« Palestinian civil organisations in the Syrian uprising. Militant conversion and forms of self-management in crisis time », al-Majdal, n°57, été 2015, pp. 11-16. (original) (raw)
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Palestinian refugees in the Middle East constitute a protracted refugee situation. In response to political considerations by multiple state actors, they are denied return to their homes of habitual residence and are refused meaningful legal protection in their host countries. As such Palestinians are suspended between their political objectification in a prolonged conflict on the one hand and the vulnerability of their humanitarian condition, like all other refugees, on the other. Unlike their refugee counterparts who are persons of concern to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Statute, Palestinian refugees endure an uneven legal regime. Since the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) fell into abeyance, no international agency has searched for durable solutions on behalf of Palestinian refugees, thus exposing them to a protection gap. Instead, the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), established to furnish Palestinian refugees aid and relief, has provided them with incremental protection, which, however significant, has been insufficient to close the gap. The extent of this protection gap endured by Palestinian refugees has been vividly demonstrated during several episodes of secondary forced displacement in the Middle East. In response to their mass expulsion from Kuwait in 1991, Libya in 1996, and Iraq in 2003, UNRWA and UNHCR have closely collaborated in order to bridge this gap and provide Palestinian refugees with adequate protection. These incidents of inter-agency collaboration constitute de facto policies between the two agencies, which demonstrate the flexibility of otherwise rigid delineations between their existing mandates. In particular, past practice makes clear that UNRWA and UNCHR can have overlapping geographic and operational mandates. During the most recent crisis in Syria, these de facto policies have proven inadequate to protect Palestinian refugees. To overcome this challenge, UNHCR and UNRWA should formalize their inter-agency collaboration on behalf of Palestinian refugees during times of calm as well as crisis in conformity with the spirit of the UNHCR Statute and the 1951 Refugee Convention as well as with past practice. Beyond crisis, the agencies should consider innovative approaches to definitively close the protection gap.
The Syrian conflict has profound consequences for the Palestinian population in Syria. Palestinians in Syria were enjoying access to education and the labor market without particular discrimination in Syria before 2011. The conflict began in 2011 rejected the Palestinians in Syria to their stateless status and forced more than 70,000 of them to seek asylum in neighboring countries, like the Palestinians from Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The aim of this presentation is to analyze the specific treatment of Palestinians from Syria in a context of a broader discussion on the selectivity of migration policies of Middel Eastern states vis-à-vis the Palestinians. The current forced migration of Palestinian refugees, largely overshadowed by the magnitude of the Syrian refugee crisis, raises many questions regarding the status of refugees forced to leave their countries of first asylum to seek refuge in a third country out of any framework for international protection. This chapter is based on a research on the movement of Palestinians refugees since the mid-1990s as well as an exploratory field study carried out in December 2013 in South Lebanon which show strong relationships between secondary migration and other forms of international migration of Palestinians, as their local effects in Lebanon.