photo courtesy of irc
The IRC provides direct assistance for people as they try to feed their families and find a safe place to live, helping to restore health, safety, education, economic wellbeing and power to people devastated by conflict and disaster. Photo courtesy of IRC.
country still riddled by conflict. The IRC began work in the former Yugoslavia in 1992 following the ethnic cleansing carried out by the Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Since 1993, it has resettled over 20,000 refugees from the Balkans in the United States. In 1994, as a result of the Rwandan genocide and civil war, the IRC established emergency programs to aid Rwandan refugees. In the years following, the IRC helped to reunite families separated in the chaos. After a tsunami hit Indonesia on December 26, 2004, IRC mobile relief teams arrived to provide emergency aid to those affected—including providing child friendly spaces for children displaced by the disaster. As the conflict in Darfur displaced thousands, the IRC was one of the only organizations assisting refugees pouring into Chad at the beginning of the conflict. More than a decade later, millions remain displaced. Since the outbreak began in 2014, the IRC has been on the forefront of the fight to stem the spread of the Ebola in Sierra Leone and Liberia while working closely with local partners to help communities to rebuild and recover. IRC deployed an emergency team to the Greek island of Lesbos in July 2015 to aid thousands of refugees arriving to Europe from Turkey. It continues to work in Europe and in the Syrian region to assist Syrian refugees fleeing their country’s brutal civil war.
Widening Gap
In addition to bureaucratic roadblocks and problems with the public’s perception of refugees today, there is a desperate need for funds. “The gap between needs and resources is widening,” writes Miliband. “In 2015, the United Nations appealed for $20 billion in order to address global humanitarians needs; it received just $11 billion.” This shortfall compromises the ability of agencies like the IRC to do its work of responding to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helping to restore health, safety, education, economic wellbeing and power to people devastated by conflict and disaster. “The more than a dozen conflicts that have broken out or reignited since 2010 are behind much of the growth in global displacement,” Miliband notes. New horrors only compound old ones. “Today’s conflicts burn for an average of 37 years,” reports Miliband. Some 27 million Afghans and 1.1 million Somalis have been exiled for decades, and the global numbers only get worse. On average, 34,000 people were forced to flee their homes every day of 2015. “As in the 1940s, the longer the delay, the worse the reckoning,” writes Miliband.
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