A mere two months after the announcement of the €1 billion EU-Lebanon aid package aimed at curbing Syrian migration flows to Europe and facilitating the return of Syrians to “safe areas” inside Syria, the Lebanese Government has begun handing Syrians back to the Assad regime.
Already, dozens have been arrested since returning. Last week, one Syrian was reportedly killed under torture.
Warnings by human rights groups immediately followed the announcement of the EU-Lebanon deal in early May. After all, it came on the back of Lebanon's track record of deporting thousands of Syrians — including registered refugees — to Assad, including opposition activists and military defectors who experience torture and conscription on their return.
It's increasingly clear that the European Union (EU) has acquiesced to the desires of far-right Christian parties in Lebanon who have presided over an atmosphere of terror for Syrians residing in the country.
Ironically, the EU now also finds itself on the same side in its treatment of Syrian refugees as Hezbollah, whose leader Hassan Nasrallah joined the xenophobic chorus by calling on the Lebanese authorities to allow Syrian refugees to leave Lebanon by boat. Nasrallah had years ago called for the return of Syrian refugees by the Lebanese state to Assad.
Regional henchmen
Meanwhile, another key Western ally, Iraq, has also embarked upon its own deportation campaign. In both cases, the campaigns have also targeted registered refugees, who have had no right to appeal.
In both Lebanon and Iraq, key Shia political parties — and their militias — form an integral part of targeting Syrian refugees, who in many cases have escaped the violence committed by these very same transnational militias within Syria.
In both cases, Hezbollah and the PMF sit in their respective government cabinets. In the case of Iraq, the PMF is legally part of the Iraqi military.
The salaries of their members, including those serving in Syria, are paid by the state — as well as individual factions who also enjoy simultaneous channels of Iranian funding. Even today, thousands of PMF fighters remain in Syria, involved in major systematic seizures of lands and property.
European and Western officials will deny that they intend to facilitate the deportation of Syrians back to Syria. But, as with much of Western policy on Syria, the question of intentionality is deceptive and the real question tends not to be of first policy preferences, but second ones.
If Western powers are made to choose between deportation campaigns and increased migration flows, they will always side with the former.
This helps explain the reluctance of various Western powers to be dragged into Israel's attempts to escalate the conflict with Iran. Indirectly, the West and the EU rely on Iran's cooperation on the migration file. They know all too well that if Iran were to oppose the deportation campaign, Iran could easily mobilise its allies — Hezbollah and the PMF — to put a halt to the process and orient migration flows towards Europe.
How the EU outsources instability
The EU’s stated pursuit of stabilisation at home relies on outsourcing destabilisation abroad.
The calculation that EU policymakers seem to be making is that endlessly repressing refugees brings no downside and will have no blowback.
However, this notion is short-sighted and fails to learn the lessons of recent history. The assumption that traumatised generations will cause no problems fails to learn the lessons of insurgency movements that rely on marginalised and disempowered demographics as fuel.
Migration policies form part of the larger 'War on Terror'. The 'War on Refugees', in turn, is noticeable for relegating key features that are, on the surface, key attributes of Western states: opposition to cooperation with competitors like Iran and non-compliance with legal restrictions that these Western states themselves have passed.
However, as part of the war against ISIS, the US-led Coalition was reported to have supported a military offensive by a group — Kata’ib Hezbollah — designated as a terrorist organisation in Iraq.
Coalition member states were also reported to have shared intelligence with the same Assad regime that they sanctioned.
Saying one thing but doing another
For their part, Hezbollah has been part of governments in Lebanon since 2005 without undertaking any reforms that, for instance, prohibit Palestinian refugees in Lebanon from most types of employment. Hezbollah currently holds the Labour and Public Works portfolios within the government.
It is these same parties that play a crucial role in the corrupt order in Iraq and Lebanon, where Syrians are scapegoated.
It is therefore no surprise that both Hezbollah and the PMF opposed the 2019 protests in their respective countries — firmly disbanding any illusion that they were not part of the establishment.
Instead of sanctioning them, including using the threat of withholding military aid to the likes of Iraq — as human rights groups such as Amnesty International called for — Western states and the EU have instead chosen backhanded channels to placate these militias that they publically oppose.
This is both in clear non-compliance with their legal obligations but also camouflaged by what could be termed “third-party concealment”, succinctly and accurately described in a 2019 letter by Sudanese and Eritrean rights groups that accused the EU of concealing its links to Sudanese militias: “The European Union has hidden behind the execution of such programs by third parties.”
The ability of the EU, along with its regional allies, to quietly pursue policies of rehabilitation of the Assad regime and encourage returns to its territory is an ironic byproduct of regime change theories that claimed to oppose Western imperialism but instead distracted from a significant track record of Western complicity with the regime.
The result today is the forcible return of those who are at risk of torture and death at its hands, by Western allies in the region, to no widespread civil society and activist opposition. And without activist mobilisation and protests, the West will continue to find ways to do deals with the devil.
Omar Sabbour is an Egyptian conflict analyst and an MA student at the Department of History and Cultural Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is a member of the Students for Palestine - FU and the wider Student Coalition Berlin, a coalition of student collectives from various Berlin universities formed in response to the current genocide in Gaza. He has been published in the Guardian, New Statesman, Middle East Eye among other outlets, and operates his own blog, The Eternal Spring.
Follow him on X: @OmarSabbour
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