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UN Refugee Chief: Rich Countries Must Keep Their Doors Open

Margaret Besheer

   U.N. refugee chief Filippo Grandi said Thursday that the forcible
   displacement of more than 70 million people worldwide was a "collective
   failure" of the international community and called for more global
   solidarity to resolve it.
   "Most of the people that we are talking about, the 70 million, are
   fleeing from war, violence, crisis," Grandi told VOA in an interview in
   Amman, Jordan, where he marked World Refugee Day. "The international
   community seems to have lost its ability to address and resolve these
   wars and this crisis."
   The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) said this week that 70.8 million people
   were either forced to flee their homelands last year or were displaced
   within their countries because of conflict, violence, human rights
   abuses or persecution. That's 2.3 million more than in 2017.
   Some 25millionof them are classified as refugees under UNHCR's mandate.
   The rest are internally displaced or asylum seekers.

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