As If The Economic News Is Not Bad Enough, War Is Up Too

One thing worse than fear of recession is fear of war, and to a surprising degree, war is on the rise. While it's been widely noted that the financial crisis in rich Western nations is slowing and in some cases even reversing the flow of economic immigrants, the tide of political refugees is rising. The United Nations reports that the number of refugees fleeing war and repression in their homelands grew by more than a million worldwide last year, to 11.4 million, and is expected to rise again in 2008, as violent crises grow and spread.

This ends, at least temporarily, a global outbreak of peace and stability. Refugee flows had been declining since 2002, as conflicts in places like Burundi and Liberia were resolved or hit plateaus, allowing exiles to return home. So far this year, the United Nations has deployed 197 emergency relief missions to crises worldwide, already more than all of last year. The conflicts that produce the most refugees are still in Afghanistan, Iraq and Colombia, but the largest new flows come from places such as the Central African Republic, where a conflict between the government and rebels displaced more than 25,000 people last year, and Somalia, where the number of refugees grew from 400,000 to more than 450,000 by the end of 2007. In Iraq, the surge in U.S. troops is widely credited with lowering the level of violence, but apparently not enough to stop the outflow of refugees. The United Nations counts an increase of 1.5 million in 2006 to 2.2 million who left the country last year.

This year the conflict in Georgia has uprooted tens of thousands more from their homes, and the number of asylum seekers (a smaller population than refugees) is also on the rise. According to a U.N. report released in October, the number of people applying for asylum in the developed world is predicted to grow by 10 percent in 2008, fueled mainly by applications from Iraqis, Somalis and Afghans. New fighting in smaller conflicts in Mali and the Democratic Republic of the Congo has also added to the spike in applications.

The increase in displaced people comes as a decadelong decline in wars around the world appears to have leveled out. "That trend has slowed down considerably and it could be a sign of reversal," says Joseph Hewitt, the coauthor of a University of Maryland report that tracks violent conflicts. U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres recently predicted that an "arc of crisis" stretching from Southwest Asia across the Middle East to the Horn of Africa would continue to drive refugees out of their homes. Even more sobering: a severe global recession could further fan the fires of war.