Washington Post: Damascus government, its allies' pressure not to persuade 5.5 million refugees to return .. so what do they want?

As winter approaches and the Corona pandemic worsens across the Middle East, Syrian refugees face parallel threats from extreme cold, as well as economic hardship due to the widespread lockdown, according to the Washington Post.

Today, after nearly a decade of war, more than 5.5 million Syrians live as refugees in neighboring countries, mainly in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.

These refugees face enormous challenges, including severe restrictions on the ability to work legally, and financial and political barriers to legal residency.

In 2020, the epidemic and intermittent closures exacerbated the economic crises in Jordan and Lebanon, making it more difficult for refugees to work, formally or informally, to pay rent and secure basic needs.

But do Syrians want to return home, as many host governments are urging them to do? The newspaper's survey data helps explain why so many refugees are reluctant to return to their homes.

Pressures for return

Although many governments believe that the situation in Syria is still far from safe, the Lebanese General Security Intelligence Branch has been organizing return trips for Syrians for more than a year, and the Lebanese authorities have always stressed the importance of the speedy return of Syrians, and have held refugees responsible for unemployment inflation, overstretched public services and deep social tensions. While in Jordan, the Jordanian government is expelling Syrians to a makeshift refugee camp in the no-man's land between Jordan and Syria.

Syria hosted a Russia-backed conference last month to discuss the matter, and officials from Iraq and Lebanon were among the attendees, although many Western and regional powers boycotted the event.

 During the conference, the Syrian government and its allies attacked the West for imposing economic sanctions on them and a lack of reconstruction aid, arguing that these policies prevent Syrians from returning, and some analysts responded by saying that the conference seemed more like a political message than helping Syrians return to their homes.

In host countries such as Lebanon, some political parties continue to push refugees to return to their homes, and these parties have long blamed the estimated one million Syrian refugees in Lebanon for many of the country's problems, a position that may help to draw attention away from the government imbalance and justify calls for more international aid..

What do refugees want?

International refugee law requires that any return be safe, voluntary, dignified and sustainable, so what do Syrian refugees themselves think of returning to their homes? To date, much of the discussion around return has focused largely on geopolitical interests and tends to overlook the critical perspective of Syrian refugees themselves.

To understand how Syrian refugees think of return, the Washington Post conducted a survey on this matter, and the newspaper held face-to-face interviews with more than 3,000 Syrian refugee families in Lebanon between August and October 2019, and the study reveals that only 5% of the refugees want to return, but within a year, the majority of refugees (63%) hoped to return.

The newspaper also wanted to know what influences people's decision to return. Many refugee hosting governments around the world restrict refugees' right to work, making it difficult to obtain legal residency and full protection under the law.

These measures are based in part on the widespread assumption that if refugees feel that life in a host country is difficult, they are likely to return home. To test this theory, the newspaper analyzed data from a large sample of Syrian refugees in Lebanon.

Refugees are paying close attention to the situation in Syria

The newspaper says: "Our study found that the conditions in Syria are the most important factors in the decision to return, and not the conditions in Lebanon, the host country for these refugees. Respondents were more concerned with their physical safety and security in their home country. Syrians are not only studying the risk of persecution by the Assad government, including enforced disappearances and arbitrary arrests, but also forced military conscription, difficult economic conditions, and lack of public services.

Syrians who reported experiencing difficult conditions in Lebanon - including a lack of work, precarious housing, insufficient humanitarian aid, and widespread discrimination - were not likely to say they were planning to return.

The choice of continuing to live abroad is difficult, as they do not want to return to their homes before conditions in Syria improve significantly, and a Syrian woman from Aleppo said to the newspaper: "My country is at war, so we cannot return, but here in Lebanon, we cannot live."

These results indicate that efforts to push Syrian refugees to return home are unlikely to be successful. This includes recent steps taken by the Damascus government and its backers - Russia in particular - to use the issue of return as a bargaining chip, and Western donors' insistence on lifting economic sanctions and providing reconstruction aid to Syria before a large-scale return of refugees becomes possible.

Considering 2021, refugees and communities in host countries will likely continue to rely on humanitarian organizations for assistance. Cash assistance and development projects can provide sustainable employment opportunities for both communities, and help reduce tensions among host refugees.

D.H