Syrian crisis hit Lebanon as well. In the country one person out of three is a refugee, in a territory with only the size of Kosovo. Low salaries, high rents and the rising cost of living are the challenges faced by Lebanese and Palestinian. 25% of the Lebanese population was already under the level of poverty and since 2011 the situation deteriorated.
Employers fire Lebanese employees to illegally hire Syrian ones. Migration crisis increased social divisions in Lebanon. But what are the living conditions of Syrians in Lebanon?
The Government according to the analysis by the German think tank Bertelsmann Stiftung would like to avoid the creation of new refugees camps in its territory. Refugees try to rent fields where to camp with their tents. So they form camps going from 2 thousand to 350 thousand of people, usually close to fields where they illegally work.
Others find some sort of accommodation in under construction houses or garages. Generally they are obliged to send their own children to work, because wages are low, that put the majority of them under poverty level .
90% of Syrian live in one of the poorest communities of Lebanon. Furthermore, it is not allowed to Syrians to work : 90 % of them have debits with flat owners. Almost half of them cannot sustain themselves and they cannot afford to buy food without external assistance.
When refugees are children
Data are even more dramatic when one consider children aged between three years and fourteen years old. Less than half of them started to attend school and the others will start during the summer but there are still too many obstacles to a normal life: minors are quite often forced to work and girls have to marry very early.
It is not allowed to Syrian teachers to practise, classrooms are not enough and financial aids are few. Health assistance is not adequate: United Nations cover 75% of hospital costs but the 25% left is charged on refugees who in most cases cannot afford it. Asylum seekers who are not registered cannot have access to health care system.
Lebanon is afraid that Syrians would stay permanently in its territory like the Palestinians already do, that’s why Lebanese authorities avoid to give them official camps.
Adults and children without residency permit risk to be forced to go back to Syria if police checks them. That’s why children quite often work instead of their parents because then they have fewer possibilities to be checked. The dramatic consequence is that children go to work with extremely low payments and cannot attend school. And so refugees live in a vicious circle of illegality and poverty.
The Lebanese government should make the access to residency permit affordable because knowing the refugees’ identities would important for the Lebanese authorities as well.
EU increased by 200% the financial aids to Lebanon. The major individual contributor is Germany. But local conflicts, a fragile economy and government leave Lebanon in a stagnation condition.
Employers fire Lebanese employees to illegally hire Syrian ones. Migration crisis increased social divisions in Lebanon. But what are the living conditions of Syrians in Lebanon?
