After a culmination of xenophobic and classist statements against Syrian refugees, a small group of activists made up of varying nationalities, including Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian, held a sit-in in Beirut on Monday to challenge the narrative.
Across the board, regardless of one's political allegiances or creed, Lebanese bigotry regarding Syrian refugees is steadily rising. In the face of this despairing event, various Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian organizations and individuals have been attempting to turn the tide. It is a fight fraught with obstacles and overwhelming odds.
More and more Syrian refugees enter Lebanon each passing month, many of whom desperately fled the brutal conflict between the Syrian regime and the various fracturing factions of the armed opposition.
Today, there are officially more than a million Syrian refugees, with estimates placing the actual number at over two million.
Naturally, the strain on Lebanon – or indeed, on any country in such extraordinary circumstances – would be great, especially considering the limited space and resources.
“I have never seen a country, including government authorities, do so much proportional to its size than this country. Refugees have been welcome in Lebanon, and have been cared for in a manner that humbles me,” Ninette Kelley, the UNHCR resident representative in Lebanon, had explained to Al-Akhbar three months ago.
“The important thing for us is the question of are people being protected. They are here. Whether they call them displaced persons or refugees, what this country has done should be held up as an example to the world,” she added.
Yet Kelley's celebration of Lebanon as “an example to the world” in regards to its support of Syrian refugees seems to collide with a more sombre reality.
A reality of discrimination
There are numerous towns and villages across the country that have implemented curfews and other forms of constraints on Syrians, the latest of which occurring in the eastern Beirut suburb of Bourj Hammoud at the end of May.
Along the same vein, Lebanese ministers and politicians from both political blocs have publicly voiced their view that Syrians are a threat to the very existence of Lebanon.
One pinnacle example is that of Lebanese politician and current Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil.
In the fall of 2013, during his previous tenure as caretaker minister of energy and water, Bassil squarely placed the country’s economic and security woes on the shoulders of Syrians, and called for curbing their number through deportation and restrictions.
“The Syrian refugee crisis is the biggest crisis threatening the Lebanese entity,” he told members of the press at the time, adding that the Syrians were a threat to the safety, economy, and identity of Lebanon.
Similarly, this past April, Interior Minister Nouhad Machnouk announced that the government was actively considering limiting the number of Syrian refugees entering the country.
“Our plan aims to limit the entry of more Syrian refugees into Lebanon and to undertake certain procedures to determine refugee status and the country's ability to absorb them and the services that can be offered, because donations often are few and come late,” local media reported him saying, “Syrian refugees are our relatives, but we will not allow them to cause problems in Lebanon.”
The negative outlook towards Syrian refugees is not exclusive to elites, but seems to have entrenched and flourished within differing segments of Lebanese society.
As Al-Akhbar reported in May, a study conducted by Dr. Charles Harb and Dr. Reem Saab of the American University of Beirut's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, titled “Casual Labor Initiative and Social Cohesion in Akkar and Bekaa,” showed that more than 90 percent of the Lebanese surveyed in the areas of Wadi Khaled, Sahel Akkar, and the Bekaa Valley were supportive of night curfews and other restrictions with regards to use of space by Syrian refugees.
Furthermore, more than 90 percent of those surveyed want to restrict the political freedoms of Syrian refugees, and more than 75 percent want to deny Syrian refugees access to work and other opportunities within the country.
Ultimately, the demands placed on the Syrian refugee are somewhat contradictory. While they are viewed through a humanitarian lens as a burden, the moment Syrians express themselves politically, particularly in a manner that does not conform to certain desires, another strand of prejudice emerges.
The recent experience with the Syrian elections is quite telling in this regard.
As tens of thousands of Syrian expatriates descended on the Syrian embassy in the neighborhood of Yarze to cast their vote, media and political personalities had a field day. The act of voting was seen as an affront, and voices demanded that Syrian voters, dubbed as “pro-Assad”, be deported immediately.
“Personally, I believe every single person who came out to vote today and blocked the streets, needs to be considered a persona-non-grata, an unwelcome person in Lebanon, including the Syrian ambassador,” Gino Raidy, the blog's founder and administrator, wrote.
“Lebanon welcomes civilians seeking refuge, not disturbers of the peace and militants. Every militant or activist that broke the law today and closed the streets, is unwelcome in Lebanon.”
“Please don’t take this as an attack on you, we know your safety is in danger back home, and we welcome you with open arms and homes till the day things better in Syria. However, please keep Syrian politics out of Lebanon, and help us maintain what semblance of a functional country we have managed to pull off,” he added.
In contrast, neither Gino nor any Lebanese politician expressed any complaints about the traffic jams and other inconveniences that arose during US Sectary of State John Kerry's surprise visit on June 4.
A “Culture of Diversion”
While discrimination and prejudice against refugees, the poor, and the vulnerable is not exclusively a Lebanese phenomenon, and is a blight commonly manifested throughout the globe, the Lebanese flavor of this sort of discrimination is firmly rooted to its unique social, political, and economic contexts, gradually crafted and shaped since the inception of the modern Lebanese nation-state.
