Dispossessing the Displaced in Lebanon

Abstract

The stories outlined in this article attest to the ways in which forced displacement is not a one-time event but rather an iterated and indefinite process of moving, settling, adapting, and planning for the future under conditions of radical uncertainty, material deprivation, and precarious legal status. Ethnographic methods are uniquely positioned to follow how these displacements structure the experience of sustaining a life in exile.

The sunset arrives early on the western side of the Beqaa valley, where a string of densely populated villages divides the farmland below from the dramatic rise of the Lebanon mountains above. The 2,500-meter peaks cast a cold shadow that creeps eastward along the valley floor towards the Syrian border. By the time Adil woke up on the mid-November day when, as he later put it, “everything around here began to change,” the apartment that he shared with seven other young Syrians had already plunged into the late afternoon darkness.

He was sitting on his mattress, sipping a coffee and rolling his second joint of the day, when his cousin Khalid called to tell him about the General Security raid that happened hours earlier in a business just like theirs in the next town over.

The two cousins made for an odd pair as friends and partners in the restaurant that they ran together. Khalid is tall, thin, and square-jawed. He dresses casually and speaks quietly. Adil is a frenetic, animated talker who only leaves the house if his clothes are pressed and his hair carefully slicked back and out his round face. Khalid memorized the Quran in his teens and hoped to follow his late father into Islamic charitable work. Adil dreamt of becoming a geography professor or a lawyer before the Syrian civil war forced him out of high school a semester before graduation. In Lebanon, they made ends meet preparing and serving dishes like hummus, fuul, falafel, and pan-fried chicken liver, the beloved and unpretentious everyday staples of Syrian cuisine.

Forced displacement is not a one-time event—the act of involuntarily crossing a border—but rather an iterated and indefinite process of moving, settling, adapting, and planning for the future under conditions of radical uncertainty, material deprivation, and precarious legal status.

Adil and Khalid’s tiny restaurant was one of my first ethnographic points of entry into a broader project exploring how young Syrian men in the Beqaa valley have built and sustained lives in exile. Though displaced by the violence of war, the majority of the young men who I met did not self-identify as refugees, never registered with the UNHCR, and received no aid from humanitarian NGOs. Instead, they hustled to get by—and in many cases support internally displaced relatives back home—through shifting combinations of day labor in the skilled trades, restaurant work, and small entrepreneurial ventures. Their stories attest to the ways in which forced displacement is not a one-time event—the act of involuntarily crossing a border—but rather an iterated and indefinite process of moving, settling, adapting, and planning for the future under conditions of radical uncertainty, material deprivation, and precarious legal status. Ethnographic methods, attentive to everyday ups and downs, are uniquely positioned to follow how these displacements, in the plural, structure the experience of sustaining a life in exile.

By narrating the events of the uneasy days after the first raids of Syrian-owned small businesses in November 2018, this essay explores one critical moment in the making and unmaking of a precarious community-in-exile. Adil would later point to that month as the moment when his life began to unravel in the tiny country that has quietly absorbed more Syrians fleeing the civil war than all of the European Union member states combined. My contention is that those days, coinciding with the growing sense that an Assad victory in the civil war was a fait accompli, ushered in a radical shift in the Lebanese state’s orientation to Syrian income-generating activities as tactics of targeted dispossession came to replace unspoken toleration. The unanticipated reach and severity of the measures connected to the raids raised the possibility of yet another instance of displacement—this time from the country of refuge—as Syrians like Adil were forced to reconsider the tenability of their precarious stay in Lebanon.

A White Jeep in the Neighborhood

Khalid explained over the phone to Adil what he knew about the raid. A white jeep carrying three officers of the General Security Directorate—the government agency that, among other responsibilities, regulates the entry and stay of foreigners in Lebanon—pulled up in front of the al-Sultan restaurant just up the hill in the neighboring municipality. Adil and Khalid knew the place well since they would direct customers there if they were out of something. The officers asked the owner for his ‘papers,’ the shorthand Syrians used to designate the many forms of personal status documentation they needed to carry.

Displaced children in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon.

Hans van Reenen, Flickr cc

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (right) visits with a Syrian family that has been living in a refugee camp in the Beqaa Valley of eastern Lebanon for five years.

