People must be getting tired of reading commentary on the seemingly endless crisis in Syria. Well, consider instead the impact of that war’s spillover into Lebanon and Jordan.
One does not necessarily have to be a refugee to feel the pain. More than 2 million Syrians have already fled the carnage in their homeland, seeking sanctuary abroad, with twice as many others becoming internally displaced, people compelled to wander the land or dwell in the open fields in partial return to the manner of beasts.
The plight of those in exile — not just in the neighboring countries but in more distant lands — is gut-wrenching They do what most impoverished refugees do: Seek asylum, shelter, food, work, and they wait, and wait, and then they wait some more, until it’s safe to return home. If ever, in their lifetime.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), around 52 percent of these Syrians are 17 years old or younger, with many having been out of school for nearly three years. Call them Syria’s lost generation, a generation whose members will for years to come carry a heavy cargo of emotional scars on their back that may not heal. This is apart from the physical hardships.
Last Wednesday was a case in point defining that hardship. On that day, in Arsal, a town in Lebanon just across the border from Syria, thousands of refugees, ensconced in their makeshift camps, had to weather a freak storm that brought with it bitter winds, torrential rains and freezing temperatures, with heavy snow that blanketed the refugees’ flimsy, substandard shelters. Despite the thermal blankets and heaters distributed by relief agencies, the refugees, according to news reports, could barely survive the cold.
But wait. That’s the easy part. Consider how the Lebanese, three years after the start of the Syrian war and the arrival of 800,000 Syrians (no less than 24 percent of Lebanon’s population) to their homeland are becoming weary.
Have the Syrian refugees worn out their welcome in Lebanon?
It looks like it. Lebanon, a fragile polity held together by a thread, as it were, is beginning to fear that these Syrians, now fully a quarter of the population, may stay for a decade. Maybe two decades. Or perhaps — Oh, the horror, the horror! — six decades, as the Palestinians had done, thus disrupting the delicate balance among Sunnis, Shiites, Maronites, Orthodox Christians and Druze.
In 1948, no one, least of all the Palestinians themselves, thought their presence in Lebanon was going to be anything but temporary. All wars, it was thought, create refugees, who seek refuge in the surrounding countries to escape being caught in the crossfire. And when those wars are over, everybody goes back to their homes and homeland. The Palestinians not only stayed but in the 1970s also became entangled in the country’s civil war, and a major player in it.
Let us, along with the Lebanese, think the unthinkable. What would happen if the Syrian refugees, now a quarter of Lebanon’s population, were to stay — for any number of reasons — for an appreciably long period of time? Would their presence impact strongly on Lebanon’s culture, economy and social life? Clearly it would. The power of demographics will, even willy-nilly, assert its qualitative tone on society. Consider, as an example, the demographic impact of the Hispanic community — now the largest minority in a nation of minorities — in the United States. And that impact began progressively to assert itself a mere three decades ago. Today politicians, from congressmen to presidents, toady to the “Hispanic vote.”
Jordan, which has received 500,000 refugees from Syria since the outbreak of the conflict there, is mindful of that phenomenon. It certainly evinced that frame of mind when it chose to withhold the welcoming mat to Syrian-Palestinians, who had ironically already been denizens of refugee camps around Damascus. There was a logic behind Jordanian authorities’ turning them back at the Syrian-Jordan border, or detaining them in holding centers without any options for release — except back to Syria. Syrian and Palestinians have compatriots and relatives in Jordan whom they could join and be helped by to blend into the landscape.
Whichever way you look at it, what we may see in the Mashrek, should the Syria war stretch endlessly, is the emergence of what demographers call the “generational cohorts,” a term that defines a subgroup in society bound together by the sharing of the same historical events, experienced within the same time interval. In the United States, we speak of the “baby boomers” and “generation X.” In the Arab world, we speak of the “nakba Palestinians.” Today we may be looking at the birth pangs of a new generation of Syrians, the “lost generation” of 2011, whose common sensibility has been honed at the whetstone of the Syrian diaspora. Stay tuned.
