3.4 million refugees, mostly Afghans.

In addition, there are 5.7 million Ukrainian refugees spread across countries, mainly in Europe.

Regarding asylum requests, the United States was the country that received the most new applications in 2022, with 730,400 applications. However, it is also the nation with the greatest delay in its asylum system, the UN emphasizes.

“One of the things that must be done is to reform that asylum system to make it faster and more efficient,” Grandi said.

But as this type of crisis grows, many countries also tighten immigration rules, points out the representative of the Refugee Agency.

UN: the greater the refugee crisis, the more immigration rules

Faced with the massive influx of those fleeing their countries, the United States, Spain, and Canada recently announced plans to create asylum processing centers in Latin America. And although they argue that they seek an orderly migration, the UN also highlights that they are trying to reduce the number of people who travel to the north of the continent through the border with Mexico.

“We see setbacks. We see increasingly tough immigration or refugee admission rules. We see in many countries the criminalization of immigrants and refugees, blaming them for everything that has happened,” Grandi said.

Xenophobia and anti-immigration discourse become scenes that are replicated on both sides of the planet, regardless of the continent, the language, and the economic power of each receiving nation.

It is a situation that was taken, for example, the recent final stage of the presidential campaign in Turkey, in which the opposition candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglupromised explicitly send home “10 million refugees”, mainly Syrians and Afghans, if he won the runoff.

Meanwhile, heLast week, European leaders renewed financial pledges to North African nations in hopes of halting migration across the Mediterranean, while the British government insisted on a hitherto failed plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, something the UNHCR opposes as worrying and an attempt by the UK to shirk its humanitarian responsibilities.

However, in the midst of a grim outlook, there are also some victories. Grandi highlighted what he described as “a positive sign”, the European Union’s negotiations for a new migration and asylum pact.

Likewise, Grandi celebrated the fact that the number of refugees who were resettled in 2022 doubled to 114,000, compared to the previous year. But he admitted that that “is still a drop in the bucket.”

With AP and EFE