Lebanon Wants Int'l Follow-Up On Russian Initiative To Return Syrian Refugees - Minister

The Russian initiative on Syrian refugee return has helped to start the process but it needs to be followed up by international and domestic measures to make it a universal process, Lebanese Foreign and Migration Minister Gebran Bassil told Sputnik on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos

DAVOS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 22nd January, 2019) The Russian initiative on Syrian refugee return has helped to start the process but it needs to be followed up by international and domestic measures to make it a universal process, Lebanese Foreign and Migration Minister Gebran Bassil told Sputnik on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

"I think that the Russian initiative, though intentionally politically handicapped somehow, it gave a big umbrella for the encouragement for refugees to go back, and it helped us a lot. Now it needs to be coupled with some other measures from the Syrian government and from the international community," he said.

In turn, the Syrian government should exempt the returnees from conscription, Bassil suggested, while the international community should continue assistance to refugees once they are back home.

"From the Syrian government - to ease the measures for accepting refugees in the sense to do a waiver for military service for example for the expropriation of the lands, and from the international community - to stop the discouragement of refugees, and to really adopt what we agreed on in our last Arab summit to incentivize the return by keeping the assistance to returnees when they come back home," he said.

The minister added that such measures would really accelerate the process of return of refugees, which is essentual for reconstruction of Syria.

"There will be no peace, no stability, no reconstruction if Syrians don't go back. And this is the importance of the Russian initiative. This is why it was really endorsed by us. We are coordinating together for this to happen quickly," he continued.

The minister noted that over the last half a year, the number of Syrians leaving Lebanon exceeded the number of incoming Syrians, which he said was a positive trend.

"In the last six months, there is 108,000 Syrians of positive balance [moving] toward Syria from Lebanon. It does not mean that they were all refugees, but this is the balance. This is very good, because it used to be negative towards us, and now it's positive. If it continues on this pace, with adopting some kind of assistance for returnees and encouragement from the Syrian government by alleviating the measures, I can assume that a few hundreds of thousands can return, especially with more stabilization on the ground, and especially after ending the Idlib conflict," he said.

Around 1.1 million Syrian refugees were living in Lebanon as of late 2018. Over 150,000 of them are still living in makeshift camps. The Lebanese authorities have complained about rising costs of hosting them and have encouraged incentives to repatriate them.