Three and a half years after the 2006 crisis and the displacement of up to 150,000 people in  Timor-Leste, all 65 camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) have been closed and their inhabitants have returned home or relocated to other areas of the country. As of November  2009, only around 100 families were still in the few remaining transitional shelters in the capital Dili. With the return process in its closing stages, attention has now turned to the reintegration phase and the achievement of a durable solution for IDPs.  

In one of the poorest countries in the world, people in Timor-Leste face significant difficulties accessing employment, services and infrastructure. The continued absence of a legal framework addressing land and property disputes, a weak justice system compromised by a culture of impunity, and a continuing need for security sector reform all stand in the way of sustainable peace.  

Within this context the precise number of IDPs who have reintegrated successfully is unknown. Lack of accurate data gathered in post-return monitoring makes it difficult to assess the extent to which returnees have been able to achieve durable solutions. Collaboration between government departments, UN agencies, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and other humanitarian and development agencies has been ongoing since 2006. The Hamutuk Hari’i Konfiansa working group, created to address confidence building and reconciliation within the national recovery programme, and also the early recovery cluster, have helped coordinate the return and reintegration process. However, until the causes of the 2006 crisis are addressed, and the institutions that support the overall peace-building process strengthened, the situation in Timor-Leste will remain fragile. 

Armed conflict and communal or ethnic violence have continued to cause internal displacement in India, and hundreds of thousands of people or more were living in displacement as of August 2010. In addition to those who were forced to flee in 2009 and during the first half of 2010, many who had been displaced earlier remained in displacement, as they had not been able to reach durable solutions.

It is very difficult to estimate the total number of conflict- and violence-induced IDPs in India as there is no central government agency responsible for monitoring the numbers of people displaced and returning, while humanitarian and human rights agencies have limited access to them. The displaced whose numbers are known are generally living in camps and registered there, and no numbers are known of IDPs outside camps. A conservative estimate of the total number of people displaced by conflict and violence would be at least 650,000.

During the 20th century, millions of people were forced to flee their homes in what is now Bangladesh. They were displaced both within the territory and to neighbouring areas by different triggers. As of January 2015, IDMC estimates that at least 431,000 people were displaced in the country as a result of conflict and violence. Information on their number and situation is limited, contested and outdated, however, with little known about the scale of new displacement in 2014.

Bangladesh is also highly prone to natural hazards, mainly cyclones and floods, and hundreds of thousands of people are displaced each year by the disasters they cause. In 2013, more than 1.1 million fled cyclone Mahasen. More than 325,000 were newly displaced by flooding in 2014.

Over the last three years, inter-communal violence targeting indigenous, Hindu and Buddhist communities has caused new displacement. The establishment of development projects has also forced large numbers of people to flee, including in areas experiencing displacement as a result of conflict and violence.

Twenty years of armed struggle in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), pitting the armed forces and Bengali settlers against indigenous groups seeking greater autonomy, formally ended in 1997 with the signing of the CHT Peace Accord. The accord granted cultural recognition and a degree of self-government to indigenous groups and foresaw the rehabilitation of internally displaced people (IDPs), but the situation of displaced indigenous people and Bengalis has not been resolved.

Insecurity continues to generate new displacements. These go largely undocumented because of restrictions on independent reporting, but some sources suggest that tens of thousands of people have been affected. Insecurity is also preventing IDPs from achieving a durable solution to their displacement. Most who are unable to return to their places of origin cite a combination of insecurity and a lack of guarantees for political activity as their main obstacles.
 
There is disagreement over who should be recognised as an IDP. Under the CHT Peace Accord, all parties recognise displaced indigenous people as IDPs, but the indigenous groups refuse to accept the Bengali settlers they have displaced from recently occupied land as such. Their position is not in line with the common definition of an IDP, which does not require a person to have lived in a place for a long period before they can be recognised as displaced from it. Given the background to the conflict, it may make sense to offer settlers compensation and safe alternatives to their discontinued occupation of the land in question, but any attempt to do so should be on the basis that they too should be recognized as IDPs and treated as such under the accord.
 
There is a also a general lack of up-to-date information and monitoring of internal displacement, some of whom were displaced as many as 35 years ago, so it is unclear what their settlement intentions might have been and whether they have achieved a durable solution.
 
