The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says that it stands ready to support the Government in registering all internally displaced persons (IDPs) and to promote reconciliation for safe and sustainable voluntary returns.

UNHCR has been working with the authorities and partners to provide water, sanitation and healthcare services to those uprooted by the violence between Buddhists and Muslims.

Some 75,000 people were uprooted in the first wave of riots in northern Rakhine state last June. Another 36,000 were displaced by a second wave of unrest in October.

“Many others who were not directly affected by the violence have lost their livelihoods as a result of restricted movements due to the security situation. Some have been forced to leave their homes in search of assistance,” UNHCR spokesperson Adrian Edwards told reporters in Geneva.

There are an estimated 13,000 people living in makeshift sites around the state capital Sittwe and some 2,800 people in Maungdaw who are not formally considered IDPs by the authorities and who have therefore not received aid systematically.

In the last year, UNHCR has distributed relief supplies such as plastic sheets, sleeping mats and kitchen sets for 75,000 IDPs. Supplementing the Government’s shelter programme, it has provided tents, temporary or permanent shelters to 45,000 people. Additional shelters are being built by UNHCR for 25,000 IDPs in Pauktaw and Myebon townships who are vulnerable to flooding during the rainy season.

“UNHCR has been working with the authorities and partner agencies to make sure that the IDPs receive adequate water, sanitation and health care services,” said Mr. Edwards, adding that this has been difficult in some areas, with aid workers being harassed or threatened and displaced people unable to move freely to access basic services.

UNHCR has highlighted the urgent need to register all IDPs in order to improve aid delivery and better respond to the needs of the most vulnerable among them.

“While humanitarian assistance remains the priority for now, we are also working with the Government to advocate for action to promote dialogue and peaceful co-existence between the communities to pave the way for voluntary return,” Mr. Edwards stated.

The agency added that active steps must be taken to stem the flow of people out of Rakhine. Since last June, more than 27,000 people – believed mostly to be from there – have embarked on dangerous boat journeys in search of safety and stability in other countries.

UNHCR has appealed to Governments in the region to keep their doors open to people in need of international protection. It is also asking authorities in Myanmar to urgently address the root causes of this outflow of people.

The agency also noted that it needs $80 million to meet the needs of people of concern in Myanmar – including IDPs in Rakhine, Kachin and the south-east – until the end of the year. It has so far received 18 per cent of that amount.

“Despite improvements to the security situation in some areas, fear of returning home remains widespread,” said Adrian Edwards, a UNHCR spokesman.

Of the estimated 430,000 people uprooted since the beginning of 2012 in Mali, available figures are that 260,665 are still displaced within the country. The refugee population is around 170,000, of whom more than 70,000 are in Mauritania, some 47,200 in Burkina Faso, 50,000 in Niger and about 1,500 in Algeria.

Edwards said that spontaneous returns among IDPs were still low although bus services between the Mali capital Bamako and the northern town of Gao resumed last week, and boats were also now travelling between the towns of Mopti and Timbuktu.

For the internally displaced and refugees alike the primary worry remains insecurity. “Continued fighting, suicide attacks, reprisal attacks against some communities, the presence of landmines and unexploded ordnance in the regions of Mopti, Gao and Timbuktu, are all cited as reasons to delay returning,” Edwards noted.

However, the absence of services in the north is also a factor. With few schools functioning there, and government authorities still absent in many towns and cities, many displaced families prefer to wait.

For those outside Mali an additional complication is ethnic make-up, as a majority of the refugees are Tuareg or Arab. Fear of reprisal attacks is widespread, as is fear of criminality or that jihadists might remain present in the community.

A reflection of the situation is that while new refugee numbers are substantially down on their levels of a few weeks ago, Mali is continuing to see net refugee outflow, albeit a modest one. During February, average arrivals in Mauritania were more than 1,500 people per week – mainly from the Lere, Goundam, Gnoufonke and Timbuktu areas. Refugee numbers in Burkina Faso and Niger are static.

UNHCR believes that reconciliation efforts are urgently needed, together with efforts to combat impunity, to encourage peaceful coexistence between communities, to help long-term stabilization and security and to prevent Mali’s displacement crisis from becoming more protracted. We are at present planning support for reconciliation in areas of displacement and returns, as well as in refugee camps.

“The north and the south need to trust each other, we need reconciliation,” said Fama, an ethnic Tuareg sheltering in Bamako, where she said she is regarded with suspicion. “We just want to live in peace now and have more access to development,” added the 56-year-old.

Meanwhile, some of those who have returned to their homes from urban areas like Bamako, or are thinking about it, say it is too costly in the cities. “Life is too expensive in Bamako, we can’t afford to stay longer here,” said 18-year-old Fatoumata as she waited to board a bus to Gao.

