1. 13/05/2015 5:43 pmLebanese sanctuary but little hope for Syrian refugees | The Australian
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Lebanese sanctuary but little hope for Syrian refugees
LOOKING back, Hoda Masri doesn’t know how she held on for as long as she did. She was
right there, in Daraa, when Syria’s agony began on March 18, 2011. A group of children had
been ​arrested and tortured for painting anti-government slogans on a wall. After Friday
prayers, when people gathered peacefully to ​protest against the wanton cruelty, they were
gunned down by the security forces.
For all that, “we wish the demonstrations never started”, she says of the spark that ignited Syria’s
bloody civil war, ending the hopes raised by the Arab Spring revolts in Libya, Egypt, Yemen and
Tunisia. After Daraa rose up in Syria’s south, the fighting spread to the cities of Homs, Hama and the
suburbs of the capital, Damascus. “At the beginning maybe one or two people were victims,” Hoda
continues, her voice tired. “Now everyone is a victim.”
Her husband, Mohammed, was killed while queuing for bread; her 20-year-old brother Amin died
from a sniper’s bullet; her sister Jamila, 35, succumbed to shrapnel wounds. She moved from place to
place with her two boys, Merhi, 14, and Mahmud, 13, as the rockets and barrel bombs rained down,
laying waste to Daraa.
By June last year they could stand no more. What was left of the family fled to Lebanon. Merhi
remembers seeing the charred bones of people lying on the roadside. A quiet boy, he misses his
father, their once happy family and the neat stone house, scented by coriander in summer, in which
THEAUSTRALIAN
JAMIE WALKER THE AUSTRALIAN MARCH 14, 2015 12:00AM
Hoda Masri sits between her two sons Merhi and Mahmud in their room at the collective shelter in Taanayil. Source: News Corp
Australia

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he grew up. He wants to go back to Syria, to whatever remains of their old life. “It’s our home,” he
says.
No one can say when that may happen. Four years into the Syrian crisis, with 200,000 dead and up to
12 million people homeless or displaced, there is no end in sight to the bloodshed. While the world
zeroes in on the barbarity of Islamic State, the carnage in Syria continues on a monstrously larger
scale, perpetuated by the callous determination of dictator Bashar al-Assad to cling to power.
The region is buckling under the strain. Lebanon’s resident population of four million has been
swelled by an estimated two million refugees, while another one million Syrians have sought
sanctuary in northern Iraq, in the teeth of the onslaught by Islamic State and al-Qa’ida offshoot
Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as the al-Nusra Front. Camps in Jordan and Turkey are overflowing.
The limited local resources have been overwhelmed and foreign aid agencies cannot meet the
demand for help. The welcome mat that was originally rolled out in Lebanon, with its long border
with Syria through the volatile Bekaa Valley, is wearing thin.
Hoda’s plight is desperately common. She shares a single room with her sons in a collective shelter
in the town of Taanayel, two hours’ drive out of Beirut. She counts herself lucky; the rent is paid until
June, the anniversary of their arrival in Lebanon. Tonight they will eat beans and rice.
The boys haven’t been to school for three years and Hoda worries about what will become of them. A
new generation of the dispossessed is growing up in the cold, grey tent cities that line the Bekaa
Valley and dot vacant lots and buildings in Beirut — fertile ground for the extremists.
Lebanon is on a knife-edge. Islamic State and al-Nusra are pushing on the eastern frontier, where
there are continual clashes between the Sunni militants and the Lebanese army. Tensions between the
Shia group Hezbollah and Israel run high in the south.
Iran-backed Hezbollah is the power in Lebanon, having fought Israel to a bloody stalemate in a
vicious war in 2006. Lebanon’s fractious politics are in such a mess that the country hasn’t had a
president for nine months; its MPs, some of them sworn enemies in the two-decade-long civil war
that raged until the early 1990s, can’t agree on a candidate, paralysing government decision-making.
Yet somehow the Lebanese muddle through. Encouragingly, the national army is holding together
and, for now, has largely contained Islamic State and al-Nusra, observers say. Hezbollah is engaged
in Syria in support of Assad as well as in Iraq, where Iraqi government forces and allied Shia militias
are rolling back Islamic State in an offensive directed at the strategic city of Tikrit, north of Baghdad.
This means that conflict with Israel — potentially a further destabiliser of the region — is about the
last thing Hezbollah should want or need.
But who can be sure? The rulebook that used to govern the Middle East was thrown out with the old-
school Arab dictators, excluding Assad, in the popular revolts of 2010-11. As the veteran editor of
Beirut’s Daily Star, Hanna Anbar, points out, if you think you understand what has happened since
then, you don’t know much about the region’s politics. “We thought it would be finished in six
months, maybe a year ... it’s a miracle we survive here in Lebanon. When we look around, we just
say, ‘Thank you, God,’ ” he tells Inquirer.
To their immense credit, the Lebanese continue to host an astonishing number of refugees, partly
because they have long memories of the grief the Syrian regime caused when it occupied the country

