Syrian refugees Maya (right) and her mother, Awatif [photo credit: Amanda Magnani]
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR has
estimated there are 5.4 million Syrians who have fled the civil war to
other countries. At least 5 million are hosted in Türkiye, Lebanon and Jordan. Can you break down the figures?
According to the UNHCR, Türkiye hosts 3.5 million Syrian refugees,
Jordan hosts 660,000, and Lebanon 814,000. But it is worth noting that
these figures reflect refugees registered under UNHCR, real numbers are
likely to be much higher, especially Lebanon, where UNHCR registrations
were stopped by the government in 2015. At the same time, we also have
another dynamic. In public statements those countries tend to exaggerate
the numbers. This is for political reasons. It is about creating
urgency with the international donor community that the numbers are
overwhelming and international support needs to continue. But with local
audiences, this is very much used to campaign ahead of elections, as
we're seeing in Türkiye which has claimed that it has 6 million Syrian
refugees in the country. They've also claimed that about 550,000 Syrians
have returned to Syria, even though we know that the UNHCR figure is
much lower. Jordan has talked about 1.3 million, Lebanon 2 million. The
Norwegian Refugee Council talks about 1.5 million Syrian refugees in
Lebanon, that’s 20% of the population of 6 million. Lebanon and Jordan
are the two countries that host the biggest population of refugees per
capita in the world. And Türkiye has taken, at a global level, the
highest number of refugees in the world.
In terms of generosity, we should mention that following the outbreak
of the war in 2011, there was a general recognition across the
political spectrum in these countries that Syrians were subjected to a
brutal regime and they needed to be hosted and offered a safe haven. On
the other hand, and this is quite important from a legal perspective,
Syrian refugees have never been fully recognised as refugees. Jordan and
Lebanon never signed on to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. We know that
though Türkiye signed on it has never considered recognizing Syrians as
refugees. The Turks basically do not really use that as a framework.
So we see in rhetoric and public statements, refugees are described as
guests, as the displaced, and their presence is always made out to be
temporary.
As you say there was that initial support for refugees in the early days of the war, but how much has that changed?
After the initial bursts of solidarity, we see that things have
started to shift. In Lebanon that started quite early in 2015 with the
ending of the UNHCR registrations. In Turkey this happened a bit later, I
imagine, because of the framework that existed in terms of bilateral
relationship with the EU-Türkiye statement in 2016. Türkiye had some
degree of steady support from Europe. But from 2018 and 2019, things
started changing. The opposition parties secured victories in local
elections. And we know that municipalities are quite important in the
management of Syrian refugees in Türkiye. So after this shift, we've
seen that public opinion has been changing because parties opposed to
Erdoğan are more hostile to the presence of Syrian refugees. Surveys
show us that now attitudes have significantly turned quite negative
towards the refugees.
And these three countries are all economically stressed so as
the war drags on, these kinds of issues, these resentments would start
to flare up and become more serious, particularly, as you mentioned with
Türkiye heading into an election.
Absolutely. We talk about these countries being on the
brink. First of all, the economies are highly dependent on remittances
and foreign support. Lebanon, of course, has been undergoing a massive
economic and political crisis. Türkiye is undergoing a tight economic
situation. Jordan is experiencing 50% youth unemployment. And
unemployment in general is quite high. The economy has been very much in
a downward spiral. We also have had the impact of COVID-19 that's added
itself to these grievances and has made the situation worse for many
people. The earthquakes in February. And so we've had a series of
overlapping crises, really. People talk about crisis within crisis that
all compound each other and overlap in terrible ways.
Added to that, the Ukraine war has created issues of food
insecurity. Between the locals and the refugees what kind of tensions
are you seeing on the ground?
The war in Ukraine has had a huge impact. Before the Ukraine war,
there were already issues with refugees' ability to access resources,
because of the strain that exists in many of the local communities. In
Jordan, for example, you have a big water problem. There is huge
unemployment. So over the years as the presence of Syrian refugees
continued to increase, local communities were more and more under
strain.
Before the Ukraine war it was about ability, the ability of Syrian
refugees to access resources, but the war has created problems of
availability as well. For example, of course, wheat and this not only
affected Syrian refugees but also locals. Türkiye and Lebanon were among
the main recipients of Ukrainian wheat. And they were among the
countries that were most affected by the increase of food prices between
February and March 2022. And in Türkiye, we have seen in 2022, a
massive spike in inflation, we're talking about at one point 99%. The
Lebanese pound has lost basically almost all of its value by now. The
war in Ukraine contributed to that. And in Lebanon it is worth noting
85% of the country's grain reserves were lost during the Beirut
harbour blast of August 2020. Jordan also was affected, although to a
lesser extent; it was less dependent on Russia and Ukraine.
Syrian refugees are being affected incredibly because, first of all,
their conditions were already extremely poor. But of course the Ukraine
war also affects local people in their capacity to cater for refugees
and it makes them more vulnerable to hostile rhetoric by politicians and
officials. So there has been a massive negative impact and we see that
efforts to promote hatred towards Syrian refugees are working to some
extent especially in Türkiye in the lead-up to elections next month.
Syrian refugees have been at the forefront of so many episodes of hatred
and hostile political campaigning. Even in situations where clearly,
they do not have anything to do with the problem. Last November when the
bombing in Istanbul occurred, Syrian refugees were blamed and hashtags
against Syrian refugees were trending. Even now, with the earthquakes we
are seeing that Syrian refugees are being blamed for a natural
disaster. But I also want to reflect and acknowledge that not everybody
in these countries has fully subscribed to the anti-refugee rhetoric.
Europeans have contributed large amounts to humanitarian support,
in the neighbourhood of US$10 billion since 2011 but how effective is
that strategy?
