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VI. Surviving in Lebanon

Obstacles to Self-Reliance

The ultimate goal of international protection is to achieve durable solutions for refugees.¹³² In general terms, there are three such durable solutions: voluntary repatriation, local integration, and third-country resettlement. The current security situation in Iraq rules out voluntary repatriation as a durable solution for Iraqi refugees for the foreseeable future. Moreover, only a small proportion of all Iraqi refugees can hope to be resettled to third countries.¹³³ The vast majority of Iraqi refugees in Lebanon have no other option but to remain in Lebanon until such time as they can return to Iraq in safety.

The UNHCR ExCom has recognized that “local integration is a sovereign decision and an option to be exercised by States guided by their treaty obligations and human rights principles.”¹³⁴ However, even where a refugee-hosting country declines to offer refugees the durable solution of permanent integration, it needs to respect their basic human rights. In particular, refugee-hosting states must respect such fundamental rights as the right to adequate food and housing, and the right to work.¹³⁵ In Lebanon, very limited assistance is available to refugees (see below). In the absence of large-scale assistance programs, refugees must be given the means to provide for their own essential needs.

The Standing Committee, a subsidiary body of the ExCom, has stated:

Measures enabling refugees to gain the economic and social ability to meet essential needs on a sustainable and dignified basis, that is, to achieve self-reliance, should be a key feature of any comprehensive solutions-oriented strategy. While not a durable solution in itself, self-reliance can be a precursor to any of the three durable solutions. Self-reliance programmes seek to prepare refugees for whatever durable solution may be realized. They equip them for reintegration in countries of origin upon repatriation, as well as for integration in countries of resettlement or of asylum where local integration is made possible.¹³⁶

The ExCom has emphasized that essential to the achievement of self-reliance by refugees is “the protection, in all States, of basic civil, economic and social rights, including freedom of movement and the right to engage in income-generating activities” and has encouraged:

[a]ll States hosting refugees to consider ways in which refugee employment and active participation in the economic life of the host country can be facilitated, inter alia, through education and skills development, and to examine their laws and practices, with a view to identifying and to removing, to the extent possible, existing obstacles to refugee employment.¹³⁷

Iraqi refugees in Lebanon experience many obstacles to achieving self-reliance. Denied legal status and constantly at risk of arrest, they are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. In their efforts to overcome these challenges, refugees resort to coping strategies that further undermine their dignity.

Fear of arrest

Although Lebanese authorities do not actively track down Iraqi refugees who are in the country illegally, Iraqis are arrested and detained in sufficiently large numbers to ensure that the risk of arrest is constantly on their minds. Refugees try to organize their lives in such a way as to minimize the risk of being arrested, which mostly means that they do not leave their homes unless absolutely necessary. But they have to go out to earn a living. As one Iraqi woman said, “I am afraid of everything. It is very difficult to go places, I am afraid to be caught, but what can we do? We have to work. During the daytime, we go, but we don’t know whether we will come back.”¹³⁸

“We fear a lot for our son, because he is working,” said an Iraqi mother. “Moving around is dangerous. He just goes to work and comes back home to sleep. He doesn’t go out. If you ask anyone around here about him, they won’t know him, because he just works and sleeps.”¹³⁹

An Iraqi father said:

When we go out, we don’t know whether we will return. When I see a police man or a member of the authorities, I am very afraid, despite the fact that I am old and sick. Any time there is a checkpoint, we can get caught. Our three sons only go to work and back: they cannot go out at night, they don’t have a social life, they have to stay at home all the time if they are not at work.¹⁴⁰

An Iraqi man who had been imprisoned for illegal entry said that his 16-year-old brother had to work in order to contribute to the family income. He explained how anxious the entire family was that the boy might be arrested, but that they did not feel they had a choice, as they needed the income. He said, “If my brother got caught, he would get between the other prisoners, it would be very bad. He is young, it would be very bad. But we have to continue working in order to survive.”¹⁴¹

Iraqi refugees who live in Beirut’s southern suburbs feel relatively safe there, since the Lebanese authorities generally do not venture into the area, as it is mostly controlled by Hezbollah. In order to avoid arrest, refugees try to avoid leaving the area. As one Iraqi man said, “I cannot leave this area [Beirut’s southern suburbs], because I don’t have any documents. Most Iraqis here don’t have residence [permits].”¹⁴² Another Iraqi man said, “I have been in Lebanon for 11 years and I rarely go out of the suburb. It has been a month or so when I last left the Shi`a suburb. You think we are free, but really we are in prison.”¹⁴³