Disputed land rights remain the most important issue. Given a context of continuing forced evictions and expropriation of ancestral lands, the commission set up to settle disputes needs to establish land ownership rights prior to undertaking a cadastral survey. By doing so, land would be registered to its original owners rather than the land grabbers.

Afghanistan is in a political, security and economic transition. The International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) will hand over full responsibility for security to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) at the end of 2014, a new president and provincial authorities will assume office and the economy will need to adjust to a loss of international military spending. During this period of transition, Afghanistan’s political, security and economic stability are uncertain. As such, humanitarian access has become a key concern, particularly for internally displaced people (IDPs) in rural or remote areas where development and humanitarian actors have limited access due to insecurity and on-going conflict. Shrinking humanitarian space does not translate into shrinking needs and, if anything, multiplies them. Internal displacement continues to rise against a backdrop of continuing armed conflict, high rate of civilian casualties, increased abuses by non-state armed groups (NSAGs) and pervasive conflict-related violence. 

Response to needs in this increasingly volatile and uncertain climate may require humanitarian organisations to take previously avoided risks, such as relying more on local actors to carry out programmes and assessments in areas where there is shrinking or limited access. Emerging conflict trends indicate a rise in short-term localised displacement at a time when humanitarian organisations are unable to adequately respond. As a result, IDPs are frequently not profiled, left without assistance, forced to rely on host communities or local authorities who are often unaware of their legal responsibility to assist or without capacity to do so.  There is an urgent need to improve profiling through local community monitoring, update data collection mechanisms and conduct house-to-house surveys. Only with better information on protection needs and vulnerabilities can IDPs receive needs based assistance.

As international troops prepare to leave Afghanistan by 2014, more than half a million Afghans are estimated to be internally displaced. The on-going transfer of security responsibility from NATO to Afghan security forces has not been accompanied by a transition to stability. In 2012, internal displacement continued to rise significantly against a backdrop of continuing armed conflict, high civilian casualties, increased abuses by non-state armed groups and pervasive conflict-related violence. Over 100,000 Afghans were newly displaced by conflict and a further 32,000 by natural disasters in 2012. There are numerous challenges in accurately profiling the displaced. The actual number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) is undoubtedly far higher. 
 

War and political violence have led to four major waves of displacement in Syria since 1967, forcing up to two million people to flee their homes. The current uprising, now in its second year, has alone displaced as many as 1,500,000 people internally according to SARC. At least 500,000 more live in situations of protracted displacement stemming from Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights in 1967, the forcible eviction of Kurds from the north-eastern province of al-Hasakah during the 1970s and the 1982 assault on the city of Hama, which put down a revolt by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.

For the last 15 months the Syrian authorities have been confronted with a popular uprising, part of a broader phenomenon across the Arab world which has seen the fall of long-established authoritarian governments. These had ruled for more than a generation, overstretching the rhetoric of anti-colonialism, anti-Zionism and pan-Arab nationalism. Overtime, these ideologies provided these governments with a veil for violence meted out against their own populations and the displacement that it caused. It was under this veil that Syria previously conducted its campaign against the Kurds and the inhabitants of Hama with relative impunity.

None of the Arab governments were prepared for the uprisings that swept the region in 2011. The blossoming of Islam as a political ideology and Gulf States sponsored media has altered the image of the Syrian government as the vanguard of anti-Zionist resistance to that of a shi’a minority government intent on stamping its authority on the country’s Sunni majority rather. In contrast, the Syrian government perceive this as a hostile foreign interference.

The Syrian people have become caught in the crossfire of a battle for regional influence between countries such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and western countries on one hand and Iran, Russia and China on the other. The plight of the country’s internally displaced people (IDPs) has not been reliably assessed by local and international stakeholders because of a lack of access to the country.  

This report covers the causes and scale of Syria’s four displacement crises and IDPs’ protection needs arising from them. It examines the national response, which – with the exception of the Golanese, who embody the country’s resistance to Israel’s hegemony - has largely been to ignore IDPs’ plight. It also looks at the response of the international humanitarian community, which despite the widespread media coverage of the conflict afforded by the digital age, remains re-stricted in its capacity to assist IDPs and other Syrians in need.