UN Photo/Mark Garten, Flickr cc

The request for papers was nothing out of the ordinary. Syrians living in Lebanon and young men in particular were used to being hassled by the various branches of the Lebanese security apparatus. General Security, the Internal Security Forces, and the Lebanese Armed Forces maintained checkpoints on major roads, while the secret police (mukhabbarat) would add flying checkpoints during times of heightened political tension. If stopped, handing over a valid residency card was the only sure way to avoid being detained, but by 2018 more than 73 percent of Syrians over the age of fifteen lacked even this baseline form of legal status. At $200 per person, every six months renewal was cost-prohibitive for the majority of Syrian families surviving on less than the $400 monthly minimum wage. “Papers” then meant any combination of a passport, ID card, stamped entry card, expired residency, UN registration certification, or other documents sufficient to convince an officer they had at minimum entered Lebanon legally.

Other aspects of the raid, however, flipped their assumptions about when, where, and how the Lebanese state—al-dawla in Arabic—could interfere in their lives and with consequences. The anthropologist Joanne Nucho observes that Lebanese citizens rhetorically ask “wayn al-dawla?” (where is the state?) to articulate their cynicism and anger at the government’s failure to provide adequate infrastructures and public services. Yet for Syrians, a nuanced understanding of the modalities and geographies of the Lebanese state’s presence and absence alike was key to survival. Young men like Adil and his friends developed what the French theorist Michel de Certeau calls “tactics” of everyday presence and movement to circumvent the strategies of state power deployed against them. At the most general level, they believed that if they stuck to the neighborhoods rather than the main road—a colloquial distinction indexing state presence and absence in these central Beqaa municipalities—they were safe.

Al-Sultan restaurant was located deep inside a hillside neighborhood, part of a strip of businesses where shopkeepers sold smuggled cigarettes with impunity, and the working assumption was that state security never came around unless they were after someone specific. Yet the armed officers who climbed out of the jeep that day were not looking for a criminal suspect nor did they merely ask the owner for his personal status documents. They demanded instead that he turn over the certificates showing that the business itself was registered. When he could not produce them, the officers ordered the restaurant closed and gave him 48 hours to resolve his status before they would return to seal the door with red wax until the issue could be adjudicated in court. After the call with his cousin ended, Adil remarked to me that he had never heard about the requirement to register with the Ministries of Health, Labor, and Interior and Municipalities, let alone possessed any certificates. The rumor Khalid heard was that the raid was part of a campaign that would target neighboring municipalities one-by-one in the coming week.

Adil takes a break from work at the restaurant.

Sam Dinger

Small Businesses and the Dirani Diaspora

With an estimated 1.5 million Syrians living alongside 4.5 million Lebanese citizens and 500,000 Palestinian refugees, Lebanon hosts the largest per capita refugee population in the world. Urban ethnographers like Elijah Anderson have observed that street corners are socially vibrant microcosms of the urban societies that surround them, a point as true in the central Beqaa as it is in New York or Chicago. Within a ten-meter radius of Adil and Khalid’s restaurant were a dozen other businesses with a diversity of ownership reflecting a local cosmopolitanism forged through decades of migration. Across the street were a Lebanese-owned lingerie shop, a Syrian barber who grew up in Lebanon, and a pharmacy run by an Arabic-speaking Russian woman who met her Lebanese husband in the Soviet Union. Around the corner were an optometrist’s office, a Syrian man selling hookahs, and a cafe run by a Lebanese-Syrian woman who served espressos to day laborers who drank and gambled inside. While a nearby grocery store run by a Palestinian Christian carried a sign reading “we welcome our Syrian brothers,” others in the neighborhood viewed the newest arrivals with a deep suspicion informed by memories of the 30-year Syrian military occupation that ended in 2005.

