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Syria’s forgotten refugees
Summary: with the world otherwise occupied, the desperate situation of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Türkiye and Jordan has been shuffled to one side. Fresh thinking is urgently required.
Today’s newsletter is a transcript edited for length and clarity of our 19 April podcast with Kelly Petillo, the programme coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa at the European Council on Foreign Relations. She recently authored a study for ECFR titled “From Aid to Inclusion: a better way to help Syrian Refugees in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan”. You can find her article here. The podcast is available here.
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.
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