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No Way Home

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No Way Home

Posted by Natalie Ondiak on January 10, 2009

No Way Home

A recent report by the United Nations notes that there are 9.1 million “internally displaced” persons in central and eastern Africa. (In the language of international relief work “internally displaced” have been driven from their homes, but not crossed an international border, in which case they would become “refugees.”) There are an estimated 26 million internally displaced persons throughout the world. That means central and eastern Africa account for an appallingly high 35 percent of the world’s internal displacement. There is a general trend toward larger numbers of internally displaced persons as countries become less willing to let people across their borders and become refugees. Illustratively, in 2007, there were 13.9 million refugees and nearly double this number of IDPs. More and more, we have seen local warlords driving people from their homes not just as a symptom war, but as a deliberate strategy of ethnic cleansing.