The European Union announced on Thursday an aid package for Lebanon of 1 billion euros \u2014 about $1.06 billion \u2014 that will mostly go to strengthening border control to halt the flow of asylum seekers and migrants from the small, crisis-wracked country across the Mediterranean Sea to Cyprus and Italy.
\nThe deal follows other recent deals by the EU to provide funds to countries such as Egypt, Tunisia and Mauritania to fortify their borders. It comes against a backdrop of increasing hostility toward Syrian refugees in European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the aid, which will be distributed between this year and 2027, during a visit to Beirut alongside Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides.
\nVon der Leyen said the EU will also be \u201cexploring how to work on a more structured approach to voluntary return to Syria in close cooperation with\u201d the UN refugee agency, or UNHCR, and called for more international support for humanitarian and early recovery projects in Syria.
\nLebanese political officials have been calling for years for the international community to either resettle the refugees in other countries or assist in returning them to Syria \u2014 voluntarily or not. Lebanese security forces have stepped up deportations of Syrians over the past year.
\nTensions around the presence of refugees have further flared since an official with the Christian nationalist Lebanese Forces party, Pascal Suleiman, was killed last month in what military officials said was a botched carjacking by a Syrian gang. The incident prompted outbreaks of anti-Syrian violence by vigilante groups.
\nMeanwhile, Cypriot authorities have been complaining that their country has been overwhelmed by a wave of irregular migration of Syrian asylum seekers, many of them coming on boats from Lebanon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The European Union announced on Thursday an aid package for Lebanon of 1 billion euros \u2014 about $1.06 billion \u2014 that will mostly go to strengthening border control to halt the flow of asylum seekers and migrants from the small, crisis-wracked country across the Mediterranean Sea to Cyprus and Italy. The deal follows other recent …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":20566,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20562"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20567,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20562\/revisions\/20567"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}