Music
25 Nov 15

Hot Press visits Syrian refugees in border settlements

<i>Hot Press</i> visits Syrian refugees in border settlements

"All we want is to go home," our man Stuart Clark is told

It’s very strange gazing across 4kms of scrubland knowing that on the other side the most uncivil of wars is raging.
A three hour drive up Lebanon’s northwest coast from Beirut has brought us to Halba near the Syrian border where the 100-strong Concern team working with refugee families is based.
Shortly before hitting Halba we got a roadside view of the Baddawi Camp, which was supposed to be just a temporary home for the 100,000 Palestinians living there when it was set up in 1955.
To get in you have to go through one of the four gated, bombproof entrances manned by the Lebanese Armed Forces who in 2007 intervened as rival armed Palestinian factions wrestled for control of the camp, which from the outside resembles a giant prison.
Given that its residents, many of whom were born here, don’t have citizenship or voting rights and are barred from working in over 20 professions, you could argue that that’s precisely what it is.
Briefing at Concern HQ completed, we travel the short distance to Borjarab where 16 families, all of them related, live in a tented enclave.
The head of the clan, Ahmed, tells us how they left the western Syrian town of Al-Qusayr in 2012 following five months of government bombing from “the ground, the air… everywhere!”
The decision to hike the 17-hours to the Lebanese border was taken after Ahmed’s 23-year-old grandson was killed during a heavy artillery attack.
In doing so, they left behind a string of successful businesses, which within days of their departure were looted.
Ahmed had the chance last year to move legally to Sweden but passed up on the offer because he wanted to remain as close as possible to his former home.
“We want to stay here and bring up our children,” he stresses when asked through an interpreter whether he’d ever consider moving his family to Europe. “We are not terrorists. Love and peace, that’s what we believe in.”
Ahmed and his extended family pay a monthly rent of $80 per tent to the man who owns the land they’re on. He says they’re treated well by their immediate neighbours, but are reluctant to stray too far from makeshift home because of the verbal abuse they suffer when they do so.
Occasionally they’ll earn $10 a shift doing casual - and illegal - agricultural work but without Concern’s assistance wouldn’t be able to survive financially. The aid agency has provided them with toilets, a water tank, a septic tank, gravelled pathways and a generator for when the mains power fails, and are helping them press for the small school that was promised but has yet to be delivered. They’ll get a $180 Concern winter fuel voucher, but they’re not sure that will tide them through to February when nighttime temperatures creep back above freezing.
Will they ever be able to return to Syria? “Only God knows that,” Ahmed proffers as we leave.
The onset of winter is also troubling Tarek, the ‘Shawish’ leader of the 215 people living in Arka 5, an altogether more basic tented village that’s sprung up in a fly-infested scrapyard whose owner is charging them $30 a month per tent to live among the rubbish.
“We don’t have enough heaters or clothes for the children,” rues the 41-year-old who had to walk for three days with his family in order to cross the border into the Lebanon in 2012. Several of his close relatives were killed before being able to make the same journey.
A disabled friend of his on crutches informs us that he’s made three failed attempts to join his brother who, after entering the country illegally, has been granted refugee status in Germany.
“I’ll try one final time, but if they don’t give me permission to go I’ll take a boat,” he says angrily. “It’s very, very dangerous but better than staying here.”
Tarek has no interest in taking his family to Europe, telling us that, “All we want to do is go home.” He’s grateful to Concern for providing them with clean water, toilets and other essentials, but reflects that: “This isn’t life, it’s existence.”
Not for the first time on this trip, my heart breaks…