Governments around the world should strive for meaningful dialogues and political consensus amid longer and more complex global conflicts where refugees are blocked from returning home or access to necessities, said an official of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Ewan Watson, head of Global Communication for UNHCR, made the statement in an interview with China Global Television Network (CGTN) in Geneva on Wednesday.
The UN official said that compared with decades ago, conflicts now involve multiple parties and thus become increasingly complex, causing the situations too volatile for refugees to return home.
"Of course, conflicts now are going on ever longer. So, whereas perhaps 20, 30 years ago, there would be conflicts, of course, but those conflicts would find some sort of resolution, and then people could go back home, ultimately. That is happening on very few occasions now," he said.
According to a UN report released in June, the number of people forced to flee their homelands have been on the rise for 12 years, reaching 117.3 million by the end of 2023.
The report highlighted the impacts of conflicts on forced displacement, saying that as the frequency, duration and intensity of conflicts increase, the number of people forced to flee each year grew as well.
"Frankly, because the world seems to have forgotten how to make peace. These conflicts just go on and on and then of course as they do so, they also become more and more complex, because it's not just one country fighting another country, they are very splintered and complex with lots of armed non-state groups operating. It makes moving around very difficult. It makes just the whole country highly volatile and unstable. And that, of course, means less people can go back because they don't feel safe to do so. There's not the environment and conditions for them to do so," said Watson.
The increasingly complex situations on the ground have been challenging the organization's operations, said the official, adding that getting permission to travel between conflict zones is one of the most pressing issues.
The UN has repeatedly stressed the serious challenges the aid workers are facing, especially over recent years when their death toll has been rising dramatically. According to an August post of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 280 aid workers were killed in 33 countries in 2023, marking a 137-percent increase compared with 2022.
The post said 2024 may be on track for an even deadlier outcome, quoting data released by Aid Worker Security Database that as of August 7, 172 aid workers have been killed. "So, that's an enduring challenge, as you can imagine. And a lot of our work is about the painstaking process of ensuring that we have the humanitarian access we need, especially in the emergency settings, that we can actually have the permission and understanding of the different parties to conflicts to be able to travel from A to B where displaced people and refugees are," he said.
Facing intensifying conflicts, deteriorating humanitarian crisis for refugees, and rising aid worker fatalities, the official stressed that governments across the world and the UN Security Council should make genuine efforts to eliminate conflicts so as to ensure long-term peace.
"So I think what needs to happen is the governments of this world and the Security Council really need to be able to find routes to peace and have meaningful peace dialogues and find that political consensus towards peace, have those difficult conversations convene, fighting parties hammer out peace. That is our consistent plea, because without that we go nowhere," he said.
UN official calls for meaningful peace dialogues amid prolonged global conflicts
