The annual Syria conference will take place in Brussels for the eighth time this month, which should keep the Syrian cause on the international agenda. Yet the attention of many attendees on Thursday was not in Brussels, but more than three thousand kilometers away, in the Lebanese capital Beirut.
Together with Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visited the outgoing Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Speaker Nabih Berri of the House of Representatives on Thursday morning. The company announced a support package of 1 billion euros with which it will invest in the economy, education and healthcare until 2027. Money also goes to ‘security and stability’ by supporting the Lebanese security services, and to ‘managing migration’. “We count on your cooperation to prevent illegal migration and combat migrant trafficking,” said Von der Leyen.
The aid package is a continuation of the assistance that the EU has been providing for years in Lebanon for the reception of refugees, humanitarian and economic aid, and migration and border policy. Since 2011, this has amounted to a total of around 3 billion euros.
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Lebanon hosts the most Syrians per capita: about 1.5 million, out of a population of 5 million. Pressure on the EU to do something about boat migration from Syria and Lebanon continues to increase. For example, until mid-April this year, more than three thousand people arrived by boat in Cyprus, which is barely two hundred kilometers from the Levantine coast.
No Syrian asylum applications
Cyprus recently stopped processing asylum applications from Syrians, even though this goes against the right to apply for asylum. Cyprus and Lebanon, like many other countries, have also been calling for some time to declare parts of Syria safe areas so that refugees can be sent back there. According to the Cypriot Minister of the Interior, such a plan would already be “gaining ground” among other European member states.
Despite rumors that the EU would speak out this week about ‘safe zones’ in Syria, Von der Leyen said nothing about this in Beirut on Thursday. Mikati and Christodoulides did raise the issue of safe areas. “Von der Leyen cannot explicitly state this, because the UN guarantees the opposite. But she didn’t go against it either,” says assistant professor of conflict studies Nora Stel of Radboud University Nijmegen. So she sees the debate slowly moving in that direction.
Declaring areas in Syria safe is controversial. Researchers continue to provide evidence that returning Syrian refugees are at high risk of arrest, torture or death.
Every year, Lebanon puts pressure on the EU to get more money. In addition to the severe economic crisis since 2019, the aftermath of the explosion in the port of Beirut in 2020 and a presidential vacuum of more than a year and a half, the country has been in even worse shape since October 8 last year. Hezbollah has since been involved in a slowly escalating battle with the Israeli army, forcing some eighty thousand Lebanese to flee the south of the country and causing the economy to suffer heavily.
In addition to stopping boat migrants, Europe has also been concerned for years with the Lebanese-Syrian border, which is notoriously porous. In particular, the arrival of the Islamic State and the threatened expansion of the Syrian Civil War to Lebanon put the (defective) border policy in Lebanon on the European agenda. For example, countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy paid for watchtowers along the border with Syria, coast guard boats and border surveillance systems. The Netherlands focuses a lot on training the security services, including the army.
Patrols
Especially since the severe economic crisis in Lebanon – the result of decades of mismanagement and corruption – refugees have been a welcome scapegoat. Syrians are not allowed to work most jobs, open bank accounts or buy real estate, and in some municipalities are even under curfew. The police and army arbitrarily arrest Syrians who are regularly deported to their country of origin, although this is against refugee treaties.
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In the run-up to the annual Syria conference in Brussels, the climate against Syrians in Lebanon appears to be deteriorating again. In early April, a local politician in the city of Byblos, a member of the right-wing nationalist Christian Lebanese Forces, was kidnapped from his car and later found dead just across the border with Syria. According to the army, it involved a group of Syrians and a car theft that got out of hand. That gave various Christian local militias and vigilantes in Beirut and elsewhere a license to patrol conspicuously for a few weeks and threaten and beat Syrians.
What is also striking to Assistant Professor of Conflict Studies Stel is that, as far as we know, no clear conditions are attached to the support package when it comes to human rights. “The Lebanese authorities do not feel that those billions depend on their good behavior towards Syrians.”
Correction (02-05-2024): An earlier version of this article referred to Najib Mikati as president of Lebanon. He is prime minister.
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