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under Assad’s father, Hafez, but mostly out of human decency. Syrian nationals are not the only ones
in need of shelter; stateless Palestinians who were third or fourth-generation refugees in Syria also
fled the civil war, and their predicament is acute as they cannot be registered with the prime
international aid provider, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Instead, they come under the
auspices of the UN Relief and Works Agency, a less well-funded body that deals specifically with
Palestinians. Conny Lenneberg, the Australian-born regional director of World Vision, estimates
there are up to 500,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, about a quarter of the total refugee
population, an unsustainable drain on the country’s resources.
The port city of Sidon, south of Beirut, has had an influx of 7000 families, most Palestinian. That
amounts to about half its previous population. The head of the local sharia court, Mohammed Abu
Zeid, 40, says the social impact is grinding. Weddings are up 25 per cent because girls are being
married off sooner by their families — he recently interviewed a 13-year-old bride — to shift the
duty of care and protection to a husband. “I send the younger girls to a doctor to make sure they are
physically capable,’’ he explains. “My job as a judge is to give advice ... if I say no, I know the
parties will simply go to a religious figure and ask him to undertake the marriage ritual.’’
At the same time, divorce and child custody disputes are increasing as relationships crumble under
the pressure. Refugees compete with locals for low-skilled jobs, driving down wages. The friction is
growing; the generosity of the Lebanese was anchored in what Zeid calls the “excitement” of the
Arab Spring, amid hopes of Assad’s fall. But that has reached its limit.
In the Shatila refugee camp, the scene of a notorious 1982 mas​sacre, Palestinians from Syria are
being told they will be sent to the border if they step outside the maze of reeking alleys. Recently,
mother-of-two Soumaya had her papers stamped with a deportation order when she went to pay her
registration fee of $250 at the Lebanese government’s general security office. “If I go back I will
die,’’ she says.
Suzane, 37, has two daughters with cerebral palsy. She carried one of them through a border
checkpoint at the height of a blizzard, while her oldest girl, Ayat, 16, struggled in the snow with the
weight of her other disabled sister. The ordeal, however, secured for her and the children a ticket to
the West. Her husband is waiting for them in Stockholm, and she has been told by the Swedish
embassy their visas have come through.
The few foreign resettlement places are generally reserved for those with special needs or in need of
advanced medical care, or with relatives in the receiving country, and Suzane is lucky to have ticked
all the boxes.
It’s a rare good news story. The girls we meet at the Bar Elias refugee camp, in the central Bekaa
Valley, have no illusions about their future. Aged between 16 and 18, they’re mainly from
comfortable homes in Syria, where they were keen to finish school and study at university. Now they
toil for 12 hours a day in a potato field, humiliated by the menial work and the predatory advances of
local men.
Asked where they expect to be at 30, this is what they say:
Hanaa of Hama: “I feel like I will still be here.”
Reem of Homs: “I will probably be married with children, but not to the man I dreamed of, or with

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the life I dreamed.”
Houwaya of Raqqa: “Nothing will change. I will just grow old.”
Manar of Aleppo: “I have no hope.”
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