UNHCR’s new representative in Lebanon, Ayaki Ito, seated center, meets with refugees in a tented settlement in Minyeh. (Credit: UNHCR)
BEIRUT — The United Nations refugee agency’s new representative in Lebanon, Ayaki Ito, arrived in the country just ahead of a grim landmark: March 15 marks the 10-year anniversary of the uprising-turned-conflict in Syria.
Ito has had a firsthand view of the situation on both sides of the border. Before taking up the post in Lebanon on Jan. 25 — replacing former Lebanon Representative Mireille Girard, who has moved on to head UNHCR’s office in Greece — Ito had been the agency’s representative in Syria for two years.
In his first media interview since arriving in Lebanon, Ito sat down with L’Orient Today to give his assessment of the refugee situation in Lebanon a decade into the conflict and the prospects for long-term solutions.
“These 10 years are really a lost decade,” Ito said. “We are marking a very, very sad decade without solutions in sight, without serious engagement in resolving the issues.”
The scene in Lebanon
As of the end of 2020, there were 865,531 Syrian refugees registered with UNHCR in Lebanon, although the real number of refugees in the country is believed to be considerably higher. UNHCR stopped registering Syrian refugees in the country in 2015 at the Lebanese government’s request.
Like that of the Lebanese, refugees’ situation has worsened amid the deepening economic crisis in Lebanon. As of 2020, the UN’s annual vulnerability assessment of Syrian refugees in Lebanon found that 89 percent were living below the extreme poverty line, currently defined as less than LL308,728 per person per month, compared to 55 percent in 2019, when the line was set in dollars at $87 per person per month.
“We hear more and more desperate calls and our offices in the field also encounter quite desperate refugees who threaten to kill themselves,” Ito said. In fact, he noted, in the last year, at least two Syrian refugees in Lebanon did commit suicide, leaving behind families with young children.
“We are also worried about tensions between refugees and Lebanese,” Ito added. “We’ve seen some incidents already, and everybody is suffering from the declining economy."
There have been two major incidents of “collective punishment” by Lebanese communities against Syrians in recent months, the first in Bsharri, where some 270 Syrian families were driven out of the town following the killing of a Lebanese man by a Syrian man in a personal dispute, and the second in Bhanin, where a refugee camp was torched and burned to the ground after a dispute between a small group of Lebanese and Syrian residents of the area.
Meanwhile, education for refugee children is also in crisis. With schools closed to in-person learning over the past year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, most school-age refugee children did not attend school, even remotely. About two-thirds of refugee children aged 6 to 14 were registered in school in 2020, but only 17 percent of children in that age group were actually able to take part in distance learning online while schools were closed, according to the UN vulnerability assessment. Most families cited lack of or insufficient internet access as the reason.
Ito noted that the disruptions to education not only impact the children themselves, but also have implications for Syria’s future down the line.
“Here, education prepares children for return,” he said. “[With education], once they return they are able to rebuild their lives. Without education, they will just transfer poverty.”
Currently, 62 percent of refugees in Lebanon receive either cash assistance or food cards, or both, from the UN. However, the exchange rate and spiraling inflation has been an ongoing issue. At present, those receiving cash assistance get LL400,000 per month, while food assistance amounts to LL100,000 per person per month.
The UNHCR cash programs, which had previously been paid out at the “bank rate” of LL3,900 to the dollar, are now getting the same LL6,240 rate agreed upon by the government of Lebanon and the World Bank for the latter’s new cash assistance program for needy Lebanese families. While the per-person payout has not been increased since the new rate was agreed upon, the number of beneficiaries has increased, UNHCR spokeswoman Lisa Abou Khaled said.
Resettlement and returns
In general, UNHCR recognizes three potential “durable solutions” for refugees: integration in their host countries, voluntary return to their home countries or resettlement in a third country.
Lebanese authorities have emphatically rejected the prospect of integrating the Syrian refugees in the long term, so that leaves return or resettlement. Both have largely ground to a halt amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying closing of borders and restrictions on travel.
While resettlement was always a rare option — with less than 1 percent of refugees worldwide getting resettlement in any given year — the number shrunk further in recent years, in part because of changes of policy in the United States, formerly the leading country of resettlement, where Donald Trump dramatically slashed refugee admissions.
