Azernews.Az

WASHINGTON D.C. – There were over 592,800 internally displaced persons in Azerbaijan as of the end of 2010, according to the United Nations agency for refugees.

The displaced Azerbaijanis were ousted from Nagorno Karabakh and seven surrounding regions during the armed conflict with Armenia that began in 1988 on Armenian territorial claims.

Worldwide, an estimated 43.7 million people are currently displaced – roughly equaling the entire populations of Colombia or the Republic of Korea or of all Scandinavian countries and Sri Lanka combined, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said in a report.

Of the total, 15.4 million are refugees – 10.55 million under UNHCR’s care and 4.82 million registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Some 27.5 million people were displaced internally by conflict and 837,500 are asylum-seekers. The report does not include this year’s internal displacements in Libya and Cote d’Ivoire.

Afghans, who first fled in significant numbers after the Soviet invasion in 1979, accounted for a third of the world’s refugees in both 2001 and in 2010. Iraqis, Somalis, citizens of Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Sudanese were also among the top 10 nationalities of refugees at both the start and end of the decade.

Pakistan, Iran, and Syria have the largest refugee populations at 1.9 million, 1.07 million, and 1.005 million respectively. Pakistan also feels the biggest economic impact with 710 refugees for each dollar of its per capita gross domestic product (GDP), followed by DRC and Kenya, with 475 and 247 refugees per dollar of their per capita GDP respectively, UNHCR said.

According to the report, more than 2.9 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) returned home in Pakistan, the DRC, Uganda and Kyrgyzstan. While the global number of IDPs remained high and instability persisted, that was nonetheless the highest number of IDP returns since UNHCR started monitoring internal displacement trends in 1997.

The number of countries reporting stateless populations has risen steadily since 2004, but differences in definitions and methodologies still prevent reliable measurement of the problem. The reported number of stateless people last year – 3.5 million – was nearly half of the 2009 figure, but this was mainly the result of methodological changes in some countries that supplied data. Unofficial estimates put the global figure closer to 12 million.