NGOs and Cholera in Syrian Refugee Camps

Non-governmental organizations have been attacking the Lebanese people as racist and xenophobic because the Lebanese have repeatedly asked the NGOs and the governments that fund them to amiably begin repatriating the 1.5 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon back to Syria.

Lebanon has drawn a long list of problems arising from the presence of the refugee camps all over the country. The NGOs reply that they are compensating the Lebanese government for the burden caused by the Syrian refugees, ignoring the fact that the Lebanese government is corrupt and dysfunctional. The NGOs also give money directly to the refugees to the tune of $100 per month per registered refugee. This is more than the minimum salary of the average Lebanese or Syrian, so it is an incentive for the refugees to stay in Lebanon, instead of returning back to Syria where the hostilities have significantly died down more than 3 years ago.

In addition to bona fide refugees, the camps also shelter hundreds of thousands of illegal (i.e. non-registered) Syrians who engage in all manner of illegal activities and crimes, including but not limited to theft of public property like infrastructure items such as pipes, electric cables, manhole covers, or other items containing metals that can be sold. For example, Major General Tony Saliba, Head of State Security, said in an interview that one refugee was caught carrying about 500 bank cards (provided by the NGOs for Syrian refugees to withdraw their welfare US dollars) from Syrian individuals residing in Syria proper (i.e. they are registered as refugees in Lebanon, yet live in Syria). He'd withdraw those monies from Lebanese banks and take them back inside Syria. In other words, the NGOs are funding criminal activities without even knowing who is a refugee and who is a criminal.

The Syrian refugees engage in all kinds of businesses, open shops etc. right next to Lebanese-owned businesses. There have been several riots across the country over such instances where the refugees unfairly compete with the Lebanese.

The refugees use the country's infrastructure - electricity, water, etc. but do not pay any bills.

The refugees have never been sensitized to environmental issues. The roadside garbage one sees all over the country is the product of refugees who either do not care for their host country or litter on purpose to spite their hosts. The Syrian refugee truck driver who picks up the garbage in the locality where I live, decided one day to get rid of wild and stray animals who come at night to eat from the bins. He laced the area with poisoned food, and killed dozens of semi-feral cats, dogs, foxes, coyotes (those are the ones I saw with my own eyes), and other wild animals who probably went back to die in the woods.

The refugees claim to have escaped from the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad and say they are too afraid to return. Yet, thousands of them demonstrated for Assad in the streets of Lebanon at the last Syrian elections, riding buses, cars and motorcycles and hurling insults at the Lebanese people.

The subsidies of the Lebanese government for such basic items as fuel, flour, medicines and other items make these items cheaper in Lebanon than they are in Syria. A golden opportunity for the hundreds of thousands of unregistered Syrians who hide inside the refugee camps and run profitable smuggling businesses across the lawless border. In doing so, they deprive the local population of those basic goods, drive their prices higher, and essentially turn the subsidies in favor of the Syrian economy of Bashar Assad. 

Syrian refugees also run human trafficking operations people in tandem with operatives inside Syria proper in the north along the Mediterranean coast near the city of Tripoli. Hundreds of Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians are dying trying to cross the ocean and reach Europe. No NGOs are seen rescuing the migrants, like they do in Turkey and Libya and other points of illegal migration to Europe.

And now, the Syrian refugees who cross the border have brought cholera to Lebanon. A couple of weeks after the infectious disease first appeared in Syria, it crept into Lebanon, carried by the friendly yet unhygienic Syrian refugees.

Given all of the above, what the NGOs are doing is to further this state of affairs by refusing to do anything at all other than maintain the status quo. Lebanon is not Germany or France or Italy with large populations and territories. The Syrians represent nearly half of the resident Lebanese population, and they are all Sunni Muslims likely harboring Al-Qaeda and Daesh cells. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese citizens have emigrated, which means that the NGOs and the international community are actively seeking to replace highly qualified educated Lebanese individuals - a brain drain that is most beneficial to their own countries with declining birth rates - with uneducated and unqualified Syrian refugees, thus furthering the decline of Lebanon, not to mention the demographic upheaval that is taking place. The West appears therefore to encourage replacing the few remaining Christians in the Middle East with large numbers of Muslims, thus leaving the Middle East as a place for only Muslims and of course Jews (Israel). This segregation of the Eurasian region into a Christian  Europe and West versus a Muslim-Jewish East in antithetical to western claims of welcoming diversity. The Europeans are either bigoted hypocrites or ignorant idiots.

Lebanon has been patiently asking for assistance in elaborating a program for the dignified return of the refugees to their cities and villages. But all this beseeching has fallen on deaf ears. Instead, merely asking for the return of the refugees is met with accusations of racism and xenophobia. One ought to remember that the Lebanese War of 1975 was masterminded by the Assad regime that sent its troops into Lebanon, where it kidnapped, killed, shelled, bombed, and assassinated at will. As we speak, there are 17,000 Lebanese citizens who were "forcibly disappeared" (i.e. kidnapped in Lebanon and transferred to Syria where their whereabouts are unknown). No one knows if they're dead or still in prison, and the Syrian regime will not acknowledge their existence. The Syrian army and its intelligence services stayed in Lebanon for 30 years (1975 - 2005). There is a huge reservoir of hatred in the Lebanese population toward Syrians in general because of that history. The future may even be more somber if the Syrian refugees end up staying longer and perhaps permanently.

If the argument is that the Assad regime will seek revenge on the refugees if they are made to return, then the NGOs are in reality working to settle the refugees permanently in Lebanon. The Assad regime is a Alawite Muslim regime that has been in power since 1969, and may in fact remain in power for several more decades. Given the economic windfall from smuggling operations, the Assad regime has no incentive to take back its citizens; they are a great source of goods and money. In addition, by keeping the Sunni Syrians out his country, Bashar Assad is altering the demographics of Syria in favor of his own minority Alawite sect.

What the NGOs can do is stop funding the refugees to entice them to go back home. By refusing to do anything to repatriate the Syrian refugees back to their country, the NGOs and governments behind them are in effect responsible for laying the ground for future wars between the Lebanese and Syrian populations.