Last month, the European Union (EU) unveiled an aid package worth one billion euros ($1.07 billion) for the Lebanese state. During a visit to Beirut, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, declared that the EU seeks to “contribute to the socio-economic stability of Lebanon”.
The funds will go towards strengthening basic services, enacting financial reforms, supporting Lebanese security forces and managing migration, she said.
Anyone who has paid attention to abuses committed by the EU border agency, Frontex, or with direct knowledge of it, against desperate refugees and migrants seeking to enter the Union would have cause for concern. Sea-Watch, a search and rescue organization operating in the Mediterranean Sea, described the deal as “another cash-for-border-violence deal” in which Europe is “exchanging money for border violence and death.”
In fact, EU financial support will encourage the criminalization of people on the move and will undoubtedly result in more suffering for refugees, especially Syrians, who already face abuse and misery in Lebanon. But this money will also undermine any efforts and any hopes of the Lebanese people to rid themselves of a corrupt and deeply dysfunctional political elite.
Threatening Syrian refugees in Lebanon
The announcement of the EU aid package for Lebanon follows similar agreements aimed at “combating migration” with other countries in the region. Last year, Egypt, Tunisia and Mauritania received large amounts of EU funds in exchange for cracking down on people trying to enter Europe.
Libya, which has received financial support from Brussels for years, has been the scene of some of the worst abuses. In March 2023, a United Nations fact-finding mission declared that there are “reasonable grounds to believe that migrants” in Libya, including those forced to return under EU-Libya agreements, are “victims of crimes against humanity and […] acts of murder, enforced disappearance, torture, enslavement, sexual violence, rape and other inhumane acts.”
There is growing concern among human rights organizations and activists that Lebanon is heading in the same direction as rising refugee abuse.
In Lebanon, the situation was already getting worse before the agreement, as shown by the increase in the number of boats leaving the Lebanese coast. The UN found that at least 59 boats left Lebanon in the first four months of 2024, compared to three boats in the same period last year. The Cedar Center for Legal Studies (CCLS) has estimated the number of boats to be around 100 by 2023.
Many of those attempting this dangerous journey are Syrian refugees, but there are also Lebanese citizens desperately trying to escape a collapsing economy and almost non-existent social benefits.
In the past, Lebanese authorities used to turn a blind eye to these deviations, but in recent years, they have increasingly cooperated with the resistance under pressure from the EU. According to local human rights organizations, Lebanon and Cyprus have entered into a “non-public agreement” to coordinate efforts to return refugees and migrants to Lebanon after arriving in Cyprus. But Lebanese authorities have also engaged in violent border patrols.
In April 2022, the Lebanese navy deliberately sank a boat carrying dozens of Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian citizens. According to witness statements collected by Megaphone News, CCLS and the Febrayer Network Investigative Laboratory, a Navy ship hit the boat and then moved away, while it sank and people drowned. Seven bodies were found, including a 40-day-old baby, while 33 people remain missing to this day. Forty-five survived.
Syrian refugees in Lebanon are particularly vulnerable to an intensified crackdown by authorities. For years, they have faced daily acts of violence from state and parastate actors, with major parties – from the Lebanese Forces and the Free Patriotic Movement to Hezbollah – routinely dehumanizing them in their rhetoric.
Furthermore, Lebanese authorities have forcibly deported Syrian refugees, including opposition activists and army deserters who are at immediate risk of torture and death at the hands of the Syrian regime. Human rights organizations have repeatedly made clear in reports that Syria is not a safe country for refugees to return. The Syrian regime killed so many detainees that it amounted, in the UN’s own words, to the “extermination” of the civilian population.
More recently, the UN commission of inquiry into Syria described Syria as an “abyss” where a “falling war economy and a devastating humanitarian crisis are inflicting new levels of hardship and suffering on the population.” [the] Syrian civilian population.” This is the same abyss that the EU wants refugees to “voluntarily” return to. Part of the billion-euro package will go to “explore how to work on a more structured approach to voluntary returns to Syria”, according to von der Leyen’s statement.
The EU has effectively approved the violent use of the Lebanese state as a scapegoat for the most vulnerable group of people in Lebanon today: Syrian refugees.
Supporting a corrupt elite
The generous EU package will also help solidify the hold of Lebanon’s corrupt elite over the Lebanese state, against the will of the Lebanese people.
It comes in the midst of an economic crisis that has lasted for years, triggered by decades of incompetence, corruption and mismanagement at the highest levels of government. This political and economic elite brought the country to its knees by running what economists called “a nationally regulated Ponzi scheme where new money is borrowed to pay existing creditors.”
In 2019, the Lebanese people took to the streets in the country’s largest non-sectarian uprising to demonstrate their rejection of corrupt Lebanese elites. Hundreds of thousands of protesters occupied city squares across the country. Echoing the 2011 Arab Spring, these protesters chanted: “The people want the regime to fall.” Billionaire Saad Hariri’s government responded by resigning.
The uprising failed to produce immediate political changes and the economic crisis only deepened when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived a few months later.
Then, in August 2020, around 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate exploded in the port of Beirut, killing 218 people, injuring around 7,000 and devastating the capital. Hassan Diab’s government created to replace Hariri’s resigned shortly afterwards. Diab would remain acting prime minister until another billionaire and former prime minister, Najib Mikati, took office in September 2021.
Lebanese journalist Lara Bitar described post-explosion life in Lebanon as facing “attempted murder [by the state] daily”. Ruling oligarchs and warlords have effectively practiced daily structural violence as a way of maintaining power.
This state of affairs dates back to the post-war period of the 1990s, when the Lebanese people witnessed the rise of what academic Ruth Wilson Gilmore called the “anti-state state”, namely the organized abandonment of state services by the very people they govern. the state.
In 2021, recognizing the role of political and economic elites in the Lebanese crisis, the EU created a sanctions regime against Lebanese politicians accused of corruption; it was renewed again in 2023.
The EU, together with the UN and the World Bank, also launched the Reform, Recovery and Reconstruction Framework (3RF) which aims for “a people-centered recovery that returns sustainable livelihoods to the affected population”.
But we have to ask ourselves where the “people-centered recovery” is in the donation of billions of euros to the same oligarchs and warlords who caused the multiple crises in the first place. Von der Leyen sealed the deal in May with a handshake with Mikati, a billionaire prime minister in a country where more than 80% of the population lives below the poverty line.
The deal will solidify existing state capture by the country’s ruling elite and send a clear political message: the EU does not care about accountability for crimes in Lebanon as long as its elites, however corrupt or violent, participate in Europe’s border regime. . .
It is no longer an exaggeration to describe the civilian population in Lebanon – citizens and residents – as hostages of an inexplicable and violent class of oligarchs and warlords. And the EU has just offered him a billion euros.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
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