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Many of the displaced either left the province or were taken in by host families but a significant percentage, often the most vulnerable, lived in makeshift IDP camps in any available space – mosques, schools, stadiums, open fields, on the…

Before the disaster, many Acehnese had been living in difficult conditions due to the counter-insurgency campaign waged by the Indonesian military against the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM). Hopes for a return to normality and a chance to build sustainable…

Displaced women and girls face heightened health risks, including sexual violence, HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, unwanted and high-risk pregnancies, and unsafe abortions. More than 150,000 pregnant women are estimated to have been affected by the tsunami. Fifteen per…

The UN made significant efforts to coordinate activities but the approach – which seemed based on the assumption that if enough resources are allocated to the field, coordination will necessarily happen – did not lead to effective coordination. At some…

In recent years the Bahasa Indonesia translation of the Principles has been widely circulated among government officials and conflict-affected communities. The Norwegian Refugee Council’s Global IDP Project, the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement and the UN Office for the Coordination…

A week after the tsunami, a European aid worker visited the Jesuit Refugee Service office in Banda Aceh. He had been on his first assessment mission to an IDP community and wanted to share with us the conclusions he had…

Since a cease-fire agreement in February 2002 the LTTE’s prolonged struggle to establish a Tamil ethnic state in Sri Lanka’s Northern and Eastern provinces has given way to an uneasy peace. The sheer magnitude of the tsunami’s destructive impact may…