World Refugee Day Recap

I wasn't able to blog last Tuesday, which was World Refugee Day, as declared by the United Nations. In recapping what we know, the sad truth is that the refugee situation is worse than last year, which was arguably the worst ever until now. CNN summarized the situation as follows:

We are in the midst of the WORLD'S WORST refugee crisis in history. A crisis that brings with it overwhelming numbers, huge challenges for countries and communities affected, untold misery -- and hope.

More than 65 MILLION people are now counted as forcibly displaced by the United Nations. That's like the entire population of the UK or France, or about as many as everyone in New York state, Texas and Florida -- all forced from their homes. Just over one-third are refugees, people forced to flee their countries because of persecution, war, or violence.

As they did last year, the Humanitarian Information Unit of the U.S. State Department has prepared an infographic summarizing our current knowledge of the global refugee situation. I have copied it below. Note that the map itself highlights the sources of refugees--the darker the shade of blue the more refugees there are from that country. The middle of Africa, and the area from Syria to Pakistan are the major contributors. The graph in the lower left shows the countries hosting the greatest number of refugees. Turkey and Jordan lead that list, and this is due largely to the Syrian crisis, although Jordan also hosts a population of displaced Palestinians. If you compare the map of where refugees are leaving, and the graph of where they are going, you see the complexity of situation--many countries that are generating refugees are also hosting refugees from elsewhere. This is true, for example, of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (currently the largest source of refugees into the U.S.), Pakistan, Iran, Ethiopia, and even Syria (which hosts refugees from Iraq, even as hundreds of thousands of its own people have fled the country.