In the foreground stands the television news correspondent. He is describing the bombings and devastation being wreaked by Russian troops in a defiant Georgia. Crossing behind him unnoticed is a small group of people clearly fleeing the devastation with possibly everything they own on their backs or in the makeshift bags they are carrying. Where they are going is a mystery.

A known but little-noted result of the conflict in Georgia — and others around the world — is the displacement of people who have absolutely no control of the events going on around them. In Georgia alone, tens of thousands of refugees from the secessionist territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been waiting for more than ten years for a chance to return home. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, as many as 247,000 people are displaced in Georgia as of February 2007. The current situation promises only to worsen an already terrible circumstance.

Indeed, according to a 2007 study published by the IDMC, the number of refugees created as a result of armed conflicts and violence in more than 50 countries is well over 26 million. In nearby Iraq, for example, nearly 3 million people were displaced by rising inter-community violence between February 2006 and March 2008, according to the UN. “If a similar percentage of the U.S. population were displaced," writes the Brookings Institute's Elizabeth Ferris in The Looming Crisis: Displacement and Security in Iraq,
"this would represent over 50 million Americans — the equivalent in displacement of those uprooted by 50 Hurricane Katrinas.”

Add these folks to the already staggering number of poor and poverty stricken people throughout the world — a World Bank report states that 2.8 billion of the world’s more than 6 billion people live on less than $2 a day and 1.2 billion on less than $1 a day — and one begins to get a sense of the enormous challenges facing the world’s decision makers.

(Editor's note: Mercy Corps is one of several organizations helping displaced people in Georgia.)