Abstract
Humanitarian assistance coupled with an unsustainable policy of regional containment have only created greater poverty and misery for Syrians fleeing civil war. How this has been allowed to happen on the southern shores of the Mediterranean – where extraordinary social linkages and networks have existed for centuries – lies mainly in the disparities between perceptions, aspirations and behaviour among refugees, practitioners and policymakers in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. This article highlights in particular three such disconnects: the a historical approach to engaging with displaced people in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, which has led to the implementation of international blueprints of humanitarian support that are disconnected from people’s needs; the imposition of an encampment policy at odds with displaced people’s need for temporary settlement enabled through their own social networks; the redundancy of humanitarian practitioners’ background and experience in dealing with the particularities of displaced populations in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the failure to build on practices that work.
Highlights
This ‘Refugee Commission’ – the first of its kind in contemporary Western history – offered incoming forced migrants agricultural land, draught animals, seeds, and other support in the form of tax relief fo
Each state bordering Syria has responded differently to this complex emergency: Turkey rushed to set up its own refugee camps for the most vulnerable groups, but generally supported people finding their own way and ‘self-settling’ in rural areas and urban centres; Lebanon refused to allow international humanitarian aid agencies to set up formal refugee camps, assuming that the Syrians would self-settle among ‘kith and kin’ or use social and economic contacts to find refuge; and Jordan prevaricated for nearly a year, before insisting on the establishment of a massive United Nations (UN) refugee camp in the desert borderland between the two countries
Many refuse to register as refugees and so are ‘invisible’ to aid agencies. This population is not served by the international humanitarian aid regime, which is focused almost entirely on the camps the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) set up in Jordan, and on the larger informal settlements in Lebanon; in particular, the Bekaa Valley where the majority of Syrians previously worked as seasonal agricultural labourers
Summary
This ‘Refugee Commission’ – the first of its kind in contemporary Western history – offered incoming forced migrants agricultural land, draught animals, seeds, and other support in the form of tax relief fo. Each state bordering Syria has responded differently to this complex emergency: Turkey rushed to set up its own refugee camps for the most vulnerable groups, but generally supported people finding their own way and ‘self-settling’ in rural areas and urban centres; Lebanon refused to allow international humanitarian aid agencies to set up formal refugee camps, assuming that the Syrians would self-settle among ‘kith and kin’ or use social and economic contacts to find refuge; and Jordan prevaricated for nearly a year, before insisting on the establishment of a massive United Nations (UN) refugee camp in the desert borderland between the two countries.
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