BAALBEK, Lebanon: Ross Mountain, the United Nations’ resident coordinator for Lebanon, prefers metaphors to discuss the critical circumstances Lebanon faces. “The idea is to keep Lebanon’s head above water,” he told The Daily Star on a recent trip to the Bekaa Valley.“We’ve got to keep the lid on,” he added later. Perhaps most ominously, Mountain quoted a reflection which he attributed to Marie Antoinette. “It’s enough to keep your head when everyone around is losing theirs,” he said, glancing at the Anti-Lebanon mountain range separating the country from Syria and the civil war raging there.
Mountain has been assisting the Lebanese government to formulate a new strategic plan which aims to strengthen the county’s ability to respond to the Syrian refugee crisis that is threatening to guillotine Lebanon’s fragile cohesion.
The Lebanon Crisis Response Plan, set to be officially announced later this month, will be coordinated by the Social Affairs Ministry in conjunction with a number of NGOs and U.N. agencies. While the Lebanese government has been wary of programs that it believes encourage the permanent settlement of Syrian refugees, Mountain said the government was eager to take a more active leadership role in managing the crisis and its effects on the country.
No longer just a humanitarian emergency, the Syrian refugee crisis now poses a clear threat to Lebanese stability, Mountain said.
Distributing aid to refugees while ignoring the communities and municipalities that are hosting them could have disastrous consequences.
Developing local infrastructure, particularly in areas of Lebanon already suffering from endemic poverty, is necessary if Lebanon is to be expected to continue hosting more than 1.1 million Syrian refugees.
“It is improper and unfair to think that Lebanon should sustain this crisis on its own,” he said.
In a new approach to the crisis, aid will be distributed to both the Lebanese poor and Syrian refugees. Municipalities will also receive assistance to boost local infrastructure.
“We’re taking Lebanon as the focus, not refugees as the focus,” Mountain said.
While foreign governments have been offering humanitarian assistance to Syrian refugees, Mountain hopes donors will tap into development funds as well. Lebanon, considered a middle income country, has long been overlooked for development assistance. As aging infrastructures falter under the burden of the refugee crisis, however, there is an acute need for this kind of aid.
On his trip to Baalbek this week, Mountain heard firsthand the hardships faced by Lebanese host communities. “We have not witnessed enough help for the municipalities hosting refugees,” Hussein Awada, the president of the Baalbek Municipalities Union, told Mountain.
Moreover, over the past three years NGOs have operated with relative autonomy in the area, implementing projects without consulting the municipal authorities, complained Awada. Well-intentioned, if short-sighted, tented settlements were erected with flimsy latrines that are now leaking waste into the ground water, Awada said, citing an example.
In villages with significant numbers of refugees, rubbish is piling up as local governments lack the infrastructure and resources to remove the added waste.
With scarce resources, towns are not able to meet “even the minimum humanitarian needs” for many displaced Syrians, acknowledged the Governor of Baalbek and Hermel Bashir Khodr.
The situation has been compounded by the announcement last week that the World Food Program had run out of funds and would be unable to load the cash allowance onto debit cards used by hundreds of thousands of refugees.
“Is it acceptable for Syrians to say ‘They took our [debit] cards away, and now it’s only our Lebanese neighbors who are helping us?’” Awada asked indignantly.
Mountain acknowledged that news of WFP’s dry funds had come as “a very unpleasant surprise.”
But he assured that action was being taken to remedy the situation and avert a humanitarian crisis. “We’re not sitting back and crossing our arms and saying ‘What a pity.’”
If refugees’ desperation increases Lebanon’s stability will be threatened, Mountain warned.
But both Mountain and Khodr said refugees who feel abandoned or marginalized could turn toward deep-pocketed terror groups like the Nusra Front or ISIS.
“Imagine I’m a 14-, 15-, 16-year-old refugee. I have no horizons, don’t go to school, don’t have anything. One day someone comes up and says ‘I’ll take you to heaven,’” he said, referring to terrorists who lure recruits with talk of martyrdom. “When these people have no hope, they will end up as terrorists.”
“The concern of youth being disaffected and radicalized is a real one, it’s a humanitarian issue, but it’s also a stability issue,” Mountain agreed.
Still, on his trip to Baalbek, Mountain repeated several times that Lebanese, particularly in the Bekaa, had shown “extraordinary maturity” by welcoming so many refugees.
“But one cannot and should not assume that this generosity is limitless,” he said.
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