“We live in very bad conditions here, with limited access to electricity and current water. We can’t find jobs here,” added the young woman, who fled to Bamako with her husband last April and gave birth later in the year.

Drawn-out displacement, insecurity, difficulties in helping acutely vulnerable people, funding shortages, and a ‘not in my backyard’ attitude are major current obstacles to quality protection, the Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, Erika Feller, of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told the annual meeting of the refugee agency’s governing Executive Committee in Geneva.

“UNHCR still has to make efforts to improve its own response. By the same token political will is not consistently enough behind protection. This is disturbingly evidenced in a prevailing attitude in a number of states to the effect: ‘Yes, we sympathize with your plight, but resolve it please elsewhere,’” she said.

UNHCR’s Executive Committee meets annually to review and approve the agency’s programmes and budget, advise on international protection and discuss a wide range of other issues with UNHCR and its intergovernmental and non-governmental partners.

In her remarks, Feller cited Mali – where Islamic militants have seized control of the north, imposing strict Sharia law and sending 260,000 refuges fleeing into neighbouring countries in a major humanitarian emergency for UNHCR – to highlight the difficulties involved in providing quality protection to individuals among the 700,000 worldwide who have become refugees so far this year.

In countries neighbouring Mali, she said, the proximity of refugees to the insecure border, physical difficulties in accessing and monitoring refugees spread across wide areas, tensions among different displaced groups and shortages of funds are combining to ensure that refugees get nothing more than basic life-saving help.

In such environments, she noted, preventing problems such as military recruitment of children, child labour or sexual exploitation of children is becoming more difficult.

While noting “very positive” efforts under way by states to collaborate on regional strategies to tackle these issues, Ms. Feller cautioned that regional cooperation is not an end in itself. “Its aims must include stronger national asylum systems, not their replacement, and for States to share more equitably the burdens and responsibilities of protecting refugees,” she said.

This year has so far seen mass displacement in areas of Africa and the Middle East, principally from conflicts in Syria, South Sudan and Sudan, Mali and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. People newly displaced in these areas are an addition to the 42.5 million refugees, internally displaced people and asylum-seekers globally.

Feller echoed a call made on Monday by the High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, for states to do more to help those countries that host major refugee populations, including by supporting funding arrangements for the local integration of people who are unable to return home, and she cited the need for more resettlement places as a further solution. Globally, demand for resettlement places currently outstrips availability by a factor of 10 persons for each resettlement place available.

The UN official also underlined the need for more concerted action to reduce risks for specific vulnerable groups, including the growing numbers of unaccompanied refugee children worldwide, disabled people and people fleeing persecution because of their sexual orientation and gender identity. Displaced children lose access to education or end up being placed in immigration detention, and girls and women often have particular difficulties, she said.

“Situations of forced displacement are not gender neutral; they affect women and girls disproportionately. Exposure to rape, human trafficking, survival sex, in tandem with lack of documentation and exclusion from support and services, is commonplace,” she stressed, adding that UNHCR was working to fight impunity by strengthening its work in preventing sexual- or gender-based violence, and ensuring that justice is more accessible for victims.

The revised Syria Humanitarian Response Plan focuses on the priority areas of health, food, livelihoods, infrastructure rehabilitation, community services, education and shelter, in Homs, Hama, Idlib, Damascus, rural Damascus, Deir Ezzor and Aleppo, as well as areas hosting large numbers of internally displaced people.

It was launched at the Syria Humanitarian Forum in Geneva which brought together over 350 participants from Member States, regional organizations, international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and UN humanitarian agencies to mobilize the necessary resources to provide assistance to the hundreds of thousands of people uprooted by the conflict.

“At the moment, the entire civilian population inside Syria is gripped by fear and despair,” John Ging, the Director of the Coordination and Response Division of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told reporters after the Forum. “The basis for that fear is very real.”

UN officials have been calling for enhanced international support to respond to the growing crisis, which has been escalating in recent weeks in many towns and villages, as well as the country’s two biggest cities, Damascus and Aleppo. More than 18,000 people, mostly civilians, have died since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began some 18 months ago.

OCHA estimates that over 1.2 million people are internally displaced, more than half of whom are children forced from their homes. There are also more than 245,000 Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries, with more than 100,000 people registered as refugees in August alone.

“This begins to give you a sense of the scale of the tragedy that is unfolding, and the fact that it’s escalating, rather than dissipating,” said Ging, who chaired the Forum.

“It also presents for us on the humanitarian side an enormous challenge,” he added. “Humanitarian action is not a solution in conflict. The solution in conflict is political resolution that ends the conflict and takes the issues into a political process.

“But while there is failure to find that process even to bring about a political resolution to this conflict and end to the violence, we in the humanitarian community have to step up and do more in evermore dangerous circumstances to help people who are suffering more.”