Iraqi refugees have learned from experience that women and children generally are at a much lower risk of being stopped at checkpoints. As an Iraqi woman said, “I feel safe, because they don’t take the women. But I am afraid for my husband and sons.”¹⁴⁴

Because the risk of being arrested is much lower for women and children, some families opt to keep the adult men at home and to send the women and teenage children out to work instead. As one woman said, “Men are more likely to be arrested. That is why we prefer for the women to work. In Iraq only our men worked, but here, because of the situation, the women work.”¹⁴⁵

UNHCR suspects that fear of arrest at checkpoints also deters Iraqi refugees from traveling to the UNHCR office. Following a deterioration of the security situation in Beirut after bomb explosions in the city in May 2006, and the subsequent increase in the number of checkpoints, a significant number of Iraqi refugees failed to show up for their appointments for registration. Fear of arrest likely also stops Iraqi refugees from traveling to the office to apply for registration in the first place.¹⁴⁶

Fear of arrest also deters Iraqi refugees from approaching the Lebanese authorities for assistance. One Iraqi father explained that he went to the Iraqi embassy in Beirut to ensure that his baby son would have Iraqi nationality. But, he said, “The embassy asks for the birth certificate to be certified by the Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but if I went there, they would ask for my residence papers [which he does not have] and I would be arrested.”¹⁴⁷

An Iraqi mother recounted how in 2006 her 13-year-old daughter had been raped. She said, “I went to UNHCR to ask for help. At UNHCR they asked if I had gone to the police to report the rape. But how could I do that? I don’t have legal documents [residence papers]. I would go to prison if I went to the police.”¹⁴⁸

An Iraqi teenager said:

I used to work as a delivery boy for a restaurant. I had a traffic accident; a Lebanese woman hit me with her car. If I had been Lebanese, the woman would have been taken to the police for questioning. But because I am illegal, I was obliged to let her go. She didn’t pay me anything. I got fired because I broke my leg in the accident.¹⁴⁹

Ironically, fear of arrest also deters some Iraqi refugees from going to General Security to apply to regularize their status. An Iraqi woman said, “I have all the papers [to apply for regularization]. Caritas said that we should go to General Security, but I don’t dare to go because we might instead be arrested.”¹⁵⁰

This is by no means an imaginary fear. One Iraqi refugee explained what happened when he went to General Security in 2006 to apply to regularize his status:

I was working at the Almaza beer company. I went to General Security to apply for residency. General Security went to the factory to verify that I was working there. But the factory is in one place, and the storage facility is in another place. I worked at the storage facility. General Security summoned me. They told me that I was a liar, they said I didn’t work at Almaza. They said that I had given false statements, that I was mocking them. I was handcuffed, and General Security decided that I should be sent back to Iraq. There was no court hearing, General Security decided it. I was sent to the General Security prison.¹⁵¹

Exploitation by employers, sponsors, and landlords

Apart from the small number of Iraqi refugees who have managed to regularize their status on the basis of a work permit, refugees are not allowed to work in Lebanon. However, most Iraqis find the cost of living higher in Lebanon than in Iraq, and whatever savings they managed to bring with them quickly run out. They are thus forced to try to earn a living in Lebanon, despite the prohibition on engaging in income-generating activities in Lebanon.

Some Lebanese employers take advantage of the Iraqis’ lack of legal status and their lack of recourse to the Lebanese authorities when their rights are violated. Iraqi refugees frequently have to accept jobs for lower wages than their Lebanese colleagues. Sometimes employers refuse to pay refugees their wages altogether. As one refugee said, “The first thing they say at work is that you don’t have residency papers. You are getting exploited.”¹⁵² Another refugee said, “I worked for a Lebanese. When they discovered that I was illegal, they would not pay me what they owed me.”¹⁵³

The minimum wage in Lebanon is 300,000 Lebanese pounds (US$200) per month.¹⁵⁴ Many refugees work for less than the minimum wage. As one refugee said, “I work in a flower shop owned by a Lebanese. I earn 250,000 Lebanese pounds per month. The minimum wage for Lebanese is 300,000 Lebanese pounds per month. I work from 9am to 9pm, six days a week. The Lebanese employee in the flower shop next to mine earns 450,000 Lebanese pounds [$300].¹⁵⁵

An Iraqi refugee, an agricultural engineer who had not been able to find work in Lebanon, said, “Now I stay at home. My wife is working in a clothes shop, she works from 9am to 8:30pm, six days a week. She gets paid $200. The Lebanese don’t work for less than $300 for the same job.”¹⁵⁶

