Lebanon: How a Mallow man is trying to focus attention on a forgotten crisis

The 38-year-old has been a communications advisor with the International Committee of the Red Cross since December 2021 and has also held various other communications roles with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

While postings have included Ukraine, India, and Liberia, he is currently based in Beirut, the Lebanese capital.

He and his colleagues in other humanitarian agencies like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are concerned that what is happening in Lebanon is going largely unnoticed in a humanitarian news agenda dominated by Ukraine.

“Something we're facing here in the ICRC and in the larger Red Cross and Red Crescent movement is the significant interest in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine at the moment,” he said.

“But while attention has refocused towards Ukraine, it doesn't mean there's any fewer humanitarian challenges for people affected by the war in Yemen or in Syria.

“Not only have the needs of the people affected there not gone away, but their circumstances are getting steadily worse due to what is going on in Lebanon at the moment.” As well as having - according to the Lebanese government - 1.5 million Syrian refugees, more than three-quarters of the country’s population are living in poverty.

Its monthly inflation rate jumped from 147.55% in January 2021 to 239.68% in January 2022. Its currency against a single US dollar crashed from around 28,000 Lebanese Pounds per US $1 to 36,000 per US $1 at the end of May.

Many of Lebanon's professionals are leaving the country, an exodus that has gathered pace since the 2020 Beirut Port blast that killed more than 200 and left 250,000 homeless.

One of Stephen’s colleagues, Pietro Orlandi, a veteran of humanitarian postings in Afghanistan and Gaza and working in Lebanon as the ICRC’s Economic Security Coordinator, said: “I go round Beirut because I have to meet my family with my kids.

“I never felt so much of a distance from my reality to the reality of these people.” As he speaks, scores of men and women and small children beg from street corners near his offices on Sidani Street, in Hamra, Beirut.

The fact that coffee shops like nearby Hamra Square Starbucks are filled with people shows one side of “normality”.

But you are never far from a woman or a man with a child and outstretched hands, pleading faces looking up with a constant entreaty for money in Arabic. 

In one street only five minutes from Mr Orlandi and Stephen Ryan’s offices, this reporter watched in horror as a small child clambered from one filthy metal wheelie bin to another, searching for food.

“There is no way to sugar coat what is a hard reality: for Syrians life is very, very harsh, but we are determined to pursue our mission in alleviating their suffering, ” Mr Orlandi said.

He shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders when asked how refugees survive.

“This is a big mystery,” he says.

“The scale of the drama is something I have barely seen.

“I've been in Afghanistan, in Gaza and Yemen but for these families in Afghanistan, for example, even when I was there 10 years ago, there was at least a sense that the dark times were over.

There was at least some sense of hope. Here, there is a crisis of hope.

“Inflation is rising, problems are getting worse and challenges are getting bigger and bigger by the day.” 

While he doesn’t like being drawn into predicting where it is all going, you get the impression he sees the situation is at a breaking point.

“It's very difficult to explain how people are surviving in these conditions,” he says.

“All the indicators are blinking red, not just for Syrian or Palestinian or any other refugee here, but also ordinary Lebanese people.

“The savings of normal Lebanese people are falling apart.

“They are being eroded on a single day and the cost of everything - food, medicine, gasoline - is going up.

“The cost of doing business is going up.

“We have small shops that cannot afford the cost of the gasoline and the number of shops closing is increasing day by day.” He adds wearily: “You have to wonder yourself how much is the capacity of the people to stand for what is going on.

“There is a point at which you can bend the material and then there is a point at which it just breaks.” 

Another Irishman doing refugee support work in the country is Limerick native, Luke Hamilton, who works with the [url=

https://www.unhcr.org/]United Nations High Commission for Refugees[/url] (UNHCR).

Luke, from Adare, has been based in Beirut for the past 17 months.

Before then, the 33-year-old was based in Nigeria for six months working as an Associate Protection Officer, and in Montenegro for just over a year as a field officer.

He has one word for the situation in Lebanon, and it’s “dire” and he quickly sums up key points to bear in mind. One of those is the fact that Lebanon is currently hosting the highest number of refugees per capita in the world.

Although the Lebanese government estimates are higher, some 839,086 Syrian refugees are registered with the UNHCR, while the entire population of Lebanon is in the region of six to seven million.

“So that's a sizable proportion of the population of the country,” he says, speaking from his offices in Beirut.

“If I am trying to compare that for friends or family back home to put the situation in perspective, I compare it to Ireland because - population-wise - Ireland is very similar to Lebanon.

“And if you think about the geographic size of Lebanon, it's maybe the same size as Leinster.

“So when you sort of put it in that perspective, you really get a sense of the scale of the issue here and then you can really sort of appreciate how the country is really stretched to capacity in terms of responding to the needs of the refugees it is hosting.” 

He adds: “So concurrent with the refugee situation, Lebanon is also going through one of the worst financial crises in the world. It's impacting on every aspect of society, and stretching the country's capacity to meet the needs of both refugees and Lebanese nationals.

Coupled with other events, such as the Covid pandemic, the Beirut blast from 2020 and you really have a situation where people are living in the most dire conditions imaginable, both refugees and the Lebanese community.

He points out that according to the latest data available to UNHCR, about 90% of Syrian refugees are living in extreme poverty.

“In a nutshell, this means they're unable to secure any basic necessities and it results in a lot of those people having to make very difficult choices,” he says.

“They ultimately have to employ negative coping strategies in order to survive.” He says this means parents skipping meals so their children can eat, and people also not seeking urgent medical treatments.

Children are engaging in work rather than attending school and a recent trend is an increase in the number of families and people taking journeys by sea across the Mediterranean.

“It’s not a massive number proportionate to the number of refugees in Lebanon,” he said. “But it is a recent increase in line with the deteriorating socio-economic conditions here in Lebanon.” When he references refugees staying in tents, he doesn’t just mean recent arrivals.

He includes some who have been living in a tent since the onset of the Syrian crisis in 2011.

They would have been among the worst hit by Lebanon’s recent bitter winter, where they found their tents covered in freezing snow or waterlogged with freezing cold water and they had to fight a daily battle just to keep warm and dry.

“I think the key thing really to remember is that, notwithstanding all of the recent crises we see in the world at the moment, Covid recently, Afghanistan and now Ukraine, Syria is still one of the world's largest displacement crises,” he said.

“We have over 13 million people displaced within and beyond Syria's borders. So I mean, I think, while substantial focus is understandably directed on Ukraine, and we see remarkable solidarity in Ireland and Europe in general in response to this, it's critical not to forget humanitarian needs elsewhere, including Lebanon.” 

Like other humanitarian agency workers, he believes the way Ireland can help the refugees in Lebanon is by “keeping the conversation alive on the humanitarian needs prevailing elsewhere in the world”.

He says: “So I think people in Ireland can also look to their local communities to see how they can support both directly and through awareness-raising with the government to just to remind communities and the government that there are needs beyond what's happening in Ukraine.”