Aboudi, 12, spends his evenings selling flowers outside Beirut's bars. His parents are stuck in his war-torn hometown Aleppo in Syria. Credit: Sam Tarling/IPS.

By Zak Brophy
BEIRUT, Aug 7 2013 (IPS)

With Lebanon fraying at the seams under pressure from the neighbouring Syria conflict and the economy stuttering amid a political vacuum, more and more children are being pushed into labour.  

There are no concrete statistics, but the ministry of labour has raised its 2006 estimate of 100,000 child workers in the country to 180,000.

The real figure is “significantly higher” due to the extraordinary circumstances of the past two years, head of the ministry’s child labour unit Nazha Shallita told IPS. Lebanon has a population of 4.2 million.

“As Lebanon struggles to deal with the huge influx of Syrian refugees, along with a general decline in the economic and security situation in the country, not to mention the absence of a government, we are witnessing more and more children being forced into work,” Hayat Osseiran, a Lebanon-based consultant for the International Labour Organisation and the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour, told IPS.

On any given night in central Beirut young children can be seen wandering among the city’s revellers selling roses or gardenia necklaces until the early hours. While the swelling numbers of street children hawking everything from flowers to tissues are perhaps the most visible and commonly encountered form of child labour, they are just the tip of the iceberg.“I thought that work would be better for me than school but I made a mistake. School is better than work. I really regret so much that I left school but it is too late now.” -- child labourer, Haydar

“This work is hard and I don’t like it but I have to do it for the family,” said 11-year-old Jihad as he carried a bunch of cheap plastic roses to tout outside a popular Beirut bar. “If my mum and my dad and my brother could make it here I would be able to go back to school but they are stuck in Aleppo and can’t come to join me.”

The legions of children working Lebanon’s streets have grown considerably with the arrival over the past couple of years of tens of thousands of impoverished and destitute Syrian families uprooted by the brutal civil war back home. However, the problem was around before the Syria crisis and often has a more sinister undertone than impoverished children hustling on the streets to support hard up families.

“Many of these kids are not just flower sellers, they are put to work selling many things and they are organised by criminal gangs,” lawyer and child rights activist Khaled Merheb told IPS. “There is a bus that brings them and then at the end of the night it comes and collects them.”

The Internal Security Forces (ISF) is responsible for policing the exploitation of street children but concede there is little they can do without proper referral mechanisms to keep the children off the streets.

There is one centre in the country for street children picked up by the ISF but it offers virtually no rehabilitation services, is chronically under-funded and is unable to keep children in its custody if a relative asks for their release – even if it is believed the family member is exploiting the child.

The ISF could offer no statistics on the number of adults charged with exploiting street children, while also acknowledging that criminal gangs mastermind much of this work. Children complain frequently of mistreatment by the ISF, said Merheb. And virtually all cases against adults who put children to work “don’t go to court.”

Beyond those children hawking on the street, tens of thousands of youngsters are getting drawn away from education into work – and work is not just a few shifts at the corner store for pocket money, or a summer job to bolster the CV.

Child labour often exposes children to physical, sexual or psychological abuse, deprives them of the right to education, and endangers their health, safety and morals. Children are working on factory floors, in brothels, machinery workshops, tobacco fields and rubbish dumps.

Lebanon is signatory to a number of international treaties on child labour and has taken some steps in changing its national laws and policies to bring itself in line with its obligations. Foremost among these was the raising of the minimum age in 1996 for working children from nine to 14 years, and 15 years in industrial projects and for activities which are physically demanding or detrimental to health.

The laws exist but there is virtually no monitoring on the ground. The ministry of labour has a team of about 70 inspectors across the country. However, a recent pilot project by the Dutch NGO War Child found that of the 19 inspectors it worked with, none were aware that it was their responsibility to investigate child labour, nor were they even aware of the child labour unit within the ministry.

