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An estimated 4.3 million people in South and South-East Asia were internally displaced by armed conflict, generalised violence or human rights violations at the end of 2009. This represented an increase of around 800,000 people, or 23 per cent, since the end of 2008. Close to four million people were newly displaced in the region during the year, mainly as a result of existing conflicts that escalated. The overwhelming majority did however manage to return before the end of the year.

By far the largest displacement was in Pakistan, where three million people were forced to flee their homes owing to government forces’ operations against Pakistani Taliban militants in the north-western provinces bordering Afghanistan. In the Philippines, up to 400,000 people fled their homes in the south as the army stepped up its operations against elements of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) before declaring a ceasefire in July. In Sri Lanka, the end of the long-running conflict between the government against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) came at a high price for civilians in the north, 280,000 of whom were displaced between October 2008 and June 2009. Tens of thousands of people were also estimated to be newly displaced in Afghanistan, in Myanmar and in India’s Orissa State and states in the north-east, where conflicts showed no signs of ending.

prevented many organisations from operating and greatly limited independent reporting on the impact on civilians of the war and human rights violations committed by warring parties. How-ever, the scale of displacement and the number of wounded civilians treated in medical centres left little doubt that it was very severe.

IDPs in the region lived in a variety of displacement contexts in rural or urban areas. Whether they were gathered in camps or relocation sites, or dispersed and possibly hosted by relatives or friends, they tended to share similar limitations to the fulfilment of their human rights.

Many received inadequate assistance and lived without any predictable source of support. While IDPs gathered in camps were more accessible, and tended to receive more assistance from international agencies compared to those dispersed among host communities, they often also had to face more difficult living conditions in inadequate and overcrowded shelters with limited access to clean water, sanitation, and economic opportunities. Away from their farms or traditional livelihoods, IDPs turned to a variety of activities to generate income, such as daily labour or petty trade, but this often had little impact in improving their access to food and other basic necessities. Rural IDPs who moved to cities often lacked the skills required by employers and were forced to accept menial and low-paying jobs. Some of the most vulnerable IDPs, such as women and children, were forced into prostitution or exploitative work which put them at serious risk of physical or psychological abuse.

Some of the IDPs facing the most difficult conditions were in Myanmar and Indonesia’s Papua Region. They had been forced to hide in the jungle with extremely limited access to basic necessities including food and health care. In these countries as well as in others such as India, governments refused to acknowledge the existence or severity of displacement situations caused by armed conflicts or human rights violations, and restricted the access of independent monitors or agencies seeking to assist IDPs.

Conflict-induced displacement in South and South-East Asia was mainly caused by fighting between government forces and rebel groups striving for autonomy or regional control, or trying to resist assimilation or migration policies resulting in their political and economic marginalisation. Competition for land and other natural resources and the exclusion of ethnic or religious minorities from economic development lay at the heart of many of the conflicts. In addition to national armies and rebel groups, agents of displacement often included militias and vigilante groups, and also communities mobilised along religious or ethnic lines.

IDPs throughout the region were unsafe because of fighting, counter-insurgency campaigns or persecution, including by government armed forces. In the Philippines, IDPs in majority-Muslim areas of Mindanao not only risked being caught in crossfire but were also exposed to human rights violations by the army, which openly considered Muslim IDPs as an “enemy reserve force” with close links to the MILF rebels.

In some cases, civilians including IDPs were used as human shields by insurgents looking to protect themselves from military attacks. In Sri Lanka, the LTTE prevented tens of thousands of people from leaving the Vanni Region and they were trapped there when government forces conducted final attacks including extensive aerial and artillery bombardments, which resulted in the death of several thousand civilians.

In Afghanistan, security deteriorated in the south, where fighting between armed opposition forces and pro-government groups forced thousands to flee. More than 2,400 civilian casualties were recorded during 2009, making it the conflict’s deadliest year since 2001. Although many people internally displaced by the fighting were able to return after hostilities ended in their home area, displacement increasingly became protracted as a result of increasing insecurity in other parts of the country.

In Pakistan, insecurity in the areas affected by fighting and displacement, and in particular in South Waziristan,In most countries, the lack of monitoring of return movements, local integration or settlement elsewhere in the country, and the fact that most of IDPs did not seek refuge in camps but were dispersed within non-displaced communities, made it difficult to estimate how many were able to return or settle elsewhere during the year.

