By Michelle Brown
With the large-scale humanitarian crises in Syria, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic, it can be easy to overlook the comparatively smaller humanitarian situation in Mali. However, as a recent briefing paper by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center reminds us, there remain acute humanitarian needs in Mali, where almost 200,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) continue to reside – still more than half of the 350,000 people living in displacement as of June 2013—the peak of the displacement crisis in Mali.
The IDMC report touches on many of the same themes that I highlighted in a report I wrote for RI in November, including government pressure on IDPs to return to their homes, the vulnerability of displaced women and girls, the lack of humanitarian assistance available to IDPs, and the focus on IDP returns as they only durable solution. Indeed, since RI’s mission to Mali in October 2013, the pace of returns has increased.
According to latest figures from IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix, IDP numbers have decreased 29 percent since RI was in Mali in October. Close to 200,000 people in the north have been identified as having returned from the south. Most IDPs cite improving security as one of the main motivations for return to the north.
However, recent attacks in Gao and Timbuktu raise questions about how secure northern Mali really is, and humanitarian actors in Mali do not yet believe that conditions are in place to encourage IDPs to return to the north. RI has continually raised the need to ensure that IDPs who choose to remain in the south receive the protection and assistance they require until they make an informed and voluntary decision to return to the north. There are IDPs in southern Mali who will never return to their original homes. For those who decide to stay in the south for the longer term, the Government of Mali has the responsibility to implement policies to ensure that they are able to live on a more long term basis in the areas where they were displaced.
Another problem that I identified in our November report was the Malian government’s pressure on IDPs to return in order to demonstrate that the extremist threat in the north had been neutralized. At the same time, donors were focusing – and continue to focus - their humanitarian funding in the north, leaving IDPs who choose to remain in the south in extremely vulnerable conditions. The growing number of crises has led to huge numbers of people in need of assistance and created a competition for limited resources. This has meant that humanitarian funding for Mali is increasingly scarce. In fact, according to IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix survey, roughly 40 percent of IDPs in the south said that they hadn’t received any assistance.
In interviews that RI conducted in October, IDPs in the south explained that their living conditions were so difficult and assistance so scarce that many of them would have no choice but to return to the north in the near future. Aid workers have expressed concern to RI that the small amount of funding that was available to IDPs will now be moved to the north. With security in the north still tenuous, it is critical that IDPs in Mali’s south are protected and assisted until they make a voluntary and informed decision to return to their homes. In addition, the Malian government should support IDPs choosing to remain in the areas to which they were displaced or resettle in another area. RI will continue to advocate to ensure that these IDPs are not forgotten.