Dr. Hector Hajjar is Minister of Social Affairs of Lebanon.
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I want to tell you about a country that has long been beloved by Europe and France.
Of a country whose writers, explorers, missionaries, soldiers, and even politicians had grasped an essential part of the complexity.
This country is Lebanon.
My country.
A nation today facing the worst dangers.
Danger of war which never leaves our neighborhood, and which today threatens even our soil.
Danger of despair, which transcends generations, confessions, social conditions.
Danger of poverty, which overwhelms so many families who were formerly members of the middle class, and who now find themselves spying on exchange rates, food aid, and the future of a region whose tremors never fail to affect our destiny.
You will undoubtedly answer me that the informed public still regularly hears about Lebanon.
Certainly, but it is to associate it with corruption, militias, drugs.
As if the darling child had become a shameful relationship, a distant relative, whose attendance and love would be forbidden by public rumor.
Oh.
As Minister of Social Affairs, you have no need to convince me that the solidarity of France and Europe for the Land of the Cedars must not be exercised without demands.
For a long time some of my compatriots have lacked the integrity necessary to defend the dignity and honor of Lebanon.
However, it is not certain that others, in France and around the world, have not also benefited from these prevarications.
The Lebanese people no longer want this operation.
He made it known by all means: in the street, at the ballot box, in the newspapers, to international institutions.
He wants justice and the truth about the explosion at the port of Beirut, he wants lasting institutions, an ordered political life put at the service of the Common Good.
No one can resist a people who espouse such ambition.
But for the Lebanese to succeed in rebuilding social life according to the justice to which they aspire, they must remain alive.
And no one survives suffocation.
The international community imposes on Lebanon the continued presence of two million Syrian migrants on its soil, or more than 30% of our population.
Hector Hajjar
Lebanon is caught in a vice.
On the one hand, an international community which imposes the continued presence of two million Syrian migrants on its soil, or more than 30% of our population.
On the other hand, the threat by donor countries to stop funding UNRWA
(United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East)
, while nearly 500,000 Palestinians live in our country, cessation of financing which is part of a constant questioning of international aid to Lebanon.
Do you know of a single country in the world that welcomes such a proportion of refugees and migrants on its soil?
Do you know of a single country in the world that exercises such constant solidarity with communities which were, let us not forget, so intimately linked to the tragedies which stain its recent history?
Imagine France welcoming, in the same proportion, 21 million refugees;
neither the national infrastructure nor the social structure would resist it.
This international “aid” that Lebanon receives sparingly should not be considered as a charitable handout, but as a fair retribution for the costs that our population bears, alone, due to the presence of refugees that no one wants in their home. .
Instead, what Lebanon gets in return is an accumulation of contemptuous remonstrances and moralizing admonitions.
Although being the most generous country in the Middle East for its reception of refugees and migrants, Lebanon is ordered to die slowly, with no other plan for the future for its population than Western dilettantism in the face of the consequences of the upheavals. regional upheavals for which the West is at least partially responsible, after all.
Yes, France and the EU regularly agree to humanitarian aid which helps to prevent – at the cost of many sacrifices for the Lebanese – the civil war from immediately becoming the Lebanese national horizon again.
However, 80% of my compatriots live below the poverty line, and rafts of desperate families already regularly leave the port of Tripoli.
How can we not be alarmed by such a precarious situation, precarious both politically and economically?
How can we not see that the danger of implosion awaits us?
Love needs proof rather than speeches: this is the testimony that the Lebanese expect from France.
Hector Hajjar
It will then be too late to hope that the reforms that Lebanon is expected to undertake will see the light of day.
Visiting Paris and Brussels, I want to convince my interlocutors of the imminence of an irremediable fracture in the Lebanese civic pact.
An inevitable divide, unless all international partners immediately convince themselves that by allowing the seeds of chaos to flourish, chaos will occur.
However, the historical experience of the Middle East is clear: if we cannot expect anything good from chaos, Europe and France cannot expect anything good either.
Help Syrian migrants find their country.
Help Palestinian refugees find a future outside the Lebanese camps.
Help the Lebanese regain hope in their national destiny, a universal prerequisite for the country's recovery.
Love needs proof rather than speeches: this is the testimony that the Lebanese expect from France.
I call on all participants in the next “Brussels VIII” summit to remember that the displaced and migrants present on Lebanese territory are not intended to remain there for generations to come.
Any new agreement must therefore concretely integrate the issue of repatriation of Syrian refugees, through a detailed implementation plan.
And if this were not the case, the Lebanese would inevitably understand that the disappearance of their country is a working hypothesis of the international community.