A record 82.4 million people have been displaced around the world in 2020 due to violence and persecution, including an estimated 680,000 in Myanmar following ethnic conflict and the recent military coup, according to the United Nations refugee agency.

Indrika Ratwatte, director of the UNHCR Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific, said in Bangkok on Friday that an estimated 200,000 people were added to the number of Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in Myanmar in the last four months, since the removal of Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian government in February.

Most of the recent IDPs are from the states of Kayah and Kayin, where ethnic groups are engaged in armed fighting with the military. Tens of thousands are also displaced in Shan and Kachin states.

“It is a rather complex map of internal displacement and the situation is of extreme concern to us,” Ratwatte said, adding that it is crucial for the international community to deliver life-saving assistance to the Myanmar refugees.

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Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims were forced to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh in 2017 following a military crackdown, while more than 100,000 of the persecuted minority remain in camps in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.

Ratwatte was speaking at the presentation of the annual UNHCR Global Trends Report on refugees, during which he also said that in the last 10 years, the number of refugees worldwide had doubled.

“Sadly, forced displacement continues to be a global phenomenon, and sadly yet again, the number of individuals forcibly displaced today are ever-increasing,” he said.

Children account for 42 per cent of all forcibly displaced people worldwide, with estimates showing that almost one million of them were born as refugees between 2018 and 2020, the report said.

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