In 2020, 4,284 Syrian refugees departed Lebanon for resettlement in a third country, down from 7,442 the year before, which already represented a decline from previous years.
“We’re hoping there will be an increase in resettlement places and also, with the global vaccination campaign happening, that traveling will be a bit eased, because some of the refugees were accepted [for resettlement] but they have not been able to travel” due to COVID-19 restrictions, Ito said.
While newly installed US President Joe Biden has promised to increase refugee admissions, Ito said it is not yet clear how many additional refugees the US might take from Lebanon.
Meanwhile, the number of refugees returning to Syria, which had been gradually increasing from 2016 to 2019, fell off dramatically in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic and closure of the borders. UNHCR recorded 22,728 voluntary returns from Lebanon to Syria in 2019; in 2020, the number more than halved, falling to 9,351.
Once COVID-19 recedes and borders reopen, Ito said it’s likely that the return numbers will tick back up, but added it’s hard to predict by how much.
Like Lebanon, Syria is now facing a crisis of hyperinflation that has seriously affected socio-economic conditions; Ito noted that some 60 percent of Syrians are now food-insecure, according to a World Food Program assessment.
“Similar to Lebanon, the situation [in Syria] is also quite difficult, with COVID, of course, and the exchange rate, which has also been deteriorating there,” he said. “Of course, return is an individual decision and refugees are the best judge.”
International standards call for returns to be voluntary, safe and dignified, which Ito said “means that people do not rush prematurely — that’s not safe and not dignified."
Human rights groups have reported that some refugees who either returned voluntarily or were deported back to Syria were then arrested by Syrian authorities.
Ito declined to comment specifically on the issue of returnees being detained. He noted that due to requirements to apply to the government for access to specific areas, UNHCR officials in Syria are not always able to follow up on what happens to returnees once they cross the border.
He added, however, that returning refugees in Syria do access services through some 120 UNHCR-supported community centers around the country. The refugee agency has rehabilitated schools and assisted returnees with some repairs to war-damaged houses, such as replacing doors and windows.
Unlike in Lebanon, returning refugees — and internally displaced people — in Syria generally receive in-kind services rather than cash assistance.
COVID-19 response and the vaccination campaign
With the COVID-19 vaccination campaign beginning to ramp up in Lebanon, refugees have so far been slow both to register and to receive the vaccine.
According to UNHCR data, only 14,076 Syrians to date had registered on the Impact platform for the vaccine, while 690 Syrians had received the vaccine.
Ito noted that as the Syrian refugee population is relatively young, the number of refugees eligible under the current guidelines, which prioritize the vaccine for health care workers and those over 75 years old, is still small. Syrians are prohibited from working in health care, and the number of registered refugees over the age of 75 is only about 6,700.
However, he acknowledged that more outreach needs to be done to inform refugees about the registration process, to assist those who do not have internet access to register themselves, and to counter some of their fears of the vaccines.
On the other hand, Ito said, the massive COVID-19 outbreaks that had been feared in Lebanon’s refugee communities largely did not materialize.
As of Friday, there had been 4,201 confirmed COVID-19 cases among Syrians to date — although Ito acknowledged the number is likely an undercount since many refugees who were sick may not have sought medical care — and 166 reported deaths.
“Contrary to some of the fears that everybody had, we haven’t seen any huge outbreaks in these informal settlements, so that’s reassuring for the time being,” he said. “But we shouldn’t lower our guard.”
Looking forward
At the end of this month, the European Union will host, for the fifth time, the annual Brussels Conference to raise funding from international donors for the response to the crisis in Syria. As it was last year, this year’s conference will be held virtually due to COVID-19 concerns.
Already, last year’s conference showed signs of donor fatigue, with pledges coming in about $2 billion lower than the year before.
But regardless of the amount pledged, Ito said that such conferences are only a stopgap solution.
“Are we going to continue with the Brussels Conference every year for another 10 years? The world leaders need to really think about this lost decade and have a solution” for both refugees and host communities, Ito said. While UNHCR will continue to provide humanitarian support, he said, “we as humanitarians cannot bring about fundamental solutions, which are often political.”