Misery Beyond the War Zone: Life for Syrian Refugees and Displaced Populations in Lebanon

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Feb 17, 2013 Syria
[Image by Michael Goldfarb via doctorswithoutborders.org] [Image by Michael Goldfarb via doctorswithoutborders.org]

Misery Beyond the War Zone: Life for Syrian Refugees and Displaced Populations in Lebanon

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following report was issued by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on 6 February 2013.]

Misery Beyond the War Zone: Life for Syrian Refugees and Displaced Populations in Lebanon

Executive Summary 

The ongoing crisis in Syria is forcing ever more Syrians to flee their homeland in search of safety. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) reported in late January that more than 165,000 refugees had officially been registered in Lebanon alone, and that almost 77,000 more were in the process of being registered. An estimated 50,000 additional refugees are believed to be in the country but have not attempted to register formally as refugees. And nearly 500,000 have sought sanctuary in Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq.

The humanitarian needs of this growing population are immense and growing. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has been working to provide aid inside Syria since March 2011, though those efforts have been limited by security concerns and access issues. At the same time, however, MSF has expanded its work with Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq.

This report specifically focuses on MSF’s work with Syrian refugees and other displaced populations in Lebanon, where MSF teams are providing urgent assistance and free-of-charge medical care among people now sheltering in Tripoli and in various locations of the Bekaa Valley.

In June 2012, MSF conducted a survey among Syrian refugees and Lebanese people who’d been living in Syria but were likewise driven out by the war. The results highlighted a number of worrisome conditions. Assistance had been quickly deployed in the early days of the crisis, and numerous organizations were still supporting the aid response, but clear gaps were already evident, particularly when it came to access to medical care. Treatment for chronic diseases such as asthma, diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease was already a major concern, in large part because the cost of the necessary drugs was out of reach for many. There were also significant gaps in hospital-level care, with four out of ten interviewees saying they could not access a hospital due to cost, insecurity, or other reasons.

Citing the survey results, MSF called for the response to be maintained and reinforced, and in December 2012, MSF launched another survey of the displaced populations from Syria now in Lebanon in order to gauge living conditions and check whether any progress had been made since results of the first survey were released. 

The results of this most recent survey are detailed below. They show that the gaps in service that existed last spring have not been sufficiently addressed but have in fact widened as more people have streamed across the border. Living conditions among the majority of refugees and Lebanese returnees remain extremely precarious, particularly with winter arriving. More than fifty percent of those interviewed, whether they were officially registered or not, are housed in substandard structures — inadequate collective shelters, farms, garages, unfinished buildings and old schools — that provide paltry, if any, protection against the elements. The rest are renting houses, but many of those people, now separated from their lives and livelihoods, are struggling to pay the rent.

The medical picture has deteriorated as well. More than half of all interviewees (fifty-two percent) cannot afford treatment for chronic disease care, and nearly one-third of them have had to suspend treatment already underway because it was too expensive to continue. For those who are and are not registered alike, the costs attached to essential primary health care, ante-natal care and institutional deliveries are prohibitive. Among non-registered returnees and internally displaced Lebanese, sixty-three percent received no assistance whatsoever from any NGO.

The survey showed that the registration process itself is problematic in ways that limit the coverage aid organizations can achieve. In fact, 41% of the interviewees said they were not registered mainly because they lacked information on how and where to register or the registration points were too far away. Others worried that they did not have proper legal papers and would be therefore sent back to Syria. Even among those who had registered, MSF’s survey found complaints. Roughly one in four said they had not received any assistance, while sixty-five percent said they had received only partial assistance that did not cover the family’s needs.

The specific findings are laid out below, but the message they convey is quite clear: Syrian refugees and other displaced people now living in Lebanon have profound humanitarian needs that are not being met. A similar situation is playing out in other countries hosting Syrian refugees as well. If these people are going to find real relief from the conflict plaguing Syria, and if their needs — particularly their medical needs — are going to be met, there must be a more expansive, concerted, and effective humanitarian response.

Recommendations

In light of these widening gaps, MSF calls for national and international humanitarian aid actors to shift policies towards a full-fledged emergency response to meet the needs of the raising refugee population. More specifically:

  • Considering that sixty-three percent of the unregistered refugees do not receive any assistance, MSF calls for a scaling up of the humanitarian response to ensure immediate delivery of food and non-food assistance to all refugees upon their arrival in the country without conditioning the aid to the completion of their registration process.
  • MSF calls on authorities to accelerate the establishment of reception centres and the immediate availability of collective shelters adapted to winter conditions to cope with the increasing influxes of new refugees.
  • With fifty percent of the refugee population not receiving the required medical treatment because it is not affordable, MSF urges national and international actors to guarantee accessible health care, specifically through the provision of free of charge services to the most vulnerable groups. Money cannot be an obstacle to health for a population fleeing violence in a war zone.
  • MSF urges authorities and the UNHCR to ensure that all refugees suffering from acute medical conditions gain full and fast access to hospital care.
  • As more than thirty percent of those in need of treatment for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are no longer able to ensure the continuity of their treatment, MSF calls for the systematic integration of affordable NCD treatment in the health care system.
  • Despite the ongoing efforts to accelerate the registration process, more than forty percent still remain unregistered today. MSF calls upon Government of Lebanon, international donors, local authorities, and the UNHCR to ensure incoming refugees are registered within days of their arrival, by significantly expanding the number of registration points and mobilizing extra dedicated human resources. 

[Click here to download the full report.]
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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412