On a street corner in one of Beirut’s impoverished slums a group of youngsters between the ages of 12 and 15 have all dropped out of school. They hold jobs ranging from packing rat poison to cleaning aluminium workshops. They typically work six days a week for eight to 12 hours a day for up to only 60 dollars a week.

“I thought that work would be better for me than school but I made a mistake. School is better than work. I really regret so much that I left school but it is too late now,” said Haydar, one of the youngsters in the group.

High dropout rates, especially in neglected areas, are a major problem. A law passed in 1998 set down free and compulsory education until the age of 12, but has never been put into effect.

“Education is neither free nor compulsory in many communities,” Lala Arabia, executive manager and protection coordinator for the Insaan Organisation that works with street children, told IPS. “Oftentimes families are simply told we don’t have enough places. How can that be compulsory? This is especially true for non-Lebanese.”

Many of the poverty stricken areas of Lebanon have long endured neglect from a weak and fractured state. Now with the political and security situation deteriorating amid a growing refugee crisis, more and more of children are slipping through the cracks.

Muhammad Sleiman Ikhlif with two of his children and a child (on the right) from one of the families he is hosting. Credit: Zak Brophy/IPS.

By Zak Brophy
WADI KHALED, Northern Lebanon , Mar 12 2013 (IPS)

The influx of hundreds of thousands of war-weary refugees from Syria to Lebanon is putting an almost unbearable strain on many of the communities that have taken them into their homes. A domestic economic crisis compounded by the arrival of such large numbers of refugees is weighing heavily on many impoverished areas.

In recent months there has been a surge in the arrival of people fleeing Syria, with the number of refugees who receive assistance, or who have applied to receive assistance, doubling in less than three months to now exceed 320,000.

The Lebanese government claims there are up to a million Syrians in the country (including migrant workers and their families), among a native population of around 4.5 million people. Unlike Turkey and Jordan, Lebanon has no formal camps. Lebanese families host around a third of the refugees.

“We opened our doors and invited them in thinking they would be here for one or two months and there would be a quick transition in Syria like in the other Arab revolts. Now it is two years later and we are really struggling to manage,” Muhammad Sleiman Ikhlif told IPS. He has built three makeshift rooms with breezeblock walls, where he houses five Syrian families.

The cramped dwelling is in the Wadi Khaled area on the northern border with Syria, which has one of the highest densities of refugees in all of Lebanon. Before the uprising against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad took root, Wadi Khaled had been a relatively poor but self-sustaining region. Now, not only do the local communities have to host thousands of refugees, but the economy in the region has ground to a halt.

“Our communities used to survive off the trade across the border, and smuggling. All of this has stopped. The economy has completely retreated; there is no trade, no activity and no employment,” said Ali al-Beddawi, community leader in Rami, one of the Wadi Khaled villages just a couple of hundred metres from the Syrian border.

In addition to the burden of the refugee influx and the collapse in trade activity, the loss of Lebanese-owned businesses within Syria has also exacerbated the malaise in the region.

Al-Beddawi used to have a successful cosmetics factory in the Syrian city Homs, only 23 kilometres from Wadi Khaled, “but it has all been reduced to zero,” he said. He estimated there are at least 50 other businessmen from the region who have lost their enterprises and investments in Syria, cutting off an economic lifeline for much of the surrounding community.

The majority of the aid and assistance has, to date, been directed towards the refugees. This has created some resentment, as they have become integrated into Lebanese communities that are in many cases also suffering from poverty and instability.

“We can’t blame the Syrians for being here,” said a young man at the village store in Rami. “They are fleeing oppression, but life is unbearable for us Lebanese here and we get no support, while they have the UN and foreign agencies and everybody else supporting them.”

In recent months there have been some shifts towards supporting Lebanese host communities. For over a year Ikhlif received no assistance for, and accepted no rent from, the Syrian families he provided a home for in Wadi Khaled. However, over the past three months the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) has been helping to cover the costs of housing the refugees. “This is a huge weight off my shoulders and makes it somehow bearable,” Ikhlif said.