The director of the Hakim House Organization, which provides assistance to Iraqi refugees, said, “The Iraqi refugees are here illegally, therefore their rights might be violated. We receive many complaints from people who don’t get paid for two or three months, and are then sent away by their employers.”¹⁵⁷

A young Iraqi man said:

I work as a carpenter. I get paid less than the Lebanese. I get paid $200 per month; the Lebanese get paid as much as $500 per month. And if anything happens to me, my employer says, “I am not responsible.” If I am sick, I get a salary cut, or I get fired. For the Lebanese, if they have a doctor’s report, they can stay at home when they are sick.¹⁵⁸

An Iraqi woman whose husband and son both had lost their jobs and had not been paid their wages said, “My son and husband used to be exploited when they worked. At the end of the month, they would not be paid. They owe my son more than $1,000, but we cannot go anywhere to complain.”¹⁵⁹

A young man who lives and works at a gas station along the highway said:

I work from 6am to 10 or 11pm, seven days a week. Sometimes I don’t have time to get food. I live at the gas station; I never leave it. Every three weeks my employer sends someone to work here for half a day so that I can take half a day off. I don’t get paid the same as the Lebanese; a Lebanese wouldn’t work like this, and they would get paid more. I work here for 400,000 Lebanese pounds [$267].¹⁶⁰

Some employers, knowing how desperate Iraqi refugees are to regularize their status, demand a “fee” for sponsoring a refugee’s application for regularization. Moreover, they frequently ask their employee to provide the $1,000 that must be paid into the Housing Bank, despite it being the employer’s legal obligation to provide this financial guarantee. As one refugee explained:

My sponsor was a woman, I worked for her, fixing curtains, carrying things. I put $1,000 in the Housing Bank, in an account in the woman’s name. I paid $300 as a “reward” to my sponsor. My application was denied. I had paid the $1,000, but my sponsor is refusing to give the money back to me.¹⁶¹

Employers are not the only people to exploit Iraqi refugees. Some landlords, too, take advantage of the vulnerability of Iraqis arising from their lack of legal status. A member of the Chaldean Welfare Committee, which provides financial assistance to Iraqi refugees, including rent money, said, “Iraqi refugees are being taken advantage of by Lebanese landlords, who know these people are desperate.”¹⁶² An Iraqi woman said, “When we arrived, the rent we paid was $150. But now the owner is asking for $200. The owner threatened us that if we don’t pay the rent, she would contact General Security, because we are illegal.”¹⁶³

Access to education and health services

Although refugee children in Lebanon are entitled to enroll in public schools, provided the school in question has spaces available,¹⁶⁴ in practice, very few Iraqi refugee children manage to enroll in public schools. The vast majority of Iraqi children who do go to school in Lebanon enroll in private schools.¹⁶⁵

A number of organizations in Lebanon provide financial assistance to refugee families to pay tuition fees charged by private schools, including UNHCR’s implementing partners in Lebanon, Caritas and the Middle East Council of Churches (MECC), and a number of private, faith-based organizations.¹⁶⁶ Even with this assistance, many refugee children still cannot afford to send their children to school, due to the high additional cost of transportation, books, and stationary.¹⁶⁷

Because many Iraqi refugees are forced to accept low wages, some families are unable to send their children to school because they need them to work to contribute to the family income. As one Iraqi woman explained:

My brother is 15 years old. He works in a printing factory. He has not been to school since we arrived in Lebanon [in November 2004]. When we arrived, we decided that my brother could not go to school; we needed money, and to send him to school would have cost money instead. Caritas only pays $300 a year, and education is costly.¹⁶⁸

Refugee children face a number of other obstacles to receiving education in Lebanon. For instance, the language of instruction for subjects like mathematics and sciences is not Arabic but English or French, and most Iraqi refugee children do not have sufficient proficiency to comprehend these lessons.¹⁶⁹

Moreover, many Iraqi refugee children have missed several years of education because of war and conflict when they were still in Iraq.¹⁷⁰ As a result, they lag behind their peers and are placed in classes with children much younger than themselves. This leaves them feeling excluded and out of place, and more prone to dropping out of school.

