Millions displaced: Violence takes devastating toll on world’s people in 2014

Conflicts and violence in places like Syria and Ukraine have displaced a record 38 million people inside their own countries, equivalent to the total populations of New York, London and Beijing, a watchdog group said Wednesday. Nearly one third of them — 11 million people — were displaced last year alone, with an average of 30,000 people fleeing their homes every day, the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) said in a report.

These are the worst figures for forced displacement in a generation, signalling our complete failure to protect innocent civilians.

Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council which is behind the IDMC

Internally displaced people (IDPs) is a label given to people who remain in their homeland, as opposed to refugees, who flee across borders. Today there are nearly twice as many IDPs in the world as refugees, the IDMC report said, without providing an exact figure for refugees. The numbers of people internally displaced last year meanwhile marked a 14% rise over the year before and dwarfed figures seen at the peak of the Darfur crisis in 2004, the spiralling violence in Iraq in the mid-2000s, or in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, the IDMC said.

World