Earlier this month, my office (The State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration) posted a year-in-review article about where we’ve come since the beginning of 2011. For the full article, you can click here, but I wanted to share a few highlights from my office (the office of Assistance for Africa) below.
“Africa: In Africa, we supported international organization and NGO efforts to assist some 170,000 Ivoirian refugees in Liberia as well as hundreds of thousands of Ivoirians who were internally displaced as a result of conflict in that region. This spring, turmoil in Libya forced over one million persons to cross into Tunisia and Egypt. In response, PRM supported the emergency evacuation and repatriation of stranded third-country migrants, assistance and protection efforts for refugees and internally displaced persons, and emergency medical care and protection programs for conflict victims and detainees. Our partnership in this effort with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was a model of multilateral humanitarian action at its best. In the Horn of Africa, conflict and famine in southern Somalia forced another 300,000 Somalis to flee in 2011, bringing the overall Somali refugee population in the region to nearly one million. PRM funding to international organization partners and NGOs provided shelter, food, and other assistance to Somalis in need, and we sponsored a series of colloquia in the region to bring affected governments — especially those who have played an important role in hosting large numbers of Somali refugees — and service providers together to begin developing a unified strategic plan to address the crisis.”
As you can see, a lot happened last year. At the same time, though, there remains a lot of work to be done in 2012. It’s often humbling to work on issues like these—it makes me grateful to have the security and comfort that I do, and it makes me realize how hard we (humanity in general) have to work before we’ll get anywhere close to addressing and preventing some of the injustice and insecurity that we create for each other every day. Here’s to more progress in 2012.
