Caritas Lebanon coping with refugees amid acceptance and fundamentalism
For Fr Paul Karam, Lebanon’s religious and cultural ethnic mosaic is at risk. Region-wide plans and international efforts are needed. Fundamentalism is fuelled by deteriorating conditions in refuge facilities.
Beirut (AsiaNews) – Lebanon is “paying a heavy price for what others have done, and could lose the ethnic, religious and cultural character” that has constituted its specificity for decades, said Caritas Lebanon director Fr Paul Karam.
For the past four years, the Catholic charity has played a leading role in helping refugees from Syria and elsewhere fleeing war. Speaking to AsiaNews, Fr Karam noted that Lebanon is not a big country, and “cannot accommodate an uninterrupted and unsupervised flow of refugees whilst other nations take in few” as by Maronite Patriarch Bechara al-Rahi pointed out during a recent pastoral visit to New York.
Refugees, the prelate said, are a “heavy burden that threatens Lebanon’s identity and future, and the country’s limited capacity to host refugees is compounded by the need to help poor Lebanese.”
Some of those limits are political, due to the failure of the small nation’s National Assembly to elect a president for the past two years. Under Lebanon’s confessional constitution, the post goes to a Christian.
For the Maronite patriarch, Lebanese Christians and Muslims have a "shared identity", albeit based on "different cultures and traditions", and founded a nation based on secularism and religious freedom according to the principle of "unity in diversity".
In the past few years, millions of refugees have arrived from Syria and Iraq, but this "heavy burden is threatening the nation’s character and future”.
Since the outbreak of civil war in Syria, almost 1.6 million Syrian refugees have poured into Lebanon, which has to cope with the demographic, economic, political, and security imbalances that this entails.
According to the United Nations, about 1.2 million Syrians are presently in the country. There are also some 700 Christian families from Baghdad, Mosul and Erbil, as well as thousands of Palestinians from Syria.
Lebanon's population stands at about 4.4 million people and the country is increasingly hard-pressed to manage the emergency.
Speaking to AsiaNews, Caritas chief Fr Karam warns that the country "cannot pay for what others have done”. Some states have accepted “5,000 refugees over five years”.
The Lebanese have shown a "great spirit of hospitality" towards the Syrians, as well as other refugees.
Since 2003, after Saddam Hussein’s fall in Iraq, the flood gates opened. “We are enduring the effects of choices made by some in their own self-interest” in the Middle East and the West.
In line with what Pope Francis said, "we try to give back some justice and dignity to people,’ Fr Karam said. But difficulties accumulate over time. “Caritas facilities are doing the utmost, but there is not enough for everyone, and what there is is a but a drop in the ocean.”
Waves of refugees, poor border controls, and growing security concerns have led to violence, as evinced by recent events in Al-Qaa, a predominantly Christian border town.
"This is what you get if no one checks who the refugees are,” Fr Karam explained. “Extremists become more active, not only here, but also in Istanbul, Paris, Belgium . . .”.
At many points along the border between Syria and Lebanon people are coming and going.
"We should not generalise, because not all refugees are criminals. Many work and only ask to live in dignity. But the degrading condition at the [refugee] facilities, the hardships and the sense of abandonment favour fundamentalist ideologies."
"After all, when food, schooling, and work are lacking, when people are denied the right to live, and are locked up in the camps, the risk of radicalisation is real and who pays the price is innocent people."
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