The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees publishes its annual report on Thursday, June 16 and notes that the number of refugees continues to increase.
Nearly 90 million people had to flee their region or their country last year, even before the start of the war in Ukraine. Refugees who find themselves by the thousands in Turkey and Lebanon.
In Turkey, the first host country in the face of growing public anger
With 3.7 million Syrians registered on its territory, Turkey is by far the largest host country for refugees in the world. But while the Turks are suffering from record inflation of more than 73%, the reception is less and less obvious and incidents have multiplied in recent months.
Even if these remain isolated incidents and that the cohabitation, on the whole, goes relatively well, the media report an increasing number of acts of violence against the refugees. The Syrians are accused of taking the work of the Turks, of being responsible for the rise in rents in the neighborhoods where they are numerous, or of creating security problems.
In fact, Syrians in Turkey are not refugees in the legal sense of the word, they are “guests” under “temporary protection”. They have the right to work legally but in fact, the vast majority of them survive on odd jobs paid on the black, and therefore underpaid.
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How does the government react to this growing anger in the population? The authorities are very embarrassed because, on the one hand, the opposition exploits the frustrations caused by the reception of refugees — at the risk of setting fire to the powder — and, on the other hand, President Erdoğan has often said that there was no question of sending these men, women and children back to Bashar Al-Assad’s Syria. Furthermore, the government has never put in place a real integration policy and has always maintained that the Syrians would return home when the time came.
To calm the electorate one year before a presidential and legislative election, the Turkish leaders are therefore multiplying the announcements. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recently unveiled a plan to send a million of them back to so-called “safe” (areas in northern Syria under the control of the Turkish army where it has carried out successive incursions.
Another measure: the Ministry of the Interior announced last week that no foreigner could settle in 1,200 neighborhoods of the country, areas where they already represent at least 20% of the population. The subject is likely to become increasingly sensitive as the elections approach.
In Lebanon, thousands of refugees in a dramatic situation and overwhelmed authorities
There are, according to the Lebanese authorities, nearly one million Syrian refugees in Lebanon since the start of the civil war there in 2011. This represents more than a quarter of the population of Lebanon, which is approximately 4.5 million inhabitants. The country is therefore the one that hosts the largest number of refugees in proportion to its population.
These refugees are in a catastrophic situation. They live in hundreds of informal camps scattered across the country, in areas near the border with Syria. They live in tents, makeshift shelters, where living and hygienic conditions are more than mediocre, where the UN and NGOs intervene, but to ensure the minimum.
Two reasons for this: the previous Palestinian and these 300,000 refugees who arrived after the creation of Israel in 1948 and who never left. Lebanon has always refused official UN camps, organized and structured for Syrians, camps such as one finds on the contrary in Jordan.
Another reason: political divisions. Some parties support Bashar Al-Assad’s regime in Syria and consider that Syrians have nothing to do in Lebanon.
But there is also the unprecedented economic crisis that the country is going through. The worst since the civil war 40 years ago, with the collapse of its currency, its banking system, its state… with three out of four Lebanese falling below the poverty line. And refugees are no exception: 90% of Syrian refugees in Lebanon live in extreme poverty.
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The situation is such that at the end of April, the government officially told the UN that international aid was insufficient, that it could no longer support their presence, that it could no longer assume the cost of security in the camps and regions where they are located. That he could no longer police illegal emigration either, to prevent departures by sea to Cyprus and Europe. Departures that have multiplied and often end tragically.