Since September 2012 the SDC has provided the equivalent of 676,750 euros to 1,300 host families in Lebanon as part of its Support For Hosting project. Each host family receives 100 dollars per month if they are accommodating two to ten people and 150 dollars per month for 11 people or more, in addition to 100 dollars per month to mitigate local economic hardships.

“In terms of cost effectiveness, reducing further displacement and ensuring refugees have access to some kind of normalcy, being hosted in someone’s house seems to be the most valid option,” SDC director of cooperation Heba Hage-Felder told IPS. The SDC figure that their initiative has enabled 10,000 Syrian refugee families to stay in the homes of host families. They intend to extend the reach to 15,000 families in the April to September period.

The Unted Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and some of the other major international aid organisations have similarly started to turn their efforts towards sustaining the homes and communities of those Lebanese who have opened their doors to fleeing Syrians.

“We all recognise the importance of building on this tradition of hospitality and making it sustainable,” said Hage-Felder.

The Syrian crisis is a highly divisive issue in Lebanon and the government has till recently come up with no strategies on issues such as the durability of host communities. “The Lebanese government hasn’t offered any support and has been completely absent from dealing with this huge crisis we are facing in the region,” said Al-Beddawi.

But with the economic and social strains reaching critical levels in some districts the government has launched the Lebanese Host Communities Support Programme in partnership with UNDP.

Robert Watkins, resident representative of the UNDP said, “More than anywhere else, the safety and livelihood security of refugees in Lebanon is inseparable from that of their hosts.”

Syrian refugee children learn to survive at a camp in north Lebanon. Credit: Zak Brophy/IPS.

By Zak Brophy
TRIPOLI, Lebanon, Jan 15 2013 (IPS)

Zuhur al-Khalaf is eight months pregnant and lives in a one-room shack in northern Lebanon with her husband and five children. The cloth walls and cardboard roof have become sodden and musty after heavy storms this past week, and two of the children are suffering from fevers and chest infections.

The family fled the Syrian city Homs when their home was demolished in the fierce battle for Bab al Amr early last year, which culminated in the Syrian army encircling and heavily bombarding the district.

“We moved from place to place until there was nowhere left to go and then we came to Lebanon around three months ago,” said al-Khalaf. The family’s tent is in the middle of a makeshift camp that has become home for around 200 refugees on the outskirts of the northern city Tripoli.

Severe storms that saw heavy snowfall and flooding across much of the country have compounded the refugees’ already dire situation. “These shelters offered us no protection, everything got wet and it is still so cold,” said al-Khalaf.

Her two ill children lay huddled under blankets next to her. A pile of damp scraps of bread had been laid out to dry on sheets of newspaper by the door. “We live on bread, tea and bananas,” said a neighbouring refugee, “we can’t afford to waste anything.”

The families rent their tents from a local farmer for around 70 dollars a month and try and find ad hoc work as labourers or farmhands. The men can expect to take home around 10 dollars and the women seven dollars for a day’s work, but most of the refugees are unable to find jobs.

“Life may be better than in Syria but in reality it is still very bad for us here. There is no work and we are not getting the support that we need,” said al-Ahmad.

Just under 200,000 refugees have fled to Lebanon since Syria’s upheavals started almost two years ago, according to the latest figures from the United Nations Higher Council for Refugees (UNHCR).

Many of those living at the camp have not registered with the UN agency and therefore do not receive any of the basic support services it offers. “We lost our papers when our house was destroyed so we don’t have anything to prove who we are,” said Zuhur’s husband Mohammad al-Ahmad.

Some of the other refugees choose not to register with the UNHCR out of fear of being monitored by the authorities, as paranoia is still common among refugees over the presence of Syrian intelligence in the country, real or perceived.

“I would rather live anonymous,” said Abu Nidal, a refugee from the Idlib countryside. “Anything could happen in the future and what if I have to travel back to Syria?”

