Before the floods

[Originally posted at NOW]

The UN estimates at least 10,000 Syrian refugees living in tents in Lebanon will soon face flooding.

The center of the unofficial Nahiriyeh camp, near the Beqaa town of Bar Elias (NOW/Alex Rowell)

BAR ELIAS, Lebanon – Arriving at what locals call the “Nahiriyeh camp,” erected on a rectangular patch of gravelly sand hidden among the agrarian fields of the central Beqaa Valley, NOW briefly received a hero’s welcome on Thursday morning. The residents – Syrian refugees from Qusayr and elsewhere in Homs Province – crowded around the car, eagerly asking if we had come to hand out aid. The hope in their eyes quickly drained when we said we were only journalists, and most walked away, heads bowed, muttering under their breath. Those who stayed wasted no time in reeling off a long list of grievances: serious healthcare needs they couldn’t pay for; children denied places at schools; dangerously unclean drinking water; lack of diapers for newborns.

And yet, unenviable as living conditions for Nahiriyeh’s several hundred residents already are, they are soon to get much worse. It has begun to rain in Lebanon in the past fortnight, and though predictions of the harshest winter in a hundred years may be unreliable, snow will nevertheless cover much of the Beqaa in the coming winter months, which is grim news for the more than 270,000 Syrian refugees that the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has accounted for in the agricultural plain. Especially vulnerable are the more than 80,000 refugees UNHCR estimates are living in what it calls informal tented settlements (ITS), which are makeshift camps in all but name (unlike Jordan and Turkey, Lebanon does not officially have Syrian refugee camps). Of these settlements, UNHCR says 12% are located in flood-prone areas, which means at least 9,600 refugees will be living in flooded tents once the rain season gets fully underway.

Nahiriyeh’s residents will be among them. Invited inside the home of Umm Ahmad, a warm-spirited grandmother from Qusayr, NOW saw few means by which the family of eight would be able to escape the rain and snow. The roof comprised cardboard box panels supported by wooden beams. The walls were carpets held in place with nails. The floor was a mat thrown over an uneven, cracked layer of concrete; unprofessionally put in place by the refugees themselves. The only furniture, such as it was, consisted of a ring of uncomfortably thin mattresses, functioning as seats, children’s play areas, and beds. Asked how she planned to cope with the coming winter, Umm Ahmad could only laugh: “What you see is what we have.”

Nor were things better in Umm Muhammad’s slightly larger dwelling around the corner. Here, the roof had been fashioned out of woven rice sack material, some of which had begun to fray already. “Look at this,” she told NOW as her children looked on silently. “When it rains, this place is going to fill up.”

In anticipation of these humanitarian disasters-in-waiting, UNHCR and its NGO partners are building on the experiences of the past two winters since the outbreak of the Syrian crisis, and have been working on a so-called ‘winterization’ plan since the summer, according to UNHCR spokesperson Joelle Eid.

“In the Beqaa, we have around 280 informal settlements at risk of flooding,” Eid told NOW. “As soon as you have a lot of rain, the floor turns into mud, and those tents are at risk of flooding.” One planned response involves identifying all flood-prone locations, and then re-locating the refugees within them either to shelters or to Lebanese host families (who would then receive compensation from UNHCR), wherever possible.

A parallel initiative, which Eid told NOW has already started, is the distribution of “sealing kits” to refugees – that is, materials with which flood-prone homes could be sufficiently fortified to keep out the wet. Moreover, Eid added that distribution of winter-specific aid, such as warm clothing, blankets, mattresses, and heating fuel “will start in the coming weeks.”

However, Nahiriyeh’s residents – who say they are burning cardboard indoors to stay warm at night – are unconvinced they will see much aid come their way.

“We’ve been promised many things for the winter, but so far there has been nothing.”

Luna Safwan contributed reporting.

Speaking on Monocle 24 about Syrian refugee businesses facing closure in Lebanon

I spoke to Monocle 24 radio yesterday about unlicensed Syrian refugee businesses facing closure in Lebanon. Episode available here (I come on at 16:35).

