UNITED NATIONS — Nearly 60 million people have been driven from their homes by war and persecution, an unprecedented global exodus that has burdened fragile countries with waves of newcomers and littered deserts and seas with the bodies of those who died trying to reach safety.

The new figures, released Thursday by the United Nations refugee agency, paint a staggering picture of a world where new conflicts are erupting and old ones are refusing to subside, driving up the total number of displaced people to a record 59.5 million by the end of 2014, the most recent year tallied.

Half of the displaced are children.

Nearly 14 million people were newly displaced in 2014, according to the annual report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In other words, tens of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes every day and “seek protection elsewhere” last year, the report found.

That included 11 million people who scattered within the borders of their own countries, the highest figure ever recorded in the agency’s 50-year history.

Tens of millions of others fled in previous years and remain stuck, sometimes for decades, unable to go home or find a permanent new one, according to the refugee agency. They include the more than 2.5 million displaced in the Darfur region of Sudan, and the 1.5 million Afghans still living in Pakistan.

When refugees flee their own countries, most of them wind up in the world’s less-developed nations, with Turkey, Iran and Pakistan hosting the largest numbers.

One in four refugees now finds shelter in the world’s poorest countries, with Ethiopia andKenya taking many more refugees than, say, Britain and France.

As the report states, “the global distribution of refugees remains heavily skewed away from wealthier nations and towards the less wealthy.”

Even so, there has been a sharp backlash in European capitals against the waves of people coming across the Mediterranean Sea, including many who are fleeing conflict and repression in countries like Syria andEritrea.

For now, the European Union has shelved its plans to get approval from the United Nations Security Council to target human smugglers who operate in lawless Libya and to destroy the ships they use to bring migrants across the sea.

Instead, the European Union is scheduled to meet on Monday to discuss whether it will start military operations in the international waters of the Mediterranean Sea, for which it does not need the Council’s blessings.

European Union leaders are still squabbling with one another over how to split up at least 40,000 asylum seekers across their 28 member states. And they have stepped up search-and-rescue operations after intense public pressure stemming from a sharp increase i

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read full article at source: http://genocidewatch.net/2015/06/18/u-n-reports-60-million-refugees-fleeing-violence-and-persecution/