TRT-World- Conflicts and natural disasters forced tens of millions to flee within their own country last year, pushing the number of internally displaced people to a record high, monitors have said.
Some 59.1 million people were registered as internally displaced worldwide in 2021 – an all-time record expected to be broken again this year amid mass displacement inside war-torn Ukraine, a joint report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said on Thursday.
Around 38 million new internal displacements were reported in 2021, with some people forced to flee multiple times during the year, according to the report.
That marks the second-highest annual number of new internal displacements in a decade after 2020, which saw record-breaking movement due to a string of natural disasters.
Last year, new internal displacements from conflict surged to 14.4 million – marking a 50-percent jump from 2020 and more than doubling since 2012, the report showed.
IDMC director Alexandra Bilak told reporters that the record numbers seen in 2021 marked “a tragic indictment really on the state of the world and on peace-building efforts in particular”.
NRC chief Jan Egeland agreed, warning: “It has never been as bad as this.”
“The world is falling apart,” he told reporters.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD FRIDAY 20 MAY 2022
