There are over 170,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. These men, women and children have come to Lebanon fleeing the ongoing and deteriorating violence in Syria. In addition, thousands of Palestinians have fled their refugee camps in Syria to brother camps in Lebanon. These people have no other place to go.
Since arriving in Lebanon, Syrian and Palestinian refugees (it is worth noting that Palestinian refugees in Syria and in Lebanon have suffered multiple removals and forced relocations) have been subjected to beatings, economic exploitation, and social discrimination. The treatment of Syrian refugees in Lebanon today stands in sharp relief to the refugee crisis of 2006, when hundreds of thousands of Lebanese sought shelter and found it in Syria, fleeing Israel's military onslaught. While many Lebanese civil society groups and groups of individuals have welcomed them and acted with the empathy that the crisis deserves, by and large public discourse on the “syrian refugee crisis” is one of danger. Recently, two Lebanese politicians, one from the March 8th political coalition and the other from the rival coalition March 14, have issued public statements on these supposed dangers.
Gebran Bassile is the Lebanese Minister of Energy. His primary credential for this crucial job in a country that is hobbled by daily power cuts of varying severity is the fact that he is the son in law of Michel Aoun, the Christian strong man of the March 8 coalition. Bassile's record speaks for itself; it is defined by ineptitude, corruption, nepotism, and dangerous deregulation and aspirations of privatization. Lest we think that it is somehow strange that a crucial cabinet post is assigned through kinship relations, it is imperative to remember that blood ties have always been the primary vehicle for structural political power in Lebanon. After all, the inheritance of political positions is de rigueur here. A case in point is the second Lebanese politician who decided to issue her “opinions” on the current refugee crisis in Lebanon. MP Nayla Tueni inherited her parliamentary seat and her newspaper from her father and his before him. Again, her primary credential for representing her district is the blood running through her veins and of course (this is Lebanon after all) her sect.
The statements issued by Minister Bassile and by MP Nayla Tueni are lessons in xenophobia and demographic paranoia. From promising to seal the border to protect Lebanon from the waves of Syrian refugees supposedly flooding it, from proposing to place all refugees into camps segregated from the general population, to warning of another “palestinian problem” in today's Lebanon. This last point highlights another thread running through Tueni and Bassile's statements: demographic anxiety. The Lebanese state is structured around a system of political sectarianism, where power is shared by pre-defined sects according to defined ratios. Political sectarianism is a system put into place by French colonialists in a bid to ensure that Christians would retain political power in the nascent state. To that end, statistics were crafted to “show” that Christians constituted a numerical majority in Lebanon. As it stands today, structural political power is shared equally by Muslims and Christians and is distributed mainly between the three larges sects, Maronite Christians, Shiite Muslims, and Sunni Muslims. Demographic anxiety has in large part fueled Lebanon's civil wars and its current political stalemate. Demographic anxiety, and the political arithmetic it inspires, has also been a defining factor in defining refugees and citizens. For example, while the majority of Christian Palestinian refugees have long been granted Lebanese citizenship, the vast majority of Palestinian Muslims (some of the wealthy families were naturalized) are seemingly forever-refugees. Any hint of improving the awful conditions that these refugees live under in Lebanon immediately turns into an accusation of planned naturalization, a prospect that, in this logic, would seal the “numeric decline” and political influence of Christians in Lebanon. Similarly, while Christian Armenian refugees to the area that is now called Lebanon were counted in the 1932 census and thus became Lebanese citizens along with everyone else, Kurdish refugees from Turkish violence were simultaneously disenfranchised an made refugees by that same census. It should come as no surprise that the majority of Kurdish refugees are Muslim. These naturalization and refugee making processes should not be seen as some sort of conspiracy or the nefarious plans of a particular sect or religion. Rather, the logic behind the political arithmetic of Lebanon is the conservation of political sectarianism itself, a system which requires continuing demographic anxiety and competitiveness. Political sectarianism, it bears remembering, is the primary conduit through which elite interest and power is consecrated and reproduced within and across all sects and political factions in Lebanon. If Bassile and Tueni are examples of anything, they teach us that political sectarian and the demographic anxiety it requires and inspires also ensures political inheritance within families.
The problem is that, more and more, the numbers simply do not add up. There has been no official census since 1932. Without a doubt, demographics have changed dramatically. Accordingly, the “danger” that Bassile and Tueni point to is the same old boogeyman: shifts in Lebanon's social fabric at the expense of Lebanese Christians. It is no coincidence that the dangerous Palestinian and Syrian refugees seeking shelter in Lebanon are majority Muslim and are not wealthy. Finally, it seems we have found a danger that the country faces that is urgent enough to promote consensus between the March 14 and March 8 political coalitions. Perhaps we should thank Bassile and Tueni for taking on this clearly very important issue instead of doing their jobs. After all, I suppose we don't really need that much electricity.
The xenophobia and racism directed at Syrian and Palestinian refugees is one of the wages of political arithmetic, as Rhoda Kanaaneh calls it. It is a symptom of political sectarianism, and we are all complicit in this system until it is ended.
With this in mind, I offer my humble translation of Recent Statements Made by Minister Gebran Bassile and MP Nayla Tueniregarding the Syrian and Palestinian populations that have fled violence and civil war in Syria to find refuge in Lebanon:
The [poor] Muslims are coming! The [poor] Muslims are coming!
Now we have another excuse to cover our, and the government's, ineptitude, corruption and complicity in the ongoing degradation of Lebanon's economy, political life, and infrastructure. Don't have a job? Blame it on a Syrian refugee! No electricity? Blame it on Palestinian refugee camps that don't pay their electric bill and plunge all [real] Lebanese into darkness!
Oh God, the [poor] Muslims are coming!