Lebanese officials have appealed to Arab states Sunday for help funding support for the Syrian refugees at an extraordinary session of the Arab League in Cairo, warning of “a dangerous humanitarian situation.” The government has recently announced a plan that requires an annual 180 million dollars budget to help deliver basic health, social and education services to the refugees.

However, Lebanon is already bogged down in a political impasse over the country’s precarious fiscal standing. A dilapidated infrastructure and administration have hampered efforts to deliver the necessary services.

The Syrian conflict is hugely divisive in Lebanon, and this has further disrupted efforts to address the humanitarian needs of the refugee communities. The government’s lack of coherent policy means few services have been extended to arriving Syrians and no formal camps have been established, like those in Jordan or Turkey.

“In other neighbouring countries there are proper camps so organisations know where people are and what services they need but here it is so informal and ad hoc that people don’t know who is in need of what and where they are,” said Ashraf Alhafny, project coordinator for the Warad organisation, which buys and collects resources such as bedding and clothes for refugee communities in northern Lebanon.

In addition to unforgiving weather, dire economic straits and a dearth of material support, many of the refugees also suffer from racism. The two countries have an intimate and oftentimes troubled history and the Syrian conflict and influx of refugees is exacerbating Lebanon’s political instability and economic vulnerability.

Leaving the camp, two young men talked of their daily life, which has been reduced to begging on the streets. “I have been beaten,” said one. “And people shoo us away and say ‘you are Syrian, you are a gypsy, go home’.”

Women walk past destroyed shops in Al-Qusayr in Syria. Credit: Sam Tarling/IPS.

By Walter García and Zak Brophy
MASHEREE AL-QA'A, Lebanon-Syria Border, Oct 14 2012 (IPS)

A group of six men listen as voices crackle through a walkie-talkie. They are sitting in a farmhouse in the north of Lebanon less than a kilometre from the Syrian border. The sound of gunfire and shelling in the distance sporadically punctuates the atmosphere. One of the group returns to the room after taking a telephone call. “Good news from the battle,” he exclaims with a smile.

The men are all in, or related to members of, the opposition’s Free Syrian Army (FSA), which is fighting fierce battles for control of a number of villages and the surrounding countryside on the other side of the border. “A military leader for Hezbollah has been killed in Zara’aat along with the head of Syrian intelligence from al-Qusayr,” he continues to tell the group. Earlier in the day the men also received news that at least 13 Hezbollah fighters had been captured and detained inside Syria.

Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shia militia-cum-political party that is the predominant force in Lebanon and it has remained a staunch ally of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad throughout the uprising. The Syrian opposition and its supporters in Lebanon have long suggested that Hezbollah is actively helping Assad quash the rebel forces, but the party has always denied any direct involvement.

However, the ambiguity surrounding the deaths of a number of Hezbollah fighters, including some highly ranked commanders in recent weeks has aroused accusations to the contrary. With the death of two senior military commanders in August and September the party stated that they had been killed performing their “Jihadi duty”, but did not say where.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah finally made a televised appearance on Thursday evening in which he categorically denied that the commanders had fallen in Syria, while also denying the capture of the 13 Hezbollah fighters.

“The Syrian Army is weak along the border now and Hezbollah is scared that the FSA will take control of all of it,” says Abu Ahmad, a combatant for the FSA on the Lebanese side of the border. He was fighting less than five kilometres from the Lebanese border in Zara’at the day before in a battle that is primarily about securing supply lines.

The FSA needs to maintain routes for the flow of refugees and injured fighters out of Syria while medicine, fuel and weapons move in the opposite direction. The routes from northern Lebanon to the Syrian town of Qusayr, via villages such as Zara’at and Jousi, are particularly important as the rebels in the war-ravaged city of Homs largely rely on them for ammunition and weapons.

