Internally Displaced People

Data gathered from: http://www.unhcr.org/basics/BASICS/405ef8c64.pdf :

Internally Displaced People (IDP) are individuals or groups of people who have been forced to flee their homes to escape armed conflict, generalized violence and human rights abuses. In extraordinary circumstances, such as the 2004 tsunami in Asia, citizens who have been made homeless by natural disasters are also classified as IDPs.

      When civilians cross an international frontier into another country in an effort to escape fighting or human rights violations, they are classified as ‘refugees’ and, as such, are protected by a strong body of international law. They are also often given food and shelter. However those who remain inside their home countries – even if they have fled for similar or identical reasons – are instead classified as IDPs and are often unable to access the safeguards and assistance afforded to the refugees. Legally, they remain under the ‘protection’ of their own government – even though that same government may be the cause of their flight, or else has shown it is incapable of saving its citizens from marauding rebel groups or generalized violence.

      There are no specific international legal instruments covering the internally displaced, and general agreements such as the Geneva Conventions are often difficult to apply. Indeed, for many years the international community offered IDP limited assistance, or sometimes none at all. One crucial and unresolved question mark concerns whether or not donors, who are sometimes reluctant to intervene in internal conflicts or to offer sustained assistance, are willing to provide the necessary funding to enable international agencies to fulfill their responsibilities for both IDPs and refugees.

      The United Nations estimates that, in all, there are around 25 million IDPs in 52 countries, a figure which has remained relatively stable since the beginning of the new millennium. According to UNHCR statistics (2007), countries with the highest number of IDP include Sudan (5.35 million), Colombia (3 million), Iraq (2.2 million), Uganda (1.3 million), Algeria (1 million), Turkey (1 million), and The Democratic Republic of Congo (1 million).

      The plight of refugees and IDPs often overlaps and, as a result, a single coordinated operation is often the most sensible solution, especially during repatriation operations when IDPs are frequently located in or returning to the same geographical locations as refugees. Today, humanitarian agencies each try taking a specific role in the areas where they can bring widespread expertise to bear – protection, shelter, camp management, coordination, water, sanitation, health, food or logistics.