Syrian refugee businessmen lament coming crackdown

[Originally posted at NOW]

This article is the first in a multi-part series focusing on a string of recent policies cracking down on Syrian refugees in Lebanon.

MASNAA, Lebanon – At the final stretch of the Lebanese portion of the Beirut-Damascus highway, between the villages of Bar Elias and Masnaa in the eastern fringes of the rural Beqaa Valley, almost every other shop has the word “Sham” (which can mean both “Damascus” and “Syria”) in its name. And, aptly enough, nearly every person here these days is Syrian, most of them refugees from the brutal war raging just a few kilometers away on the other side of the snow-capped Anti-Lebanon mountains.

Cut off from their livelihoods at home, many of them have opened small businesses – mostly restaurants, grocery stores, and cheap goods outlets – almost invariably without obtaining legal licenses. Having operated for months without disturbance from the Lebanese authorities, these small enterprises will now face closure from next week, according to a government announcement Tuesday, in a move that coincides with a wider crackdown on Syrian refugees, including stricter measures at border crossings. Speaking to AFP Thursday, Caretaker Economy Minister Nicolas Nahhas said the 377 identified refugee-owned businesses in Lebanon were creating “unfair competition,” and that Syrians in Lebanon did not have the right to work in “business and commerce.”

Though most Syrian business owners NOW met in the area on Thursday insisted they had licenses – claims of which their neighbors were quietly skeptical – they were nevertheless unhappy with the government’s decision.

“What’s the reason for this? Give me a reason!” said a cell phone accessories store owner, who preferred not to be named. His tone was not so much angry as genuinely confused: “Are we really harming the economy? Does it really hurt the Lebanese for us to be here as Syrians, selling to other Syrians, keeping to ourselves?”

Others, too, dismissed the idea that their presence was undermining the Lebanese economy.

“They say we’re stealing Lebanese jobs, but we’re doing manual labor work that the Lebanese don’t want to do anyway, and we’re only here in the first place because of the war back at home,” said a restaurant employee.

Everyone NOW spoke to agreed the financial burden was the key factor discouraging the refugees from obtaining licenses.

“It can cost $1,000 a month or more to get a license, and most of these places don’t make more than $200 a month,” said a grocer.

“Even without paying for licenses, most of our businesses only stay open for a month or two before going broke and closing down,” said a baker. “Many have already returned to Syria – better to be killed there than die of hunger here.”

Some, however, merely shrugged off the news, saying they doubted the government would carry out its pledge.

“It’s well-known that all restaurants in Bar Elias are Syrian-owned, operating without licenses,” said a restaurateur from Homs, who admitted to not having a license himself. “The previous owner of this one told me that State Security came to him once and told him to get a license, but they never came back again to check if he did.” If the government really did close him down this time, he said, he would simply move and start another business elsewhere.

Analysts NOW spoke to shared the refugees’ scorn for the notion that the coming crackdown is driven by economic concerns, saying instead the government is responding to political pressures pertaining to Lebanon’s notoriously delicate power-sharing arrangements between sectarian communities.

“I don’t buy the claim that the refugees are cutting into Lebanese business,” said Dr. Hilal Khashan, professor of political science at the American University of Beirut. “The reason is political […] remember these are Sunni Muslims for the most part, and Lebanese are very sensitive to demographic numbers. Lebanon proved to be inhospitable to Palestinian refugees, mainly because they are Sunni, and here you have an even larger influx of Sunnis.” From the perspective of sectarian opponents, therefore, “this threatens to tip the demography in favor of the Sunnis.”

Nor does Khashan expect such tensions will alleviate any time soon.

“Initial expectations were that the Syrian conflict would not last long and these refugees would soon be returning to Syria. As it happened, the influx has increased steadily, and it seems that this conflict does not have an end in sight.”

Maya Gebeily contributed reporting.