Similarly, the army’s ability to hold territory is dependent on its supply lines from the heart of the country. “We have managed to cut their most important routes,” says Abu Ahmad. “They desperately need food and munitions and that is why there is such a tough battle for the villages across the border.”

Refugees and FSA fighters within Lebanon claim that Hezbollah has been using Housh as-Sayed Ali, a district on the border under their control just north of the town Hermel, to provide supplies to the Syrian army and send in fighters to buttress its debilitated forces. They say that the party’s fighters are firing across the border from Lebanon into Syria so as to pincer the FSA between the Syrian Army’s artillery fire from the mountains in the east and to cut their escape routes back into Lebanon.

In his televised speech Sayyed Nasrallah denied Hezbollah had sent fighters into Syria but conceded that members of the party have been fighting there on their own volition in order to protect their homes and families. The border area is essentially undefined, with many Lebanese citizens’ homes and farms falling within Syrian territory. Nasrallah claims Hezbollah supporters living there were attacked, harassed and some even killed by the FSA. While many have fled, others stayed to fight.

The justification is technically plausible but does not bode well for stability at the border. That Hezbollah members are fighting inside Syria with the support, if not the command, of the party hints at how Syria’s trauma is increasingly threatening to Lebanon’s vulnerable security.

Masheree’a al Qa’a, a strip of farmsteads along the border to the east of Housh as-Sayed Ali, is all but devoid of its native inhabitants. “Over the past six to seven months as the conflict has moved onto and over the border the families have all fled,” says Abu Mohammad, a philosophy teacher from Zera’aa living in one of the farm houses with his family.

He made the journey to Lebanon once the army started its aerial bombardment of his hometown and he now lives with his extended family in one of the farmhouses approximately one kilometre from the border. Of his two sons fighting in the FSA, one has been detained by the Syrian Army, and the other smuggles supplies to the FSA.

While standing on Abu Mohammad’s rooftop in Masheree’a al-Qa’a a house on the border can be seen burning. There had been a fierce battle between the FSA and the Syrian Army in the area earlier in the day, so the army set fire to the building once night had fallen.

“We moved to the relative safety here, but it is all relative. The first house on the border we moved to was shelled and I was injured and now we have moved here, but there is often cross border fire and you can see where we were recently hit,” he says pointing to where fist sized chunks of concrete have been ripped from the building. A local resident joins the conversation saying at least ten Lebanese civilians have been killed in cross-border attacks in the area over the past year.

The houses closest to the border have almost all been shelled or burnt to the ground and smugglers and fighters only make the journey to the frontier under the cover of night for fear of sniper fire. “The Syrian regime’s forces destroy the houses along the border so the FSA fighters can’t take refuge there or use them for their snipers,” says Ahmad Fliti, municipality official from the Lebanese border town Arsal.

The FSA’s use of the Lebanese border areas to offer refuge to its fighters and run smuggling operations destabilises the region and traps the Lebanese Army in an implacable bind. However, if Hezbollah is being drawn into the affray across the frontier, the repercussions threaten to be far more disruptive.

The Lebanese army seized a ship last weekend carrying three containers filled with weapons reportedly intended for Syria’s rebel fighters. Although Lebanon has remained relatively stable throughout the sustained violence next door in Syria, this discovery is the most recent reminder that the country is far from immune to the unrest plaguing its neighbour.

A shop window in Tripoli in Lebanon marked by bullet holes after sectarian fighting over the Syrian revolution. Credit: Zak Brophy/IPS.

The Basher Assad government in Syria has often complained of arms being smuggled into Syria from neighbouring countries, and since the inception of the uprising little over a year ago there have been a number of weapons shipments intercepted in Lebanon. The smuggling routes across the notoriously porous border between the two countries are now being used to move weapons and supplies into Syria and to provide passage for the fleeing refugees and injured fighters.

“I’m going to see my army,” said Zaki while waiting in a safe house just inside the Lebanese side of the border. His family are from Hama and Homs, hotbeds of the Syrian opposition. They were exiled in 1981 during the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood by former president Hafez al-Assad.

