KNOW NOW:
This is Beirut, with its ever-alluring coastline and deep-water ports. Once the Middle East mecca for travelers and traders on an elegant and carefree retreat, the Mediterranean city now leads Lebanon’s campaign to shake off a more recent reputation as war-beaten and high-risk.
Still staggering from its own long sectarian civil war ending in 1990, Lebanon’s been the go-to for survivors and fighters from neighboring conflicts. It started a century ago with an influx of Armenians fleeing their homeland. A destination point for Palestinians from their earliest scuttles with Israel and where Palestinian leaders landed after Jordan expelled them, it’s now where Sunni-Islamicist HAMAS operates and where Shia-Islamicist Hezbollah has taken control. Mount onto that the millions of Syrians who have crossed into Lebanon since Assad turned on his people in 2011, and the country earns the dubious distinction as host to the largest refugee population, per capita, worldwide. All this, in a territory the size of Connecticut.
Lebanon’s government, divided along sectarian lines, has also established itself as a world-class debtor, with a patriarchal payroll that covers ten percent of all 4.5 million Lebanese. Broke and sinking further into debt, the country is now in turmoil over possible cuts in services.
Transparency International’s watchdogs issued a low rating for Lebanon in 2018, based on an array of violations, from election fraud to diverting international aid intended for Syrian refugees. This is mirrored by Lebanese citizens, who have a legendary distrust in their government. In Gallup’s latest yearly poll, a stunning 95 percent of the nation’s respondents contend government corruption is widespread.
Up and coming Lebanese talent worry about underemployment and shrinking wages. The surge of refugees who accept lower pay and dangerous working conditions push more citizens into poverty. Today, almost half of country’s college educated young adults are jobless; their unemployment rates are higher than illiterate adults. They’re taking their education and skills elsewhere, a disturbing brain drain of young Lebanese who want to work as the engineer or accountant they trained to be, not in the waitress or bus driving jobs they managed to find.
The numbers of Syrian refugees drawing on limited resources leave Palestinians facing greater challenges. They are poor are growing poorer, and many are falling from the entrepreneurial middle-class into indigence. They call it 'the neglected crisis': new, steep economic divisions more profound than ethnic, religious and political differences.
The rich-poor divide is inescapably visual. Consider the gleaming new downtown area; former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri showed characteristic hubris by leading the razing and re-developing of iconic real estate along the harbor. Killed by a car bomb in 2005, he and other investors have erected massive limestone buildings affordable to super rich, mostly Gulf Arabs who buy sprawling addresses and leave them unoccupied. Lined with absentee investments, the streets are empty and quiet, save the cranes operating nearby.
To Mark Ghazali, a politics student at American University of Beirut, it’s a ghost town created by the greedy and corrupt. He spends weekends leading provocative tours of Beirut’s Downtown, the seaside area that once throbbed with nightclubs and posh hotels before shells shredded the area during the civil war. He motions a group past corroded city walls. "You Stink but you don’t do sh*t” is sprayed in big, black angry letters. “You Stink” movement graffiti artists have spread their message since the 2015 trash crisis, when garbage high, dumps were beyond capacity, and the public raged against government incompetence. Many social movements push for better living standards. Poverty is deeper and wider, but World Bank data crunchers contend that current data is useless given the massive and ongoing influx of indigent migrants.
Across the city at the Burj Barajneh Refugee Camp, Palestinian men return from a day’s work. Wearing soiled white shirts emblazoned with “window cleaner” on their backs in large black letters, they walk through a dusty haze of heat and diesel emissions. Cutting a path through waist-high piles of trash and industrial refuse, their home is just beyond the 40-foot metal fencing. It’s a place teeming with people, open-air metal works, fruit stands, mosques, repair shops, and people peering out of makeshift structures that have been adjusted and added to for generations.
Lebanon is home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians like these, most here for generations. Many have integrated into cities and villages over the decades, while others live in sprawling camps, now urban ghettos.
The country won’t allow more recent Syrian arrivals this illusion of stability. Earlier this month Lebanese authorities forced them to break down the hard structures they constructed to weather winds, rain and other harsh conditions. Nothing permanent.