Lebanon to send Syrians home amid coercion fears

STORY: The first Syrian refugees in Lebanon to return home under a new repatriation scheme leave on Wednesday (October 26).

But few in this impoverished camp in the Bekaa Valley say they will sign up.

And rights groups fear the program won't be as voluntary as it purports to be.

Concerns are growing about coercion. The groups say it's already occurring in Turkey, where 3.6 million Syrian refugees are registered.

This year, both host countries have ramped up pressure on refugees to go back.

Manal, who did not give her last name, earns a little over $2 a day sorting firewood.

She lost her two sons to an air strike in Deir Ezzour and fled to Lebanon with her two daughters.

"In the end, I prefer living this hard life to living through a war. It’s easier to live this humiliating life than to lose people from my life. I am not ready to lose my girls in the war."

Most said they wouldn't go back until it was safer. But Khalfa Ramadan al-Safa said she might as well leave the desperate conditions of the camp.

"Nothing’s worth it anymore. We’re close to dying anyway. Nothing is worth it. We will go, finish our lives out and that’s it."

Lebanon says its General Security agency will facilitate voluntary returns, a repeat of 2018 when it repatriated about 400,000 Syrians.

United Nations refugee agency UNHCR didn't back that process but had representatives on-site if refugees had questions, and may play the same role this time.

General Security did not respond to requests for comment.

Rights group Amnesty International said some past returnees were subjected to detention, torture, rape and forced disappearance.

It also said attacks on Syrian refugees in Lebanon, which hosts hundreds of thousands of them, have increased.

Amnesty's Syria researcher Diana Semaan says "Syria is not safe for returns".

"From our perspective, any kind of voluntary returns need to be based on free and informed consent and our research shows that for now it is very difficult for refugees to make that free and informed or to take that free and informed consent of return given that direct conditions that they are currently living in Lebanon."

Human Rights Watch on Monday accused Turkish authorities of arbitrarily detaining and deporting hundreds of Syrian refugees this year.

Senior migration official Savas Unlu said the allegations were "baseless".

Under the non-refoulement principle, asylum seekers should not be forced to return to a country where they may be persecuted.