The majority of those who were reported to have returned did so after a relatively short period of displacement, as in Pakistan where around 1.6 million people displaced from the Swat Valley were reported to have returned when their areas were declared safe in July, or in the Philippines where the majority of people displaced between August 2008 and July 2009 were able to return in the weeks or months following their displacement.

For many IDPs, return was not an option during the year because of a number of obstacles including continued fighting, insecurity, land and property disputes, and the lack of assistance available in return areas. Even when return was a possible settlement option, it did not always present a path towards a durable solution.

In many countries ongoing insecurity, limited freedom of movement, unresolved land and property issues, and the lack of political will and assistance by governments prevented IDPs from achieving durable solutions, both in situations of return or settlement elsewhere.

A number of governments encouraged IDPs to return even when conditions were clearly not conducive for doing so and when assistance provided to rebuild and restart a livelihood was insufficient. Governments often failed to organise returns within the framework of a coordinated and comprehensive return and reintegration strategy. In some cases, returnees were subsequently displaced again, often beyond the reach of assistance. Others preferred to remain in displacement, with host families or in camps where at least some security and assistance was available to them.
In Afghanistan, Pashtun IDPs who had returned to provinces in the north found that the harassment which had contributed to their displacement in the first place continued to prevent their reintegration into their home communities. In Pakistan, some of the 1.6 million people who were told it was safe to return home were displaced again as they found their homes and livelihoods destroyed and insecurity continued. At the end of the year, 1.2 million people were still unable to return.

In the Philippines, the government tried to close camps in early 2009 and instructed residents to return although conditions were clearly not safe; many ended up returning to the camps or resettled elsewhere. Following the ceasefire in July, returns were much slower than expected, and at the end of the year up to 188,000 people were still living in camps or with host families where they felt safer, and people in return areas were confronting the impact of recurrent fighting on infrastructure, housing and basic services.

At the end of 2009, the government of Sri Lanka allowed a significant number of IDPs to leave the closed camps where they had been for months. However, many of them could not return due to the presence of landmines, damage to their homes, and the lack of livelihood assistance offered; they remained in displacement, with host families or in transit camps in their districts of origin.

Only in one country, Timor-Leste, was return linked to a near-resolution of the displacement situation. During 2009 “recovery packages” consisting of cash compensation continued to be distributed to people agreeing to leave the IDP camps, and all the camps had closed by August. By the end of the year, only 50 households were still living in “transitional shelters” in the capital Dili. However, lack of monitoring in areas of return made it difficult to estimate how many were able to successfully reintegrate.

Many of Asia’s IDPs, in particular those living in the main towns or cities, chose to integrate in the place of their displacement rather than to go back to their place of origin. Some had no other choice, but others were reluctant to jeopardise the relative security they had attained in urban areas where they had established new social links, sent their children to school or found a job. However, not all IDPs in urban areas had improved their standard of living. In Nepal, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Philippines, many continued to struggle to obtain decent accommodation, employment, education and other services.

The responses of the region’s national authorities to internal displacement situations varied greatly, but overall they were largely insufficient. Most governments acknowledged their responsibility towards their displaced citizens and collaborated actively with the international community to assist them. However, few had the capacity or the will to comprehensively address internal displacement, let alone the root causes of the underlying conflicts. The drafting in some countries of IDP laws (as in Sri Lanka and the Philippines) did not make significant progress during 2009, while in Nepal, the effectiveness of the existing national IDP policy continued to be limited by poor coordination, insufficient resources and the absence of any implementation guidelines.

There was no coordinated regional response to the problem of internal displacement. Most countries continued to avoid interfering in the domestic affairs of their neighbours. Progress was made with the establishment during the year of the ASEAN Inter-Governmental Human Rights Commission, the region’s first human rights mechanism. However, due to a number of important limitations including its weak mandate, the absence of a formal mechanism for individual complaints, and a decision-making process based on consensus, there were strong doubts that it would be an effective instrument to implement international human rights principles and standards.

The United Nations plays an important role in helping governments of the region provide assistance to internally displaced populations. With the exception of India, Myanmar and Bangladesh, where governments have declined offers of international assistance for people displaced by conflict, the UN addresses internal displacement in all countries monitored by IDMC. The cluster approach has now been rolled out in eight countries out of ten, but only in five of them (Afghanistan, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste) were the needs of conflict-induced IDPs a regular item on the agenda of the protection clusters, mainly because of the sensitivities of governments (as in the Philippines) or their refusal to acknowledge the existence of such groups (as in Indonesia and Myanmar).