One People One World

 A postage-stamp-sized camp for displaced people in 2018 in Ituri Province in the far east of the Democratic Republic of Congo has mushroomed from hundreds of people to more than 10,000, spilling beyond its borders and necessitating the creation of another sprawling encampment across town.  At the time, women, children, and men in Ituri were being butchered alive by militiamen armed with machetes. And the attacks have never fully abated. Three years later, the violence and displacement continues.

In the first 10 days of this month alone, militiamen carried out eight attacks in Ituri.  On February 1st, a massacre at a displaced persons camp there killed 62 people, injured 47, and displaced 25,000, adding to the already astronomical numbers in Congo.  Around 2.7 million Congolese were driven from their homes between January and November 2021, according to the United Nations, swelling the grand total of internally displaced people in that country to 5.6 million.

In 2020, a tiny landlocked nation in West Africa, there was an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe. Families were streaming down that road from Barsalogho about 100 miles north of the capital, Ouagadougou, toward Kaya, a market town whose population had almost doubled that year. They were victims of a war without a name, a lethal contest between Islamist terrorists who massacre without compunction and government forces that have killed more civilians than militants.

And the suffering there persists as that conflict continues to force people from their homes. The number of internally displaced Burkinabe jumped 50% last year to more than 1.5 million, while another 19,200 people fled to neighboring countries, a 50% increase over 2020. 

 This year, according to the Danish Refugee Council, an additional 400,000 Burkinabe will likely be displaced. And that's only part of a wider regional crisis that has engulfed neighboring Mali and Niger where another one million people have been rendered homeless.

Across the continent, the civil war in Ethiopia that began in November 2020 has left it with one of the world's largest internally displaced populations.  At the end of that year, 2.1 million people had already been put to flight within the country.  By the close of 2021, that number had doubled to 4.2 million.  As in Congo, violence and displacement has left some of the unluckiest doubly victimized.  Earlier this month, for example, Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia's Barahle refugee camp were attacked by armed men who killed five of them, kidnapped several women, and sent more than 14,000 refugees fleeing to other towns.

The Danish Refugee Council forecast, based on a sophisticated model utilizing more than 120 indicators related to conflict, as well as to governance and environmental, demographic, and economic factors, suggests that Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, South Sudan and Sudan will all experience significant displacement in 2022 while Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Somalia are likely to see substantial increases in 2023.  All told, the Council predicts that the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa driven from their homes will jump by more than five million by the end of next year.

We live in a world where so many displaced  Burkinabe, Congolese, and others are bottled up inside their own borders or in neighboring nations that are ill-equipped to bear the burden. 

Taken from here

Opinion | Nationless in a War-Torn and Unforgiving World | Nick Turse (commondreams.org)