or the first time ever, the United Nations has warned that the Russian war in Ukraine has caused the number of forcibly displaced people around the world to increase to more than 100 million.
"The number of people forced to flee conflict, violence, human rights violations and persecution has now exceeded the staggering 100 million, for the first time ever, driven by the war in Ukraine and other deadly conflicts," UNHCR said in a statement.
The UNHCR considered in a statement that this "alarming" figure should shake the world and push it towards ending the conflicts that are forcing record numbers of people to flee their homes.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees indicated that the number of forcibly displaced people rose to 90 million by the end of 2021, driven by violence in Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, Nigeria, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. Since then, more than eight million people have been displaced within the country while more than six million refugees have fled across the border.
"100 million is a stark, alarming and thought-provoking figure. It is a number that should never have been reached," said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi.
He warned that this figure "should serve as a wake-up call to resolve and prevent devastating conflicts, end persecution, and address the underlying causes that force innocent people to flee their homes."
This number includes refugees and asylum seekers and more than 50 million people displaced within their own countries.
"The international response to people fleeing the war in Ukraine is very positive," Grandi noted, adding that "this rush of sympathy is very real and there is a need for similar mobilization with regard to all other crises in the world."
Grandi stressed that "humanitarian assistance is only a palliative, not a cure," stressing that "in order to reverse the trend, the only response is peace and stability so that innocents will no longer have to choose between the immediate danger of conflict and the difficulty of escape and exile."
On Friday, Grandi criticized about two dozen countries that, in the name of health security, continue to close their borders to asylum seekers more than two years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. He suspects that these countries are using the order as an excuse not to reopen their borders.A report by two NGOs published on May 19 showed that there were nearly 60 million internally displaced people worldwide last year, many of them due to natural disasters.
And the Secretary-General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland, considered that the situation in the world "has never been this bad before," adding that "the world is collapsing."
