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Article: How Many Internally Displaced Persons Are There in Darfur?

From Eric Reeves:

The simple answer to the question, “How many internally displaced persons are there in Darfur?” is easy: we don’t know, and we don’t know the margin of error for various figures that have been promulgated by the UN in the past. But we are not without data, and the data raise troubling questions about the integrity of the current UN estimate of 1.9 million IDPs, very quietly first published in July 2010. When precisely this consequential revision—down from a previous UN figure of 2.7 million IDPs—took place is unclear, as is the decision-making process itself. As recently as May 2010, a report from the UN General Assembly’s Economic and Social Council, presumably using UN data, declared that “more than 2 million people remain displaced.”

The history of the new UN figure provides context that is at once suggestive and disturbing. The three statistical snapshots below all come from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA); none includes the more than 250,000 Darfuri refugees currently in eastern Chad, according to the UN High Commission for Refugees.

Read the full article in Dissent Magazine.