They now have a successful trading company in Saudi Arabia and, according to Zaki, “are transferring money to people (in Lebanon) and they send the money to the revolutionary people to buys guns.”

He claimed they have been sending 100,000 dollars every month for the past eight months to opposition fighters of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). He said his father had sent him to make sure the money was providing the fighters with the weapons they expected. “The Saudi government does not want to stop anyone who works like this. They are covering us. They want us to work without talking,” he said.

The funding and arming of the FSA has been a divisive issue among the countries within the international community supporting the uprising. While there has been no inter-governmental agreement to overtly arm the fighters, after the last ‘Friends of Syria’ meeting in early April, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states reportedly committed to establishing a multi million-dollar fund to pay members of the FSA.

A Syrian activist, who smuggles humanitarian supplies and refugees between the two countries, complained that certain gangs trading arms within Lebanon were exploiting the Syrian uprising to boost their profits.

Speaking on condition of anonymity he said, “Some merchants are trying to create their markets inside of Homs by getting certain groups to buy their weapons and create war. We have a problem with them. It is known now that those merchants are creating a small war for their market.”

The increased demand, whether it is for the revolutionaries in Syria or militias in Lebanon, has caused prices to rise sharply. The same activist said a Kalashnikov rifle now fetched around 2,000 dollars whereas the pre-revolution price tag would have been closer to 200 to 300 dollars. “You could spend 25-30,000 dollars just on providing munitions to a single checkpoint,” he calculated.

As well as weapons being smuggled from sea before being sent overland to Syria, there have been reports of weapons being stolen and sold from within the Lebanese army.

In early April the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar reported that an intelligence officer who was in charge of a weapons depot had been detained for questioning on suspicion of stealing and selling arms. That same week at the safe house on the border, Zaki said, “The (arms dealers) are selling from Lebanon, some even thieve from the Lebanese army and others are importing to Lebanon.”

In addition to the flow of arms across the border there is a steady stream of people, with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimating there are 24,000 displaced Syrians who have made the journey to seek sanctuary in Lebanon. Along with the civilians fleeing in search of safety, fighters regularly cross the border.

The traffic of fighters has predominantly been Syrian combatants. But recent reports suggest some Lebanese are now making the journey to join the revolution. Hilal Khashan, professor of political science at American university of Beirut, said, “Like what happened in Iraq, parts of Syria are now becoming a land for jihad…The Syrians are responding by crossing the border and opening fire. There is a low intensity conflict on the border between Syria and Lebanon but I don’t see it developing into a major confrontation.”

Tripoli in north Lebanon is a conservative Sunni city that has close societal, familial and historical ties with the communities in western Syria revolting against the Assad regime. Sheikh Mazen al-Mohammad is a leading religious figure in the city and has been at the forefront of the regular demonstrations in support of the Syrian uprising.

He denies recent media reports claiming he said he has sent religiously inspired fighters, or mujahideen, to Syria but added, “If these international efforts we see fail in helping our brothers in Syria, and they request us to help them to victory then we will do it, whatever the consequences.”

Syria enjoyed a strong military presence in Lebanon from 1976 until 2005, and many of the Sunni communities, especially in the north, harbour strong resentment over their treatment during this time. Sheikh Mazen al-Muhammad said, “The Sunnis in Lebanon, because of their suffering at the hands of the Syrian regime, can understand the position of the Syrian revolution more than anyone in the Arab World… When this uprising began in Syria the wounds were opened afresh here.”

The fragile balancing act played by Lebanon’s politicians and sectarian leaders has so far kept the nation aloft from the violence next door. However, Lebanon is intrinsically connected to Syria, and its sectarian and political tensions have been tangibly exacerbated by the uprising there.

The thriving trade in weapons and potential militarisation of certain communities does little to allay fears of renewed civil strife in Lebanon if the Syria crisis deteriorates further.