Facing a dead end in Lebanon, 1,600 Syrian families sign up for ‘voluntary return’

BEIRUT ­– In the coming weeks, 1,600 Syrian refugee families in Lebanon are scheduled to return to Syria through a repatriation plan organized by Lebanese and Syrian authorities. Returning families tell Syria Direct economic hardship is the main reason they have decided to go back.

“The economic situation in Syria is bad, but it is in Lebanon, too. At least we’ll be in our home,” one Syrian refugee in Arsal said. He and his family are waiting for Lebanon’s General Security Office to notify them of the return date.

Lebanese authorities insist that all currently scheduled returns are voluntary. “These are voluntary returns. We have 1,600 families that registered, complete families, not just women and children,” General Salim al-Bourji, a spokesperson for Lebanon’s General Security, which is organizing the returns, told Syria Direct. 

These 1,600 families make up the first “batch” of several rounds of return planned by Lebanese authorities. The date for the first group to cross back into Syria is not yet set, since General Security is finalizing logistics with Syrian authorities, al-Bourji said.

General Security has facilitated returns to Syria since 2018, but they were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Today, we reinitiate these voluntary returns,” Lebanese Minister of Social Affairs, Hector Hajjar, told Syria Direct. 

Last week, General Security head Major General Abbas Ibrahim said Lebanon has organized 485,000 refugee returns since 2017. It is a staggering assertion compared to data collected by the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), which documented 5,192 voluntary returns from Lebanon in 2022 and a total of 71,771 since 2016. 

While returns to Syria from Lebanon are not new, the planned mass return of 1,600 families appears to mark an increase in the rate of return from Lebanon, a country where 90 percent Syrian refugee households live in extreme poverty due to a strangling economic crisis since 2019.

Lebanon’s economic conditions, combined with a spike in anti-refugee rhetoric, makes labeling returns as “voluntary” questionable, according to Nadia Hardman, researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW). “The context of Lebanon is coercive, the policy of the Lebanese government is to make life so difficult for refugees inside Lebanon that they would be left with no choice but to return,” Hardman said. “Therefore, voluntariness would not qualify in our understanding under refugee law to a free and informed decision.”

Minister Hajjar dismissed the plan’s critics. “The process follows the desire of displaced Syrians to return to Syria, these returns are voluntary,” he insisted. Citing Lebanon’s economic crisis, Hajjar said “a large number of Syrians need a little encouragement to return to Syria.” 

“We’re talking about stimulating return,” Hajjar said. “The first step is this voluntary return process, but there is a second step.” Asked if he meant forcible deportation—which would violate international law—Hajjar told Syria Direct, “If I wanted to say deportation, I’d have said deportation. The first step is voluntary returns, and then there are other steps that the Lebanese state will take, which we will announce later.”

An opaque process

Under the current return process, Lebanon’s General Security collects the names of Syrians registering to go back, and sends this information to Syrian authorities, which grant or deny security clearance. 

The process has dangerously little transparency, Hardman said. “There’s no mechanism that monitors what happens to people when they return, the process is opaque and it doesn’t measure up to the kind of safeguards that you need to qualify for voluntary, safe and dignified returns,” she said.

UNHCR, the body responsible for refugee protection, is not “facilitating or promoting the large-scale voluntary repatriation of refugees to Syria from Lebanon,” spokesperson Paula Barrachina said. However, the UN agency will “continue to engage in dialogue with the Lebanese Government” in the context of the General Security-facilitated returns and called for “respect of refugees’ fundamental human right to freely and voluntarily return to their country of origin at a time of their choosing.” 

Fadel Fakih, Executive Director of the Lebanese Center for Human Rights (CLDH), said UNHCR has the “responsibility—especially since they are present in Syria—to provide the information and facts on what awaits the person upon their return. It is important for Syrians to make informed decisions.”

The upcoming returns organized by General Security are separate from a plan to deport 15,000 Syrians refugees per month touted by the Ministry of the Displaced this summer. That plan seems sidelined, for now. “Minister Charafeddine had this plan…but that’s his plan,”  Hajjar said.

Hajjar insisted Lebanon does not deport Syrians. “Deportation is by force. We don’t use force,” he said. But in 2021, Access Center for Human Rights, a Lebanese NGO, documented 59 deportation cases. The vast majority, 51, were Syrians who tried migrating to Europe through the sea, and upon return to Lebanon were deported to Syria. 