There is no short answer to this, I think it's very nuanced. To a
certain extent it has helped in mitigating some of the problems. But the
issue that I see is that even as the war in Syria continues, and now we
are at year 12, the bulk of the support has remained of a very
short-term, narrow nature; we're talking about support like food
assistance, access to basic services, which has also been insufficient,
and many times the gap in financing has not been filled. And meanwhile,
rhetorically, Europeans keep on stressing, and fairly so, they want
Syrian refugees to return home only when returns can be voluntary, safe
and dignified. This is however, really unattainable right now. When we
talk about returns it is very much not a given where refugees will
return to. They also don't have a full picture of what has happened to
those who have returned; we know that over the years they have suffered
massive poverty. They also require mental health support and
rehabilitation from trauma. There are gaps in terms of access to
livelihood, education, normal skills knowledge development, all sorts of
things. But most importantly, I think Syrian refugees have no access to
key documentation that helps them be self-reliant. You have on the one
hand this long term, hard to achieve goal of securing voluntary, safe
and dignified returns. But on the other hand, support has been very much
day to day and humanitarian. I know the Europeans are aware of this to a
certain extent. And I know there are extreme challenges to achieve
support that is more long term, more based on rights and legal security
and overall security. But it is just not a conversation that is being
had right now.
And yet countries like Denmark insist that parts of Syria are safe for refugees. What do you make of that claim?
There is very little monitoring currently taking place to what
happens to Syrian refugees who do try to return, which are very few by
the way. But for those few cases, though, as documented by human rights
groups like Human Rights Watch, we know there have been arrests,
detentions, and forced disappearances. Overall, the regime tends to
consider most of the refugees who have fled the country as dissidents.
There is also the danger of forced conscriptions for male Syrians and so
there are all sorts of uncertainties as to what happens to them when
they return. And Syria itself, we know it's not safe to return to now.
The country has an economy that depends on the (illicit) Captagon drug
trade. There is widespread poverty, massive instability, and territorial
fragmentation. Assad controls the bulk of the country, but in the north
of Syria, we have the presence of the Turkish army, we have the Kurds,
we have other armed groups, the opposition, and groups that are labelled
as terrorists by the UN.
Denmark in 2018 deemed two areas in Syria, Damascus and the area
around Damascus, as safe. And now they've added two more areas, Tartus
and Latakia. However, while the Danish authorities deemed them as safe
and revoked residence permits for some Syrian refugees, they still are
not able to actually return those refugees. So it is very much a
decision fuelled by domestic politics. Copenhagen doesn't have any
official diplomatic relationships with the Assad regime. There are
revocations that have taken place, but refugees are able to legally
appeal them.
So the Danish authorities revoke the residency permits. What happens then to these refugees when these revocations take place?
Many of the Syrians who get their permission, their residency permit
revoked, are put in detention centres, sometimes these are former
prisons. And you restrict massively the ability to move around and seek
employment. So the effect that this actually has is leaving these
refugees in of a state of limbo.
And these efforts by the Danes and others how are they playing out in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan?
In Denmark, and other countries like UK, Italy, etc. the heightened
nationalisms, the right wing political currents have had a massive
impact on scapegoating in the region as well. And they really helped
legitimise these narratives in the host countries. Paradoxically, what
ends up happening is that if Syrians in those three countries feel
pressure to return, they are unlikely to make the return to Syria. At
this point, every survey that exists, including UN surveys, say the
Syrians are not ready to return. So what we're seeing is that Syrians go
the other way, towards Europe. Arrivals have doubled in the past couple
of years. And you end up actually achieving the opposite of what
political parties in Europe want. You have this paradoxical situation
and the conversation right now is extremely grim. It's very much around,
‘let's help them where they are now.’ There is very little appetite or
possibility for what we call durable solutions, which means not only
repatriation, but settlement and integration. So you see that the
gestures and the rhetoric that European domestic politics are
implementing are actually fuelling anti-refugee trends in the region.
A grim resonance that's paradoxically reinforcing the crisis, leaving refugees in Türkiye,
Lebanon and Jordan to stay where they are in almost unbearable
circumstances or attempt the dangerous journey to Europe. But your paper does have recommendations. What are some of the main points?
The main point for me is that, despite Europeans, and
fairly so, being focused on the war in Ukraine, their attention should
also not go away from Syrian refugees. The reality is that Syrian
refugees are unlikely to return home anytime soon. And the situation in
Syria is even worse as a result of the earthquakes. So it will take
quite a long time to return Syrian refugees. And realistically, the
scope for resettlement at the same time in Europe but also elsewhere
remains quite limited. And the conclusion I reach in the paper is that
the situation realistically speaking, and I know this is not ideal,
needs to be managed in the regional host countries, that’s Lebanon,
Jordan and Türkiye. The good news, at least if we can call it that, is
that everyone, that is the Syrian people, host countries and
international community agree that return to Syria is the main long-term
solution to the Syrian refugee crisis. This is the point of departure.
But there needs to be more attention dedicated to what happens before
these returns can occur, given that there is no political solution in
sight in Syria. So politically, for me, when it comes to the EU and its
member states this is about reiterating yet again, and maintaining the
position that refugee returns should be voluntary, safe and dignified.
As I mentioned, Syrian refugees have stated that they're unwilling to
return in the near future. And the number of those who wish to return
some day, as we seen from UN surveys, decreases year by year. At the
same time, Europe's leverage, I think will decrease more and more as
funding levels decrease, as attention and funding gets shifted towards
Ukraine, and other crises. But for now, I think they still feature among
the top donors to the Syrian response. So there's still something that
Europe can do to secure what in the paper I call inclusion rather than
integration. Because I've seen during my research that the word
inclusion is better accepted when it comes to having that political
conversation with Lebanon, Jordan and Türkiye.