UN figures a sobering reminder of what it is to be human

Coming so close to the centenary of the June 28, 1914, assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the murder that sparked the First World War, yesterday’s report from the UN refugee agency that the number of people driven from their homes by conflict or crisis is more than 50m for the first time since the Second World War is

The agency reported that 51.2m people were forcibly displaced at the end of 2013, 6m more than in the previous year.

This points to several things — our terrible inability to learn from our past; our inability to resolve conflict without resorting to violence and the absence of an effective international intervention process to try to protect the millions of ordinary, blameless people caught up in these terrible situations. The escalating crisis in Iraq and Syria, the source of well over a million refugees, are the latest example of this age-old tragedy. We are it seems, like Lot’s wife, condemned to pay for our weaknesses forever.