Lebanon is heading towards catastrophe as a result of the World Food Program’s recent decision to end food donations to Syrian refugees, Social Affairs Minister Rashid Derbas said Thursday.
“The decision to stop the food donations to Lebanon means [the country] will face a real catastrophe, because it will be responsible for providing food... to 1.2 million Syrian displaced,” Derbas said at a discussion panel organized by the Friends of Kamal Jumblatt League.”
The United Nations on Monday announced that it had been forced to stop providing food vouchers for 1.7 million Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt because of a lack of funds.
More than 1.1 million Syrians are registered as refugees in Lebanon with the U.N. Refugee Agency.
Derbas explained that he had opposed the proposal to naturalize Syrian refugees during the Berlin conference in late-October. He implied that the international actors were pressuring Lebanon to naturalize "elite" Syrians.
“The problem is dangerous and worrying, because it’s about naturalizing the Syrian elite, and thus depriving the Syrian people from its elite, especially its wealthy ones,” he said. “This implied that the international community is turning a blind eye to the biggest crime of this epoch.”
Health Minister Wael Abu Faour, who served as social affairs minister before Derbas, apologized to his successor for the "fireball" he threw in his lab.
“The Syrian displaced matter is one of the Lebanese disappointments,” Abu Faour said. “Things are going from bad to worse.”
Abu Faour underlined that the international community has failed to do anything effective about the Syrian crisis and its humanitarian consequences.
He predicted that the Syrian crisis is heading to “wider destruction,” while the horizons carry no solutions for the refugee issue in Lebanon.
Abu Faour cynically recalled when the Lebanese political class accepted in 1948 to build Palestinian refugee camps on the entrances of cities to benefit from cheap labor with no interest in addressing the crisis.
