ISTANBUL, Turkey – Humanitarian organizations are out of resources to respond to the staggering crisis of forcibly displaced people whose numbers rose to a record 60 million at the end of last year, most from the war in Syria.
"To those that think that it doesn't matter because humanitarian organizations will be there and able to clean up the mess, I think it's important to say that we are no longer able to clean up the mess," UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Antonio Guterres warned on Thursday.
"UN agencies, NGOs, the Red Cross -- we no longer have the capacities and the resources to respond to such a dramatic increase in humanitarian needs," he told reporters in Istanbul.
Guterres issued the stark warning a few hours after UNHCR had issued its annual Global Trends Report: World at War, showing worldwide displacement was at the highest level ever recorded.
The report said the number of people forcibly displaced at the end of 2014 by war, conflict and persecution had risen to a staggering 59.5 million, compared to 51.2 million a year earlier and 37.5 million a decade ago.
In the last year, Turkey has become the biggest refugee-hosting nation in the world, with more than 1.77 million Syrians fleeing there from the violent conflict in their country. Turkey now hosts more than 2 million refugees in total and spends more than $6 billion on helping Syrians alone, said the report.
In recent days more than 23,000 people surged across the Syrian–Turkish border crossing at Akcakale to escape brutal fighting around Tel Abyad in Syria.
Turkey continues to keep its borders open, and continues to house some of the arriving refugees in 24 camps, but Ankara has intensified its security in the border, according to local newspapers.
"That has a special meaning in a world where so many borders are closed or restricted," Guterres said, "and where new walls are being built or announced."
The report noted that the main acceleration in the number of refugees has been since early 2011 when war erupted in Syria, propelling it into becoming the world's single largest driver of displacement.
In 2014, an average of 42,500 people became refugees, asylum seekers, or internally displaced every day, representing a four-fold increase in just four years. Worldwide, one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum, said the report.
"We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before," said Guterres. "It is terrifying that on the one hand there is more and more impunity for those starting conflicts, and on the other there is seeming utter inability of the international community to work together to stop wars and build and preserve peace."
The report underlined that, alarmingly, over half of the world´s refugees are children.
"With huge shortages of funding and wide gaps in the global regime for protecting victims of war, people in need of compassion, aid and refuge are being abandoned," said Guterres. "For an age of unprecedented mass displacement, we need an unprecedented humanitarian response and a renewed global commitment to tolerance and protection for people fleeing conflict and persecution."
The report said Syria is the world's biggest producer of both internally displaced people (7.6 million) and refugees (3.88 million at the end of 2014), making the Middle East the world's largest producer and host of forced displacement. Adding to the alarmingly high totals from Syria was new displacement of least 2.6 million people in Iraq, where as a result 3.6 million people were internally displaced as of the end of 2014, as well as 309,000 people newly displaced in Libya.
The Kurdistan region, the only stable part of Iraq, has been struggling to provide adequate humanitarian assistance to an overwhelming number of Iraqi internally displaced persons, IDPs, and Syrian refugees.
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has appealed for further assistance from United Nation agencies and the international community to step in and help provide assistance to an estimated 1.7 million refugees and IDPs whose numbers grow with every spike in violence in Syria or other parts of Iraq.
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