Moe Ali Nayel and Bassem Chit articulated such a point in a October 2013 report –published by the Civil Society Knowledge Center and the Lebanon Support – that analyzed the reasons behind Lebanese racism towards Syrian refugees.
They wrote:
This culture of diversion, if it may be called as such, is not new. It has been a longstanding accompanying discourse of Lebanon’s ruling elite, in building their own political hegemony and preserving their rule. The ills of Lebanon are always relegated to being the result of interference of “stranger” and/or “foreign” elements. This is exceptionally true in the dominant discourses interpreting the causes of the long civil war that destroyed the country between 1975 and 1989, following which the ruling elite declared a general amnesty and resorted to explain the civil war as a result of the interference of “Palestinians” or “Syrians” in local Lebanese affairs. It was enough to divert attention from the real causes of the war, the State’s sectarianism being one of the major causes.
“Yet this scapegoating is never done on the level of interfering governments or rich Arab and foreign interventionists. Quite the contrary, it has always been directed against migrant workers, refugees, workers, and the poor. It is exactly this economic or class element of this culture that is worrying,” they added.
Scapegoating and scaremongering of the vulnerable is a tried and true tactic by politicians and elites to dissuade any pressures on themselves by the general public.
In response to the overbearing discriminatory narrative, Al-Manshour, a local far-left online publication, complied numerous sarcastic memes mocking attempts to blame Syrian refugees for many of Lebanon's problems.
In one meme, a woman states that word is going around that Syrians are consuming all the water. A man in the image responds, “Rather than being concerned for the water used by Syrians, they should worry about the Blue Gold’s water project.”
Beyond memes, efforts to combat this growing tide of racism, classism, and discrimination towards Syrians, as well as others, are being made by local organisations and individuals, keen on highlighting how these statements are now becoming mainstream rhetoric.
The latest effort was Monday’s sit-in, where around 80 people gathered outside the Lebanese National Museum and chanted against racism and classism directed towards Syrians, as well as towards Palestinians, Iraqis, and other non-Lebanese, and voiced their solidarity and unity as a people.
“[This sit-in] was held because of the building up of racist statements by Lebanese politicians, ministers, political parties, along with the decisions of the minister of interior and some municipalities banning the movements of Syrian refugees at night and things like that,” explained Bassem Chit, the author of the aformentioned Civil Society report and a member of the far-left organization Socialist Forum, one of the groups that organized the protest.
“We can also see among the left that there is a racist sentiment happening towards the Syrian refugees, especially by the conventional left like the Lebanese communist party and many others,” he added, pointing to the examples of painting the entire Syrian uprising as being Islamist and extremist.
“This allowed what I call light racism. And there is no action by politicians towards racist positions by others. No reactions and no support for Syrian refugees. Even the unions were talking about protection of Lebanese workers from the Syrian refugees as if Syrian refugees were stealing it. No, it is the employers doing that, not the Syrian refugee,” Chit said.
He also pointed out the connection between classism and racism, referring to the fact that Syrian investors with a lot of money tend to be received well, while poorer Syrians are restricted or physically attacked.
Indeed, one of the chants at the sit-in was: “They have curfews for Syrian refugees, but not for well-known Lebanese criminals,” lamenting a political system that criminalizes innocent Syrians and exonerates Lebanese elites who are associated with outrageous conducts committed in the past and today.
The sit-in, while not large in number and will likely not change things on the ground, was still viewed as an important step, particularly for the Syrians who participated in it.
“I know that materially it won't change things, by at least it shows that we are together. This is symbolic, and that is important for me and others,” a Syrian from Homs, who works as a freelance journalist in Beirut, told Al-Akhbar on the condition of anonymity.
“We don't see the fight against the Lebanese ruling class as separate from the fight of the Syrian ruling class. Historically it was the same. It's two states within one class set-up,” Chit stressed.
Who poses a threat to whom?
Taking the general political and media rhetoric at face value, one can be excused in believing that the large number of Syrians – amounting to almost 20 percent of the country's population – is a legitimate threat.
But when one digs deeper into the facts behind the question of who poses a threat to whom, the reality is vastly different.
During a notorious press conference held last fall, Minister Bassil claimed that “87 percent of the arrests are Syrian,” yet according to figures complied by the Lebanese NGO Association of Justice and Mercy, the average number of Syrian refugees in Lebanese prisons amounts to around 200-300 individuals per month, many of whom were arrested for a lack of documentation or petty crimes.
Of late, a tragic horrifying story emerged this past weekend in north Lebanon's Akkar of a 17-year-old Lebanese who raped and murdered a 5-year-old Syrian child, disposing of the body in a dumpster.
While the actual motive behind this crime is unknown, it would not be a stretch to argue that subjecting an already vulnerable population to a hostile discourse – one that the Palestinians had faced before – does play a role.
Ultimately, the struggle to combat prejudice, fear, and hate is a long one, bristling with obstacles, difficulties, and challenges from all corners of society. It requires a unified effort by all residents – citizen or otherwise – to work together and stand up to acts of prejudice and discrimination.
Without such serious efforts, the result could very well be calamitous.
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!
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