By Niamh Fleming-Farrell
WADI KHALED, Lebanon: As Syrian forces take measures to prevent rebel infiltration of Lebanon’s northeastern border, municipal leaders in Wadi Khaled anticipate an influx of vulnerable Lebanese displaced from Syria’s border villages. Since 2011, the impoverished north Lebanon region has received and hosted thousands of Syrian refugees, but according to Mostafa Yassin, the deputy mayor of the Amayer-Rajm Issa municipality, “The biggest problem are the Lebanese coming from Syria.”
Among a group of municipality representatives speaking to reporters Saturday following a UNDP-funded capacity building training session, Yassin described these Lebanese, whose businesses and livelihoods are in Syria, as having “lost everything.”
Many such Lebanese have already been displaced from Syrian villages back across the border into Lebanon, but more are now expected to return to North Lebanon as Syria moves to secure its border.
Sources told The Daily Star last week that Syrian troops had begun blockading the northeastern frontier with trenches and earth mounds stretching northward toward the Akkar region of Wadi Khaled.
Local television station LBCI reported security sources as saying the Syrian Army had informed Lebanese nationals living in Syrian border villages that if they wanted to cross into Lebanon, they should do so before the blockades were fully in place.
And according to the representatives of eight municipalities gathered in the Wadi Khaled village of Amayer Saturday, many of those affected are taking the opportunity to leave.
“We are expecting an increase in this influx because they are closing the borders,” Yassin said. “They started arriving two days ago.”
Yassin and his colleagues went on to describe the worsening economic situation in the already neglected and struggling hamlet: Unemployment has rocketed as businesses previously based on cross-border trade flounder and the thousands of Syrian refugees flooding the labor market have cut labor rates.
But, Yassin said, for returning Lebanese the situation is worst. Syrian refugees receive food and support from international organizations, while Lebanese who have lost their jobs must fend for themselves, he said.
But in spite of this harsh discrepancy, the municipal leaders say there has been no resultant negative impact on the hospitality shown Syrians in the area.
“Hosting people is part of the culture of the people in Wadi Khaled,” Farj Hamada al-Osman of the Khat alPetrol municipality said.
Yassin meanwhile contended there was not a house in the region that wasn’t accommodating at least one Syrian, while Bassam Khalife, the mayor of Amayer –Rajm Issa added that most households were now between 10 and 15 people, and space was running out.
But, while the situation is difficult, the representatives said there had been no increase in crime rates or any hostility between the host communities and refugees.
Asked about the curfews municipalities elsewhere in the country have imposed on Syrians, the gathered men looked incredulous, saying nothing like that has ever been contemplated in their districts.
This peaceful coexistence was evidenced Saturday afternoon as classes finished up at a school in Amayer and classmates, a mixed group of Lebanese and Syrians, animatedly showed off schoolwork and played together in the grounds.
Out of 313 students, 183 are Syrians, Abdullah Muhieddine, UNDP’s area manager in North Lebanon, told The Daily Star: “Numbers have increased dramatically since the crisis began.”
The Amayer school is among 18 in the region receiving support from UNDP since before the current crisis began, but Muhieddine said that with numbers expected to increase again in the coming academic year, more assistance would be needed.
“We will definitely need more space, resources and teachers,” he said.
Education is just one area in which Wadi Khaled had needed and benefitted from international assistance.
Other challenges – many predating but exacerbated by the Syrian crisis – abound in the region.
In addition to rapidly depleting hosting options, municipality leaders readily listed unemployment, sewage, water, electricity, pollution and inflation as major issues.
Expressing gratitude for the work UNDP has done in a number of these areas, and saying their municipalities have no resources to manage the ongoing crisis, the leaders are now calling on both the government and international community for more support.
The representatives, many of whose municipalities were created only within the past year, credit UNDP’s capacity building program – which is being implemented through the body’s “Strengthening Civil Peace in Lebanon” project – with empowering them to access government bodies and international organizations, and to communicate with a wider audience.
Yet while the municipal leaders said they now feel more competent reporting on and lobbying for their communities’ needs, they have yet to see the tangible results of that empowerment – several even pointed out that the government seems even more absent in the region now than before the crisis.
Some, like Khalife, hold out hope that the Social Affairs Ministry will assist with accommodation for refugees; he thinks prefabricated houses might be supplied in due course.
Most however, assure, unequivocally, that if and when national elections are held they will not be voting for the same MPs again.
Copyrights 2011, The Daily Star - All Rights Reserved
20/05/2013
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Local-News/2013/May-20/217664-wadi-khaled-expects-influx-of-refugees.ashx#axzz2ToQPVp4I