My interlocutors estimated that Syrians outnumbered Lebanese residents in that municipality and that some 60 percent of those—including Adil and Khalid—hailed from Darayya, a middle-class, Sunni-majority suburb just south of Damascus, the Syrian capital. Darayya was an early hotspot for revolutionary activism in the peaceful demonstrations that gripped the country in mid-2011. The town was ultimately destroyed in a series of retaliatory airstrikes after the revolutionary uprisings morphed into an internationalized civil war with the Russian and Iranian governments and their proxies rushing to the aid of President Bashar al-Asaad’s beleaguered regime. Khalid’s father, the director of a charitable fund for orphans and a prominent local supporter of the revolution, was killed in 2012 in what they believed to be a targeted assassination. Adil’s older brother, a photographer for the grassroots revolutionary newspaper published by Darayya’s local coordination committee where Adil also volunteered as a delivery boy, was disappeared by the regime’s secret police. The two cousins and their families fled home days after an August 2012 massacre killed more than 300 civilians in Darayya, joining the ranks of the 5.6 million Syrians—over 25 percent of the country’s pre-war population—forced into exile as part of the largest global refugee movement since World War II.

Khalid came to straight to the Beqaa with his mother and four younger siblings and later married a young woman from his hometown. Adil’s parents sent their son alone across the border and rented an apartment with their daughters in the mountains outside Damascus. He grafted fruit trees in the northern Beqaa, painted apartments in Beirut’s southern suburbs, and collected bills for the municipality in Aramoun. During these years of perpetual movement, he did not, as he put it, “start taking down numbers” of the people he met until a visit to Khalid when he ran into old school friends who he had not seen since the massacre. He left Aramoun to move in with them and join his cousin in the restaurant business. Khalid fronted $6,500 in start-up capital and Adil provided his labor in exchange for an equal share of the profits rather than a wage. In a good month, he could net $500, enough to cover his family’s rent in Syria and his own living expenses. Khalid needed twice this sum to pay for his siblings’ school fees and a comfortable apartment for his family so he worked shifts at another branch of the restaurant where he was the sole proprietor.

Taking into account the wages paid to their teenage trainee and the part-time employee who helped with the lunch rush, revenues from this three-table restaurant supported the livelihoods of more than twenty individuals on both sides of the Lebanese-Syrian border. However, the potential stakes of the business raids extended beyond the owners’ and employees’ families. The sociality of the street corner provided the most immediate context for the development of what sociologist Javier Auyero calls “problem-solving networks,” informal institutions for the distribution of material resources and symbolic systems that render the experience of marginality in a particular time and place meaningful. By generating stable enough revenues year-round, small businesses enabled both remittances and the circulation of credit between Syrians in Lebanon, like the many men working in construction, for whom earnings were less predictable. Last, but by no means least, was the role these businesses played in recreating, however imperfectly, the lively social atmosphere of a Damascus neighborhood. The traffic of neighbors dropping in to share a tea, a smoke or a bawdy joke often exceeded that of paying customers, providing an antidote to what Adil and others criticized as the impersonal and westernized character of social life in Lebanon.

Dispossession and Double Displacement

The day after that first raid, Khalid picked up me and Adil in the battered Dodge minivan that he used to transport supplies between his restaurants. He wanted to drop in on other business owners they knew to see if there was any collective sense of the significance of the previous day’s event. On the way to their great-uncle’s grocery, they noted that the steel gates were down at the businesses around the shuttered al-Sultan. The grocery was open, however, and looking the part of wise old shopkeeper in his crisp white apron, their great-uncle explained that he was already talking to the same lawyer who facilitated his residency permit. He heard rumors that “fixing up the papers” for a shop will cost upwards of $4,500 with additional fees for restaurants. He said the owner of al-Sultan is leaning towards a different option—selling a majority stake to a Lebanese owner who can register it cheaply in his name and bring him back on as a worker. Their barber on the lower side of town was more dismissive of the raids. “If security turns in at the Tuesday market (at the intersection with the main road), the news will make it to me faster than their car. Thirty seconds and I’ll have the bikes pulled in and the shutter down.” Adil stood outside for a smoke while Khalid finished his shave. He told me that the barber’s confidence is misplaced—less than a kilometer of open road separates his storefront and the intersection.

