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Six million trapped as long-term refugees - UNHCR
10 Dec 2008 17:32:01 GMT
 Source: Reuters

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(Clarifies status of Palestinians, not included in the figures)

By Robert Evans

GENEVA, Dec 10 (Reuters) - Some six million people around the globe are trapped in mainly poor countries as long-term refugees, many facing deprivation that feeds crime and human trafficking, a senior United Nations official said on Wednesday.

The world body's High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, said there were at least 30 crisis areas around the world where people had been forced to flee into neighbouring states and had not been able to return home for many years.

The six million figure does not include millions of Palestinians, whose affairs are handled by a separate U.N. agency.

"The burden of hosting these refugees falls almost exclusively to developing states. It is important to recognise that the international community as a whole has not done enough to share that burden," Guterres told a conference.

"The problem of protracted refugee situations has reached enormous proportions," he declared in a separate paper for participants in the annual conference held by his agency, the UNHCR.

Many of the refugees could not go home because their countries of origin were racked by civil wars or affected by gross human rights violations.

"Packed into overcrowded settlements, deprived of an income and with little to occupy their time, these refugee populations are afflicted by all kinds of social ills, including prostitution, rape, and violence," he said.

"Unsurprisingly, and despite the restriction placed upon them, many take the risk of moving to any urban area or trying to migrate to another country, putting themselves in the dangerous hands of human smugglers and traffickers."

Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal, told the conference that the six million were people who had spent more than five years -- and many of them several decades -- in limbo in exile, mainly in Africa and Asia.

FIVE LONG-TERM CRISES

The UNHCR identifies the major five long-term refugee situations as that of Afghans in Pakistan and Iran, Muslim Rohingyas from Myanmar in Bangladesh, Eritreans in eastern Sudan, Burundians in Tanzania, and ethnic Serbs from Croatia and Bosnia in Serbia.

Tanzania's prime minister, Mizengo Pinda, said in a keynote speech to the gathering that his country had been hosting tens of thousands of refugees from Burundi since the early 1970s.

But in the mid-1990s, with political crises and new conflict in Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, it had seen more than a million people flood in over a very short time, straining Tanzania's infrastructure to breaking point.

Amid the current global economic crisis, Pinda said, "it is an undeniable reality that developing countries are facing shortages and higher costs of social services such as food, water, health and educational facilities".

"Thus, any influx of refugees creates more pressure on those facilities which ultimately increases the unbearable burden that cannot be accommodated by the host country." (For more information on humanitarian crises and issues visit www.alertnet.org) (Editing by Jonathan Lynn and Mark Trevelyan)


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