IDPs a neglected humanitarian issue, UN official says

The UN is looking into how best to resolve the problem of internally displaced persons (IDPs) worldwide, a senior UN official has said, describing internal displacement as a neglected humanitarian issue. "The UN is doing a major review now of displacement worldwide - looking at how [it] could better structure itself to deal with this situation more effectively," Dennis McNamara, the Special Adviser of the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator on Internal Displacement and Director of the Inter-Agency Internal Displacement Division in the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said. Speaking to reporters in May in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, McNamara said the review would be done in 2006. More attention would be paid to eight countries with acute IDP problems, McNamara said. The countries are Burundi, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Liberia, Nepal, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda. "This displacement issue is one of the big neglected humanitarian problems that we face, particularly in Africa," McNamara said at the end of a mission to Burundi and Uganda. He also held meetings in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, with aid-agency officials working in Somalia. Some 13 million of the world's 25 million IDPs were in Africa, he said. Approximately 10 million of the African IDPs were in Sudan (5 million to 6 million); at least 1.5 million in Uganda; 2 million to 3 million in the DRC; and 500,000 in Somalia. "This is a humanitarian challenge for us," McNamara said. "It is a challenge also for governments, the donors and the host governments. But in addition to being a humanitarian challenge, it is also a challenge in terms of peace-building and trying to recover from conflict." He said displaced people lacked basic support, were destitute and often subjected to abuse. "They are a very vulnerable category, very impoverished," he said. "Most of them get less assistance than refugees in camps." He said his department had managed to mobilise UN agencies and their partners to focus more on the IDP problem, but a lot remained to be done. He challenged civil authorities in areas where IDPs were found to help alleviate the suffering of displaced people. McNamara said: "In Burundi, we have more involvement of the agencies. In Uganda we have more UN involvement, more NGO involvement. In Somalia there is more involvement now by the UN family, by the NGOs." He urged donor governments to provide more resources to make it possible for aid agencies to resolve the IDP crisis. "We can only get progress if we get support from donor governments," he said. "We do get that support - but don't get enough of it for these populations." Illustrating the lack of funding, McNamara said aid agencies had so far received only 20 percent of the US $130 million they had appealed for to fund humanitarian programmes in Burundi in 2005. For Uganda, $158 million was requested, but only the food was funded. Many of the other agencies had received less than 10 percent of the necessary funding. "In Somalia the appeal for humanitarian assistance this year was $164 million. The food part is fully funded, but a number of the other agencies - FAO [the UN Food and Agriculture Organization] for agriculture, UNICEF [the UN Children's Fund] for education, WHO [the UN World Health Organization] for health so far this year have got zero." "That's the sort of essential support that the donor governments need to give and it is not forthcoming enough," he added. He said unless the agencies, including the UN, host authorities and the donor community came together, displaced people would "remain in those miserable conditions for the foreseeable future". McNamara said the donor response to the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004 had affected other humanitarian catastrophes because too much funding had gone to the tsunami operation, leaving little for other humanitarian emergencies, especially those in Africa. "In some way, the tsunami has distorted the international humanitarian perspective because it was dramatic," he said. "It was Christmas; it affected so many countries in the south and the north. It got unprecedented world-record contributions from governments and populations. "Africa, in many ways, has a silent tsunami many times in a year, a silent tsunami in terms of human suffering, displacement, even loss of life. If you look at the numbers in the [Democratic Republic of] Congo, in Sudan - you have the equivalent impact in human terms of a tsunami every few months as [UN Humanitarian Coordinator] Jan Egeland has said on a number of occasions," McNamara said. He added: "But those silent tsunamis in the jungles of Congo or the remote untouched areas of Somalia don't get that attention. That's understandable, but it is a problem. "Our challenge is to try and make sure there is more equal attention to these 10 million [IDPs] that I mentioned in this region who are displaced." He said the problem of displacement was also a challenge to peace-building and post-conflict recovery. "We have learned over many years in many countries that unless you have a stable population base - unless you can stabilise populations - you cannot rebuild countries after conflict. "It is not possible to rebuild southern Sudan when you have four million people on the move. It is not possible if you had peace in eastern Congo - which we don't - with two million people displaced," he said. McNamara said resolving internal displacement was "not just a humanitarian issue. We are focusing on the humanitarian, but it has much wider implications than that, and that is something that is often not recognised".