The raids, the restrictive measures, and the proposed workarounds have echoes in the Lebanese government’s longstanding discriminatory treatment of the country’s Palestinian refugee population. Since 1982 the Lebanese Ministry of Labor has barred Palestinians from over 70 commercial and administrative professions, categories encompassing all but the most menial work, while a 2001 law subsequently abrogated their right to acquire property. Justified politically as a means to keep a temporary population from settling down, measures like these, whether enforced upon Palestinians or Syrians, present the government with a cruel win-win scenario. In the event that business owners pay the outlandish fees necessary to regularize their status, the Lebanese state—burdened by the third-highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the world—gains a much-needed source of revenue. And if pressure forces them to close and leave, the government makes progress towards the goal of “decreasing the number of Syrians in Lebanon” articulated in its first formal statement on the Syrian refugee issue, the 2014 “October Policies.”

With an estimated 1.5 million Syrians living alongside 4.5 million Lebanese citizens and 500,000 Palestinian refugees, Lebanon hosts the largest per capita refugee population in the world.

Eyeing their own business later, Adil lamented that their main commercial advantage, visibility from the main road, turned into a liability overnight. That their restaurant was named after the Syrian capital made matters worse. The bright red and yellow triangular sign that Adil designed jutted out like a target above the door. Adil and Khalid decided to return after dark and rip it down. Khalid perched himself perilously atop a tall cylinder of cooking gas that we wheeled out of the kitchen and used their biggest knife to hack around the lower edges of the sign where the screen-printed vinyl met the steel frame. After freeing the lower half, he jumped off the cylinder with a corner in hand, ripping down the rest. We finished by packing up perishables so they could give what they could not use to their friends and neighbors rather than losing it to spoilage. Adil estimated that they were giving away more than $100 worth of food and that they would lose $80 in revenue for every day they stayed closed.

In this cycle of displacements, Sudan and then Egypt promised to offer temporary refuge, if only from the gnawing fear that Adil described in those final months of standing behind the counter and waiting for the inevitable knock from General Security.

However, Khalid added emphatically, if they needed to close they were going to close on their terms.

As they packed up the van, the Lebanese woman who owned the lingerie shop peeked her head out and asked what they were doing. “Returning to Syria,” Adil replied. “Seriously?” she asked. Adil laughed, “No, no, God willing we’ll stay here forever. Just closing for two or three days till the raids pass.” The woman smiled and wished them luck.

Adil and Khalid kept their restaurant closed for two weeks until mounting expenses forced them to reopen. While the raids subsided in December, by February, plainclothes officers were targeting individual businesses seemingly at random. Some speculated that those initial town-by-town raids had been designed to produce a kind of census of Syrian-owned shops since the authorities could assume that businesses that closed preemptively were ipso facto Syrian. Only a tiny percentage had access to enough liquidity to pay the status regularization fees, while economic necessity forced the rest to stay open and risk dispossession by the Lebanese authorities. When General Security got to Adil and Khalid in April 2019, they gave them 48 hours to clear out or begin the regularization process and warned that their assets would be seized if they attempted to reopen without authorization. With the Lebanese economy showing signs of impending crisis, they decided it was time to sell everything and leave.

Slowdowns in construction and the restaurant industry coupled with the business closures had already eroded the economic base of the Syrian diaspora well before the late 2019 onset of an economic collapse that has seen the Lebanese lira lose 80 percent of its value amidst widespread shortages and political unrest. That spring, prior to the crash, Khalid only managed to get $300 for the restaurant equipment in a resale market flooded by the raids, an astonishing 95 percent loss. He gave the money to Adil. It was just enough to buy a one-way ticket to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, one of the last countries on earth granting visa-free travel to Syrians. Many young Syrian men treated Sudan as a way station between destinations viewed as more desirable, including Malaysia, Libya, and Egypt. The cousins intended to meet a smuggler in Khartoum and travel north through the desert into Egypt to join relatives in the coastal city of Alexandria.

The pair departed Lebanon days apart from each other at the end of Ramadan, displaced into an ever more uncertain future, this time by the quieter violence of dispossession rather than the spectacular violence of war. In this cycle of displacements, Sudan and then Egypt promised to offer temporary refuge, if only from the gnawing fear that Adil described in those final months of standing behind the counter and waiting for the inevitable knock from General Security. Against that sense of being trapped and targeted, movement was an end in and of itself. Khartoum was a place where he could jump back into the work of adapting, hustling to get by, planning for the future, and anticipating further displacements to come.