The Syrian Humanitarian Disaster: Understanding Perceptions and Aspirations in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey
| Author | Dawn Chatty |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12390 |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
The Syrian Humanitarian Disaster:
Understanding Perceptions and Aspirations
in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey
Dawn Chatty
University of Oxford
Abstract
The modern architecture of international humanitarian assistance has established a template of provisioning for refugees flee-
ing armed conflict which is based on notions of encampment and vulnerability. The narrowness of that assistance framework
coupled with an unsustainable policy of regional containment have created greater poverty and misery for Syrians fleeing the
armed conflict in their country. How this has been allowed to happen on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea –
where extraordinary social linkages and networks have existed for centuries –lies mainly in the disparities between percep-
tions, aspirations and behaviour among refugees, practitioners and policy makers in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.
Syria can be described as both a refuge state and a refugee
producing nation. This modern historical fact has had a pro-
found influence on the way that neighbouring countries
and their peoples have responded to and reacted to the
current humanitarian crisis. In addition, the international
humanitarian aid regime in its 21st century carnation has
been caught out, unprepared and curiously unresponsive to
the perceptions and aspirations of both those seeking
refuge and the host community providing it (CFR, 2016).
This paper sets out to explore the disparity in perceptions
and aspirations among forced migrants, members of hosting
communities and largely international humanitarian aid
practitioners and policy makers. It is based on fieldwork in
Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan between September 2014 and
September 2015.
The making of a refuge state in Syria
Five times in modern history Syria and its peoples have
received and accommodated massive influxes of forced
migrants. In the 100 years between 1850 and 1950 Syria
received several million forced migrants from the contested
borderlands with the Imperial Russian and Ottoman Empires.
At the close of the Crimean War (1853–6), and the following
two Ottoman- Russian Wars in the 1860s and 1880s, more
than 3 million forced migrant Tatars, Dagestani, Kabarday,
Abkhaza, Abaza, and other related Circassian and Chechnyan
ethnic groups entered the Ottoman provinces of Rumeli (the
Balkans), Anatolia, and the Arab regions of Bilad al Sham
(Greater Syria).
The Sublime Port in Constantinople, was faced with deal-
ing with the aftermath of what many historians labelled as
the first genocide in modern history (McCarthy, 1995). It
established a special Refugee Code in 1857 to address the
needs of these millions. In 1860, a refugee commission
(Muhacirin Komisyonu) was established with the goal of
helping these borderland populations to integrate and settle
successfully in the Ottoman Empire (Shaw, 1980). Generous
terms for resettlement of these people –as well as other
voluntary settlers from Europe –included freedom to
choose where to settle along the sparsely settled agricul-
tural lands (the Ma’moura) of Greater Syria. This ’Refugee’
Commission –the first of its kind in contemporary European
history –offered incoming forced and voluntary migrants
not only agricultural land, but also provided them with
draught animals, seeds, and other support in the form of
tax relief for a decade, and exemptions from military service
(Chatty 2010). All effort was made to see these settlers
become self-sufficient in as short a time as possible. Integra-
tion into the numerous ethnically-mixed settlements of
Greater Syria was encouraged in order to promote and pre-
serve the cosmopolitan and convivial nature of urban and
rural communities in the late Ottoman Empire.
As World War One drew to a close as many as half a mil-
lion Armenians found refuge in Syria settling among with
their co-religionists in Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut and Jerusa-
lem (Watenpaugh, 2015). When the modern Republic of Tur-
key was established in 1923, 10,000 Kurds from Turkey fled
across the border into Syria choosing to escape from the
forced secularism of Kemal Ataturk’s new Turkey (Figure 1).
The Inter War French Mandate over Syria saw a continuation
of these processes, with waves of Assyrian Christians enter-
ing the country in the 1930s seeking asylum and safety after
the British had given up their mandate over Iraq in 1932. All
these forced migrants were granted citizenship in the new
Syrian state (White 2011). And then in the late 1940s, Syria
was the safe harbour for over 100,000 Palestinians fleeing
the Nakba at the time of the creation of the state of Israel.
Between 1975 and 1989, Syria was a ’safe harbour’for hun-
dreds of thousands of Lebanese fleeing civil war in their
Global Policy (2017) 8:Suppl.1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12390 ©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 8 . Supplement 1 . February 2017 25
Special Issue Article
To continue reading
Request your trial