In addition, a 2019 decision by the Higher Defense Council allowed Lebanese authorities to deport Syrians who entered the country illegally after April 2019. These “returns” became an administrative procedure, for which no judicial order is needed. As of September 2021, 6,345 Syrians had been forcibly repatriated under the Council’s decision. 

“Deportations are a violation of Article 3 of the Convention Against Torture, and Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both of which are legally binding documents for the Lebanese government,” CLDH director Fakih said. 

Suffocated in Lebanon, two Syrian families return

Manar fled his village in Damascus countryside in 2013. Since then, the Syrian refugee has lived with his wife, six children and mother in a tent in a camp in Arsal. His family is among the 1,600 signed up for the first batch of returns. The names of returning Syrians quoted in this report have been changed, and identifying details have been removed for security reasons. 

Two months ago Manar’s family signed up with General Security to return to Syria, to their war-damaged house outside Damascus. “We have to fix the house, but it’s still standing,” he said.

After nine years in Lebanon, they could not make it through the country’s economic crisis. Manar said the 2 million LBP per month ($50 at the current parallel exchange rate) they get from the UN is not enough to survive. “Before the crisis, with the UN assistance, and my occasional work, we got by. But now everything is expensive,” he said. In Lebanon, food inflation has hit 332 percent, while the value of the national currency has plummeted.

Making ends meet is a suffocating challenge. Each month, the family spends approximately $30 to rent their tent and pay for water and electricity. They dread the thought of another cold winter in Arsal, unable to pay for heating. “Nobody will lend me money to cover these expenses because everyone around us is also in debt,” he said.

One of his daughters needs a $250 surgery to treat her kidney and urinary problems, which they also cannot afford. Manar is thinking of her future, and that of his other children, some of whom have not gone to school for three years due to school closures and rejection by school administrations. “They have no future in Lebanon,” he said.

One common fear among refugees returning to Syria—or Syrians seeking to flee abroad—is conscription into the army for mandatory service or reserve duty. Manar said he is not worried about conscription  because he is his parents’ only son, and he trusts his 17-year old son will be exempt for the same reason.

Jawad, another refugee in Arsal whose family signed up to go back one month ago, hopes his health issues—a herniated spinal disc and neuritis—will help him avoid mandatory army service. Beyond that, he is not afraid to return because “I don’t have personal problems with the Syrian state,” he said. 

For nine years, Jawad, his wife and five children have also lived in a camp in Arsal. Like Manar’s family, they have somewhere to go back to: Their house in Syria is still standing. 

Life in Lebanon, always difficult, has become unaffordable, Jawad said. “Before [the 2019 crisis] we used to get $250 from the UN, now it doesn’t reach $40 or $60 dollars,” said Jawad. A large chunk of that goes to pay monthly bills: 900,000 LBP ($22.50) for rent, electricity and water.

Once back in Syria, he hopes to be able to afford medical treatment for his chronic health problems. “Here the hospitals are very costly. In Syria the surgery and X-rays would cost me $100, here it’s $1,600,” he said. 

And, like Manar, he is thinking about his children’s future.  “One of them should be in third grade, and he still hasn’t started,” Jawad said. 

But another reason Jawad wants to leave Lebanon is a constant sense of discrimination. “Three days ago, my children went to the park, and they had a problem with Lebanese children. I want to take my children to a country where they don’t face these issues,” he said. “Here, we are just sitting depressed in a tent.” 

He said he knows many families from Qalamoun, Quasayr and Homs who have also registered to return. “If we had the chance of traveling outside Lebanon, that would be better, but there’s no hope,” Jawad said.

No safe return

Syrians in Lebanon who have signed up to go back are likely those who believe they will not face any security issues upon return. But for thousands, especially those with forcibly disappeared family members or who have participated in activism, returning could mean immediate detention.  

UNHCR and international organizations have warned that Syria is not safe for return, and that returnees have faced a range of abuses. A 2021 HRW report documented cases of refugees who, after returning to Syria, suffered torture, extrajudicial killings and kidnappings. 

“There’s no accountability and it doesn’t look like there’d be any accountability for crimes in the past, or to reform security agencies to ensure that no crimes and gross human rights abuses are committed in the future,” HRW researcher Hardman said.

Since 2014, the Syrian Network of Human Rights has documented “3,083 cases of arrest, including 244 children and 207 women” among returning refugees, Fadel Abdul Ghany, head of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, told Syria Direct. All of the individuals documented were arrested by Syrian regime forces, and 1,196 are still under arrest, of whom “864 have become forcibly disappeared,” Ghany said. Most were refugees returning from Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.