Internal displacement: global overview of trends and developments in 2004

This report presents a global overview of the situation of IDPs in 2004. It identifies trends, central themes, and regional situations in internal displacement.

The report’s findings include:

• Africa: with over 13 million IDPs in 19 countries, Africa remained the continent by far most affected by internal displacement in 2004. More than half of the world’s internally displaced people lived in Africa. In Sudan alone, up to 6 million people were internally displaced, more than in any other country in the world. Sudan also is the country with the largest amount of people newly displaced in 2004
• Americas: Colombia, the country with the world’s second largest IDP population, accounts for most of Latin America’s 3.7 million internally displaced people and nearly all new displacements recorded in the region during 2004. While most armed conflicts have ended in the region and IDPs have generally been able to return or resettle, the displaced in Mexico, Guatemala and Peru were still waiting for durable solutions, mainly with regard to property issues and indigenous rights
• Asia-Pacific: the number of IDPs continued to decrease in the Asia-Pacific region and reached 3.3 million by the end of 2004. However, the high return rates recorded in 2002 and 2003 in the three countries most affected by internal displacement – Afghanistan, Indonesia and Sri Lanka – levelled off significantly in 2004
• Middle East: in the Middle East, Iraq still accounted for about half of the region’s 2.1 million IDPs. In 2004, hundreds of thousands of people were newly displaced in Iraq by military operations against suspected militants in Fallujah and other cities. Kurdish IDPs displaced by the previous regime continued to return to their home areas in northern Iraq, albeit in lower numbers than in 2003. In the Palestinian Territories, thousands of people were forcibly displaced in 2004, mainly by house demolitions carried out by the Israeli military.

The following themes are identified and discussed in the report:

• women and children
• health and food
• property issues
• shelter and housing
• public participation of IDPs
• IDPs and peace processes
• IDPs and peacekeeping
• urban displacement
• development-induced displacement.