The Caravan – August 2019

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16 THE CARAVAN

/ sreejith sugunan

On 20 March, a Bangladeshi migrant
working at a small eatery in the coastal
Jordanian city of Aqaba complained to
me about how little the jobs there paid,
leaving “hardly anything to send home,”
even as he conceded that “at home, I
might not even get a job.” It was a sen-
timent echoed by not only the majority
of migrant workers I spoke to—mostly
Palestinians, Syrians, South Asians,
Filipinos and Egyptians—but by the Jor-
danians themselves. There was palpable
disappointment in the air because of the
lack of jobs and meagre salaries. The
government holds an ongoing refu-
gee crisis partially responsible for the
domestic situation, but the residents of
Jordan no longer buy this explanation.
During an interview at the World
Economic Forum, on 24 January, the
prime minister, Omar Razzaz, admit-
ted that Jordan was suffering from
“neighbourhood effects”—a reference
to the Syrian crisis, which has reshaped
the demographics of the country, where
one in three people is now a refugee.
According to the United Nations High
Commission for Refugees, Jordan,
Lebanon and Turkey together host over
three quarters of the 5.6 million reg-
istered Syrian refugees, who have fled
their country following the crisis that
has unfolded since 2011.
Although Turkey has taken in most
of the Syrian refugees, Jordan and
Lebanon—despite their relatively small-
er size—host over a thousand Syrian
refugees per 100,000 habitants. While
Jordan’s government and the UNHCR
have tried to ensure that the majority
of the nearly seven hundred thousand
registered Syrians in the country are
housed outside of the country’s refugee
camps, recent reports indicate that 80
percent of those outside the camps live
below the poverty line, and more than
half are unemployed.
Jordan has for long been a hospita-
ble country, accepting refugees from

many war-torn countries. The kingdom

accommodated over 1.5 million Pales-

tinian refugees following the Arab–Is-

raeli wars of 1948–49 and 1967. After it

withdrew its claim to the West Bank,

in 1988, the Jordanian government pro-

vided these refugees with passports for

travel purposes, but did not grant them

citizenship or permanent residency.

During the Gulf War in the early

1990s, a comparatively smaller exodus

of Palestinians came from Kuwait, in

addition to a million Iraqi refugees.

According to the United Nations Relief

and Work Agency for Palestinian Refu-

gees in the Near East, of the five million

registered Palestinian refugees, over

two million live in Jordan—a country

with a population of around ten mil-

lion. When added to Jordanian citizens

of Palestinian descent, they amount

to over half the country’s population,

according to unofficial estimates.

In 2016, the World Bank estimated

that the cost of hosting Syrian refugees

in the kingdom was $2.5 billion per

year, suggesting that the government

spent almost four thousand dollars per

refugee per year. According to the gov-

ernment, over a quarter of the country’s

budget was directed towards meeting

the costs of the refugees.

In order to meet the government’s

growing demands for aid, an agreement

called the Jordan Compact was signed,

in 2016, by representatives from the

United Kingdom, Germany, Kuwait,

Norway and the United Nations. Touted

King’s Gambit

The economic turmoil caused by Jordan’s

“strategic refocus” / Government

LETTER FROM

JORDAN

mohammad hannon / ap