Tribune. The year 2022 threatens to be the greatest humanitarian catastrophe of all time. This is what shows the “Emergency Watchlist 2022” published by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in its report of December 14, 2021, on the 20 humanitarian crises most at risk of worsening in 2022, starting with Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Yemen.
In twenty countries, more than half of which are in Africa and the Middle East, 274 million people are dependent on humanitarian aid, 100 million face severe food insecurity, and an unprecedented number of people are fleeing violence, persecution or the consequences of droughts made worse by climate change.
While these twenty countries have 800 million inhabitants, around 10% of the world’s population, they include 89% of people in need of humanitarian aid, 80% of refugees and asylum seekers and 76% of internally displaced persons. The “Watchlist 2022” is not only an international index of misery, an accidental addition of crises, or the exposition of a spectacular concentration of poverty, it is also and above all the revealer of a systemic failure with consequences. disastrous.
The failure of states and diplomacy
Failure of states to carry out their basic missions towards their citizens, not simply by omission or incapacity but also by orientation when they commit crimes against their own population or block humanitarian access. Failure of diplomacy, then, which fails to resolve increasingly complex conflicts which involve many non-state and international actors on the same grounds.
There have never been so many internationalized civil conflicts. The UN Security Council is blocked by the growing use of the veto. Failure of international law, also, international humanitarian law being regularly violated with impunity in the name of the sovereignty of States brandishes to justify the erasure of human rights and the Charter of the United Nations.
Failure, finally, more and more often, of the system intended to prevent and respond to humanitarian crises, as needs explode while funding stagnates or is reduced and access to populations is threatened by attacks on hospitals, convoys and humanitarian personnel. The head of the world food program is reduced to launching appeals for help on Twitter to try to avoid a gigantic famine in Afghanistan and Ethiopia!
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