In 2013, 9,500 Syrians were displaced per day on average. By July 2014, the total number of internally displaced people (IDPs) reached 6.4 million, a third of the entire population of the country. An additional three million Syrians have sought refuge in neighbouring countries. A stable middle-income country that hosted refugees from all over the region and beyond just four years ago, Syria is now experiencing a displacement and protection crisis of a magnitude the world has not seen for many years.

The Syrian authorities have not only failed to protect civilians from or during displacement, but their deliberate targeting of non-combatants has also been the main cause for their massive displacement. Sieges, checkpoints and international border restrictions have prevented civilians in need of protection from fleeing to safer areas, either within or outside the country. For their part, several fundamentalist Islamist groups have also forced civilians to flee and carried out human rights violations that have led to their displacement.

Aid agencies have done their best to respond to the overwhelming humanitarian impact of the conflict, both in the country and from neighbouring states. However, the politicisation of aid by international and regional actors has prevented them from fulfilling their basic functions. It has prevented them from being able to respond to the needs of all IDPs, irrespective of their locations or political allegiances, in conformity with the humanitarian principle of the neutrality of humanitarian assistance. The Syrian authorities have severely restricted the work of international humanitarian agencies and, except for a few cases, have prevented them from delivering aid to rebel-held areas across front lines and international borders.  

Access restrictions and cumbersome procedures imposed by the Syrian authorities on humanitarian agencies have hampered their monitoring of IDPs figures and movements. This has led to inconsistent, unreliable and patchy data and contributed to an underestimation of IDPs’ needs. Tensions between inter-national agencies over their relations with the Syrian authorities, perceived by NGOs active in rebel-held areas as compromising, have created mistrust among the different actors. This has, in turn exacerbated coordination constraints. All these factors, compounded by severe funding shortcomings, have gravely hampered the humanitarian response.

The government has made good progress in implementing its 2007 strategy for internally displaced people (IDPs). Since 2008, it has made significant efforts in building and refurbishing housing, and set standards to guide the implementation process with the international community. This has improved the living conditions of many IDPs.

This housing assistance has met several challenges, however. Some IDPs received substandard new or refurbished housing and are still waiting for property titles as agreed. Timelines for housing assistance are ambitious, and measures are often taken without due planning or communication with IDPs. The majority of IDPs are yet to receive a housing solution, which includes the most vulnerable IDPs who have not been prioritised for support as well as those who have returned to their damaged homes.

Greater attention to the creation of livelihood and job opportunities is needed for IDPs in their place of refuge and return. Without this, most IDPs continue to depend on state benefits as their main source of income. The government’s action plan for IDPs includes measures for livelihoods and jobs, but this needs to be strengthened with accurate data and funding clarified.

Other barriers to durable solutions include segregated education, the absence of a mechanism for restoration or compensation of lost property, limitations on freedom of movement, ineffective investigation of displacement-related violations, and insecurity and the poor quality of education in return areas. Humanitarian organisations cannot access South Ossetia from undisputed areas of Georgia, and access is increasingly difficult in Abkhazia. 

Eight years after the internal armed conflict in Peru ended, most internally displaced people (IDPs) have returned to their places of origin or have resettled elsewhere. According to a 2007 government ministry estimate, 150,000 people remained in the urban centres where they arrived after being forcibly displaced. Given that these IDPs have long integrated in various localities, it is difficult to determine if they still have specific protection needs originating from their forced displacement, with the exception of  their right to remedy and reparation. Nevertheless, there are indications that they still struggle to access basic services and livelihood opportunities. 
 
IDPs, like many other victims of violence, are in 2009 still waiting for reparations for the human rights violations and abuses they suffered in the conflict, although the right to reparation, enshrined in the American Convention on Human Rights, was pivotal in the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission published in 2003. The adoption of a statute on internal displacement excluded the reparations component, and reparations for IDPs were instead included in a more general statute for all victims of the armed conflict.  
 
Under this statute, reparations are dependent upon a registration system identifying the victims. Some 5,000 IDPs have been registered in the IDP-specific registry, despite an excessive burden of proof placed on applicants, but not one of them has received reparations benefits. Lack of coordination between the IDP-specific registry and the general victims’ registry, and the current focus on reparations for collective groups, have effectively excluded individual IDPs. Finally, reparations both for IDPs and victims of other human rights abuses have generally been framed as development or anti-poverty measures rather than fundamental rights supported by international law.