One million fled Darfur homes in 2004 – report

GENEVA, March 18 (Reuters) – A third of the three million people worldwide forced to flee their homes by violence and war in 2004 are in Sudan’s conflict-scarred Darfur region, a U.N.-backed report said on Friday.

A makeshift camp for internally displaced people near Seleah village in Sudan’s West Darfur province is seen by helicopter Monday, Sep 27, 2004. (AP).

More than 25 million people worldwide, around half of them in Africa, are internally displaced people (IDP) or refugees within their own country, living in dire conditions and lacking clean water and food.

The report, requested by the United Nations to monitor one of the world’s largest neglected groups, found that numbers of IDPs remained high.

“8,000 people were forced to abandon their homes every day last year … It is perhaps the area where we fail the most,” U.N. emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland, told a news conference.

Despite three million people able to return to their homes, mostly in Angola and Liberia, the overall numbers are unchanged, said Elisabeth Rasmusson, head of the Geneva-based IDP project.

“The problem is that the total of 25 million remains the same for the third year in a row, because even if people returned, there was new massive displacement,” she told a briefing.

Sudan is followed by northern Uganda, where 600,000 people abandoned their homes.

The IDPs’ living conditions are worsened by “too little or no assistance at all” due to insecurity, lack of funds, poor coordination among aid agencies or hostile authorities, said the group’s Global IDP Project report.

Some 290,000 people were uprooted in Colombia and 200,000 in Iraq — mainly people fleeing counter-insurgency operations by U.S. forces, according to the report.

IDPs are separate from the about 11 million refugees and asylum-seekers who crossed borders to flee civil war and persecution.