“I really hoped that I would never have reached this terrible number, an ugly symptom of the state of our world”, Filippo Grandi, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, was alarmed on Thursday on franceinfo, as the forced displacement of populations broke a new record in the world. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which publishes its annual report this Thursday, 89.3 million people were forced to flee their region or their country at the end of 2021. At this “human tragedy”the international community is in “the inability to resolve these conflicts”. Filippo Grandi regrets that even the Security Council no longer finds this unanimity necessary” “achieving the peace”:
In the report, you point out that this forced exile has increased every year over the past decade.
The figure of 90 million that is contained in this report stops at the end of 2021. If you add to this the refugees and displaced persons from Ukraine, the figure now exceeds 100 million. I really hoped that I would never arrive at this terrible number, an ugly symptom of the state of our world. Conflicts and all the other reasons that force people to leave their homes seem to be increasing. And none seem to find a solution. Sometimes we get so caught up in statistics that we forget who it is. They are indeed women, men, very often children, since half of these people are children, minors. So this is a human tragedy of major proportions.
Are the main causes of these forced displacements still wars?
Yes. And the main cause remains the inability in which we find ourselves, all in the world, to resolve these conflicts. Look at the Security Council, the organ of the United Nations, which is the supreme organ responsible for peace and security in the world. The Security Council no longer finds this unity, this unanimity necessary to promote peace in any of the major debates around the conflicts raging in the world. And without this unanimous political will, it is impossible to achieve peace and create the conditions for these people to be able to return home.
Unless we learn to make peace again, the number of people forced to flee by war and violence will continue to grow.
They were 89 million at the end of 2021, they are more than 100 million following the war in Ukraine.https://t.co/L3X8YvqNMJ
—Filippo Grandi (@FilippoGrandi) June 16, 2022
There are 100 million displaced people. But you also have to count the families who have to stay put. The number of people directly affected by these situations is therefore much greater…
And I will also add the communities that host them. In the West, we have a bit of an image of refugees as a phenomenon of people who come to us to seek more peaceful conditions. But in fact, the majority of those 100 million are people moving from one poor country to another. They therefore find themselves in countries with few resources and are often hosted with great openness and generosity by very poor communities. And they too are affected. So we are talking about several hundred million people in the world affected by this phenomenon.
What response from the international community to these displacements and from Western countries in particular? Does welcoming refugees seem possible with the war in Ukraine?
Certain European leaders have told me so often, ‘Europe is full, we can no longer take in people, we have to send them home, build walls, send them back to Rwanda’, as we recently heard from the UK. How is it possible that, if Europe is full, Europe was able to accommodate seven million Ukrainians rather efficiently? Of course, there is a political will, we understand the context. But it does mean that the mechanisms exist to do it for others as well.
Shouldn’t we also take into account food or climatic refugees, the extent of which we are only just beginning to assess?
Rather than talking about climate refugees, I prefer to say that the causes that push people to flee are becoming more complex. Of course, at the root of all refugee flows, there are conflicts, violence, human rights violations. But increasingly we see other causes intervening and creating further complications. Climatic phenomena, certainly, social inequalities, even demographic imbalances, even the pandemic, have caused population movements. And now, with the impact of this war in Ukraine which will cause food and other crises, we will have further complications.