Refugees transported back from Lebanon

Following the decision announced by Lebanese President Michel Aoun on October 12, 750 Lebanese refugees from the town of Arsa have been transported back to the northern borders of Syria on October 27. This was a Lebanese government-supervised exercise and the United National High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) was not involved in it, and Human Rights Watch (HRW) had warned that it is not yet safe for Syrians to go home. Ever since the outbreak of the civil war in Syria in 2011, about 1.5 million had fled to Lebanon – the others went mainly to Jordan (674,458 in April 2022) and Turkiye (37,62,385 in April, 2022) – and many of them are in United Nations refugee camps. The Lebanese government had decided to repatriate the refugees in the face of acute financial meltdown that the country had gone through, and the enormous pressure the presence of refugees exerted on the weakened infrastructure in Lebanon. It seems that many of the Syrian returnees are volunteering to return. Omar al-Borraqi, one of the returnees said, “There were so many reasons that we didn’t go back (earlier). Now God has made it easier for us.”

Meanwhile, Turkiye President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had announced in May 2022 that he wants to resettle million Syrian refugees in Turkiye in Turkiye-controlled northern Syrian territory. There is no doubt that the Syrian refugees, whether in Lebanon, Jordan or Turkiye cannot forever stay in the camps, and they have to get back home. The Syrian government must take the moral responsibility of getting its people back. The gesture of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad of granting amnesty to all those who fled, because many of them were political opponents of his government and there were others who fled because they had wanted to escape military service is not the best way of dealing with the people. The leader cannot treat people as unwanted because they oppose the set-up. He has to learn to reconcile to the fact that people have the right to express their views. But he can certainly object to the use of violence to replace his government because that would create more problems than it would solve.

The spirit of the 2011 “Arab Revolution” was that the people must have their say in peaceful, democratic ways. The time for one-party states is coming to an end. The only support he has is that of Russia and Iran, and both are unstable in strategic terms. The leader has to come to terms with freedom of expression as did the governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya. Even under the iron-clad rule of Shia clerics in Iran, there is a contest between conservatives and moderates. Governments cannot choose to live under a pseudo-democracy.

The presence of nearly four million Syrian in refugees in the neighbourhood creates political instability all around. It is true that the United States had followed the wrong track of regime change and encouraged extremist elements. That has only increased the volatility in the region. What is needed is a round table under the aegis of the United Nations where all the parties of Syria sit around a table and find a democratic solution. The government cannot any more avoid this. The government seems to believe that there is no need for any major change to come up with answers to serious problems. If that is indeed the case, and it could possibly be true as well, what the leader has to do is hold elections and let international independent groups to monitor the elections. People cannot be left to suffer forever.