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.)

Iraqi refugees living in Jordan. Photo: Jacob Colie/Mercy Corps

Life has been hard for many Iraqi refugees. They flee their homes in the thousands each day to reach unwelcoming neighboring countries that do not have enough room or resources for them.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is leading the effort to help these refugees with food, jobs, health care, and education. Accomplishing this mission, however, has become increasingly difficult for the UNHCR due to a lack of funds and the recent spike in food and energy prices. Many Iraqi refugees now face a very precarious future.

This dire situation, however, is not the case for all Iraqi refugees. Especially in Jordan, some Iraqis have found that their lives have actually improved away from the conflict-torn Iraq. A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor recounts the stories of Iraqi refugees who have been able to start over and even establish their own businesses in Jordan.

These Iraqi refugees have the training and resources to start over because many of the roughly half-million Iraqis in Jordan are from the well-educated middle class. A study by the Norwegian Research Institute Fafo of Iraqis in Jordan found that 46 percent of adult males and 42 percent of adult females have some type of university degree.

UNHCR is promoting awareness and raising concerns about the most vulnerable of the 4.7 million Iraqis who are either refugees or have been internally displaced. Equal concern should also be given to the most valuable — those who, by departing, drain Iraq of the brains needed to rebuild.