Finally, while refugee children do not generally need to produce school certificates from Iraq to enroll in primary school, they do need such school certificates if they wish to enroll in secondary school. Many refugee children do not have these certificates. As one Iraqi father explained:

When we fled Baghdad, we couldn’t get the school certificates for our three children. We would have had to take the certificates from the school to the Department of Education to have the certificates attested. But the Department of Education has been moved to a Shi`a area. The Shi`a militia go there, and it is too dangerous for us [Sunni Iraqis] to go there.¹⁷¹

To register for the state exam for the baccalaureate, children have to have residence in Lebanon, which excludes almost all Iraqi refugee children.¹⁷²

Iraqi refugees do not face discrimination when seeking access to health services in Lebanon. Most medical services in Lebanon are private, and refugees are treated on the same basis as Lebanese: they do not need to be in the possession of residence papers, but they do need to show that they are able to pay for their treatment.¹⁷³ Because Iraqi refugee families are already struggling to provide for their basic needs, many refugees find that they are unable to pay for the cost of even minor treatment or medication. There are a number of organizations who cover at least part of the cost of medical treatment for Iraqi refugees who would not otherwise be able to access health care.¹⁷⁴ However, both Caritas and the MECC require a certificate from a designated doctor paid for by the refugees themselves. The cost of a doctor’s appointment is an obstacle for many refugees. As one refugee explained:

Caritas sends you to a specific doctor to get a certificate that you are sick. This costs 35,000 Lebanese pounds [$23]. Once you have this certificate, Caritas pays for the medication. The clinic here charges 10,000 Lebanese pounds [$7] to Iraqis, but Caritas doesn’t accept the prescription from the clinic here.¹⁷⁵

Looking to the Future: Legal Status and the Right to Work

Many Iraqi refugees told Human Rights Watch that they have good relations with Lebanese neighbors. One Iraqi man said, “The Lebanese are respecting us, they are friendly and helpful.”¹⁷⁶ An Iraqi woman said, “People in Lebanon are very friendly, we have many friends here.”¹⁷⁷ Another woman said, “The Lebanese neighbors are good with me.”¹⁷⁸

However, while Iraqi refugees are grateful to the Lebanese for receiving them and for the safety they have found in Lebanon, they also expressed their anguish about their condition and about their lack of hope for the future. Unable to go back to Iraq, and not allowed to build a new life in Lebanon, they are despondent that their lives have been reduced to a struggle to survive from one day to the next.  An Iraqi woman said, “There is no stability. Our sons cannot be married because they do not have legal status here. There is no future for us here.”¹⁷⁹ Another Iraqi woman felt dejected because she and her husband had been forced into a life on the margins of Lebanese society, and expressed her despair about the future. “I am getting so desperate,” she said, “sometimes I tell my husband, ‘Let’s go back to Iraq and face our destiny.’”¹⁸⁰

For some families, the pressure of being in the country illegally and the difficulties this entails proves too much. One Iraqi woman explained:

Since 2003 there have been a lot of problems in my family. I am a teacher, my husband is a lawyer, but the children were not going to school. This was a big problem. My husband was being exploited at work. When my oldest son was only 15 years old, I had to make him work. He did not go to school for five years. All this affected the family. My husband became violent, he beat me and my children. Recently we got divorced.

She went on to say:

I have a degree, I have 16 years of work experience in Iraq, why am I not allowed to work here? Why are the Iraqis treated so badly, especially when we are fleeing war in our own country? Many Iraqis feel that they are insulted, they are losing their dignity, the way they work here. Iraqis want to live in dignity, they want their rights like any normal citizen.¹⁸¹

As noted above, Lebanon has formally agreed that Iraqi refugees cannot be forcibly returned to Iraq until such time as the security situation in Iraq significantly improves. It is Lebanon’s sovereign decision whether it wants to allow Iraqi refugees to integrate permanently into Lebanese society. But even if it is not inclined to offer Iraqi refugees permanent integration, it must respect their basic human rights for the duration of their stay in Lebanon. In particular, it should offer Iraqi refugees at least a temporary legal status, and give them the right to work for as long as they cannot go back to Iraq. Any such legal status could be made conditional on the security situation in Iraq, with permission to reside in Lebanon withdrawn once Iraqi nationals could return there in safety and dignity. But for as long as they are unable to return to Iraq, Lebanon should allow Iraqi refugees to live a decent life in its territory. As one refugee who had been detained for illegal entry pleaded, “I have never caused any problems to anyone in Lebanon. I didn’t come here to cause problems. I have only come here to survive.”¹⁸²

Whatever reasons Iraqis had for seeking safety in Lebanon, the Lebanese government and its people cannot now simply wish them away. Denying them their rights does nothing to resolve the Iraqi refugee crisis, while doing harm to people who fled their country in fear for their lives. As the refugee who now finds himself in detention said, “It is not as if we were happy leaving Iraq. We cannot stay in Iraq because of the situation, the terrorism.”¹⁸³ Lebanon is entitled to expect much greater assistance from the international community in hosting an Iraqi refugee population and providing for their needs (see next section). But Lebanon, for its part, must take responsibility for respecting the fundamental human rights of the Iraqi refugees in its territory.