The World Food Programme reports that at least 80,000 people are displaced in the region

Mural of Ali Abdallah, a homeless man who lived in the Hamra neighborhood.

While the report speaks of two million displaced, the official figures show one and a half million.

One of my favorite murals is the one of Ali Abdallah , a homeless man living on Bliss street.

In addition, some 27,000 IDPs returned to their homes during 2004.

The number of IDPs living in sites for the displaced has also decreased, from 145,000 in 170 sites in 2004 to 117,000 IDPs in 160 sites countrywide in 2005.

In BiH, at the end of last year, there were 617.350 refugees and about 520.000 displaced citizens.

Ali's existence was surrounded by urban legends about how he became homeless.

By April 2005, the number of conflict affected persons had risen to 2,450,000, of whom 1,860,000 were internally displaced.

In Northern Darfur, technical complications related to water supplies have delayed the relocation of some 25,000 displaced persons currently in Abu Shouk.

According to official data, there are still about 1,000 displaced persons accommodated in collective shelter in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and about 2,000 in Republika Srpska.

According to the Government the estimated number of IDPs in Colombia was above 2 million by the end of 2004. In Liberia UNHCR, in close collaboration with other humanitarian actors, assisted some 195,000 IDPs to return to their places of origin.

WFP also provided a four month resettlement package totalling 3,743 metric tons of food to 61,000 resettled internally displaced persons and 33,000 returnees.

At least 1.2 million people are internally displaced with the cold winter weather setting in, and no foreseeable end to the fighting, the outlook for people trapped in the conflict including Palestine and other refugee communities is grim.

The tsunamis of 26 December 2004 left in their wake more than 300,000 people killed, 500,000 injured and more than 1 million internally displaced across South and South East Asia.

By 1922, there were between 4.5 million and 7 million homeless children in Russia as a result of nearly a decade of devastation from World War I, the Russian Civil War, and the subsequent famine of 1920 1922.

The January 2005 agreement ending decades of civil war in southern Sudan also hastened preparations for the return of some 550,000 refugees and an estimated 4,000,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs).

Labado, Southern Darfur, which had been the scene of heavy fighting in December and January, saw the return of some 12,000 internally displaced persons and residents after the African Union established a presence in the wake of the Government's withdrawal.

While the overall number of refugees has slowly decreased since the early 1990s, internal displacement figures have remained relatively constant, at the 2001 level of an estimated 25 million (see graph).5 While the overall figure for internal displacement remains constant, the situation on the ground is not static.

In 2004 alone, some 90,000 refugees from the United Republic of Tanzania and 140,000 internally displaced persons returned to their communities of origin, putting strong additional pressure on fragile community resources as well as the national authorities.

This new figure includes nearly 1.9 million internally displaced persons and over 200,000 refugees in Chad, plus drought affected people and nomadic communities that have been affected by the conflict but did not begin to receive humanitarian assistance until early 2005.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Serbia and Montenegro, UNHCR and the Council of Europe Development Bank signed an accord in March 2005 under which the Bank would provide grants and loans to build independent housing for some 2,300 displaced people who had been living for years in collective centres.

We judge that to bring the interest in refugee return in line with the creation of conditions for its implementation, the priority for reconstruction would be about 500,000 residential units, to secure the return of about 200,000 displaced persons and refugees in the next four years.