End of the Year Issue
By Ghazal Khalife
October 29, 2022
Bodies drifting ashore, sirens blaring, and families frantically searching for survivors: this was the scene when a boat carrying 150 people capsized close to the Syrian shore.
On Sept. 22, 2022, a boat carrying 150 emigrants — most of whom were Lebanese citizens, but also Palestinian and Syrian refugees — capsized near the coast of Tartous, Syria. More than one hundred bodies have been found, while 40 other victims are still lost. Syrian and Lebanese authorities have cooperated to locate these missing persons and inform their families of their fates. Lebanese officials, meanwhile, succeeded in capturing the smuggler and accomplices involved in the scheme. The scene is nothing short of a tragedy. Testimonies from the few individuals who survived and from victims’ relatives show just how calamitous the incident was.
What pushed these people to embark on a journey where the death toll exceeds the survival rate? Mostafa Mesto, one of the fatalities, reportedly sold all his belongings to collect the 12 thousand dollars that the smuggler demanded. It was Mesto’s last chance to escape Lebanon with his family after his four failed attempts at legal immigration. Desperation is the common motive for victims of the illegal immigration industry and they are often inspired by success stories of families who reached Europe. A Palestinian survivor, Jihad Michlawi, explains how friends that migrated to Europe by sea promised that conditions in European migrant camps were more dignified than living in Lebanon, alleging that “even the food is way better.” This highlights the despair that the Lebanese population is feeling, faced with an ever-deteriorating economic crisis and a shamelessly negligent political class. It appears that this disaster will be repeated as more Lebanese citizens struggle to make ends meet and lose faith in a promising future.
A Dire Economic Crisis with no Glimmer of Hope
Most of the people on the boat came from Lebanon’s Northern region, Akkar and Tripoli, one persistently neglected by the government even before the financial crisis that plagued the country in 2019. According to a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 2022, 708,000 out of the 1.1 million residing in Lebanon live under the poverty line, among them 266,000 Syrian refugees and 88,000 Palestinians. As a result, it comes as no surprise that the demand for the Lebanon-Cyprus illegal immigration industry is increasing. In one year, Lebanon’s migration rate increased by 426%; many are comparing the current immigration wave to that of the 1880s.
The financial crisis blew up in 2019 after successive governments borrowed money with few restraints. Prior to this depression, the balance of payments deficit was usually remedied by foreign aid and remittances from the Lebanese diaspora. However, as the budget deficit skyrocketed and the government implemented few reforms, foreign donors refrained from handing out billions of dollars worth of pledged aid. The symptoms of a plummeting economy began to emerge in 2016, but the impending market slump was hastened by the 2019 protests. In short, a combination of poor financial planning, a turbulent political climate, and foreign investors’ loss of faith, further worsened by the pandemic and the Beirut explosion, paralyzed the Lebanese economy. As an import-dependent country, Lebanon’s sharp currency depreciation caused prices to increase drastically almost overnight. The price of bread rose 900%, and unsurprisingly wages could not keep up.
In Tripoli’s densely populated Tabbene neighborhood, where most victims originated, the economic situation hit families hard — with disproportionately higher unemployment rates and close to no government intervention compared to the rest of the country. Furthermore, the consequences of the financial crisis have manifested themselves in greater emigration and crime rates. One of the more recent developments has been attacks on banks. Within a few months, there were two cases of desperate depositors attempting to access their money by holding bank employees hostage. The general public even sympathized with these depositors, hailing them as heroes who were “claiming their own rights.” Sally Hafiz, a woman who raided a bank demanding 13,000 dollars from her account to fund her sister’s cancer treatment, said in an interview, “I had begged the branch manager before for my money, and I told him my sister was dying, didn't have much time left… time was running out and I had nothing to lose.” Hafiz’s case exemplifies the desperation uniting much of the Lebanese public.Fears of an even more dire future have inhibited popular protests.
Lebanon is experiencing a vicious cycle of an increasingly dysfunctional political class and an apathetic population looking for ways to escape or reach short term solutions rather than demanding fundamental reforms. This reaction is shared by the masses — many are too occupied with securing their day to day needs rather than engaging in political activism which already proved ineffective in changing the existing political regime.
As the perilous political and economic climate persists, Lebanese residents continue risking their lives in search of dignity andfundamental rights. They are looking for a solid government plan to resuscitate the dying economy and collapsing country. As long as no evidence of realistic, firmly implemented economic and politicalreforms appear on the horizonLebanese residents will continueembarking on suicide missions to seek out a stable livelihood. In an interview following the migrant boat’s capsize, 16-year-old Rawane El Maneh, arelative of one of the victims, said, “they went looking for a new life, and there they are in anew life, hopefully, one better than this one.”