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By Stephen Dockery
TRIPOLI, Lebanon: In his
downtown headquarters, Amin Mando spreads out the Tripoli Coordinating
Committee’s monthly refugee ledgers. Two oversized sheets of paper are
unfurled on the sitting-room floor, bearing the names of several hundred
Syrian families in need of aid.
Families’ names are written down
one column, their status recorded in another. Most are classified as
“poor,” while others are “very poor” or “conditions difficult.” The number
of people in each family is in a third column – many have five or seven
members, some nine, and one family totals 20.
It’s a snapshot of the thousands
of Syrian refugees who are going uncounted and unaided in Lebanon. They are
seeking help but are receiving little to no assistance from the country’s
very restricted official aid operations.
Their care has fallen to
religious charities and organizations such as the Local Coordinating
Committees, a loose but centralized network of about 100 Syrian activists
taking refuge in the country.
Committees or small groups of
activists are spread out across the country, from offices of a few people
in Akkar villages to larger ones with dozens of activists in the cities of
Tripoli and Sidon.
They try to fill the aid void by
providing items like diapers, medicine, cooking gas and blankets for the
thousands in need. The displaced activists are also working to keep their
revolutionary hopes alive, organizing anti-Syrian regime rallies and
spreading protest videos online.
“The U.N. doesn’t do anything,”
Mando says in exasperation.
He’s referring to the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ operations in the city of Tripoli.
UNHCR doesn’t have an office in
the city, one of the biggest hubs of refugees in the country, and the
operations they do have are limited by the government.
Coordinating Committee leaders
estimate that there is a refugee population of 7,000 in Tripoli alone,
while the UNHCR only acknowledges that many refugees in all of north
Lebanon.
“The situation is so bad,” he
says.
A second small document is also
unfolded on the floor. This one is the Tripoli group’s monthly expenses.
There are only two rows for
donations, several thousand dollars from a local man and a few thousand
more from student groups in Tripoli. It totals just over $8,000 for the
month, not even a full percentage of UNHCR’s monthly operating budget in
the country.
But they’re making it stretch.
The headquarters is actually a fabric shop and the sitting area turns into
a bedroom at night that sleeps eight people.
The others who are active with
Mando are refugees themselves from Homs and Hama, and they work to make
ends meet.
They distributed bottles of milk
and baby formula to 342 families with the money, while 416 families
received diapers. A total of $2,150 in grants was given out to improve
houses in the winter and $1,144 was given out as cash.
Their monthly expenses are just
one element of a network spread out across the country. It’s a loosely knit
web that’s controlled by a central administrative council of eight Syrian
refugees.
Sheikh Yasser is that group’s
general manager. Yasser, who hails from the Syrian coast and withholds his
family name for safety concerns, is a rotund man with a wide beard, wearing
a dark, untucked dress shirt.
Speaking on a couch in the
headquarters of a partner Islamic aid organization called Bashaer, he
explains how he oversees the network of Local Coordinating Committees in
Lebanon.
It’s a group of volunteers who
stay in contact by phone and online and are largely autonomous for
day-to-day work. Sheikh Yasser’s administrative council provides extra
funding to local councils and functions as a central hub for coordinating
aid for new arrivals.
Refugee families are one room
away, waiting to take blankets and food to their homes, where 10 to 15
people live under one roof. Sheikh Yasser says he has an unrivaled view of
the actual situation for refugees around the country and his criticism of
the current aid efforts in the north is caustic.
“There are no international
organizations working seriously in this area,” he says.
Along with a number of Islamic
charities, the Local Coordinating Committees provide basic staples such as
medicine and food.
They have also established
sophisticated medical care for wounded Syrians fleeing the conflict. The
Coordinating Committees and Bashaer charity provide transportation from the
border to hospitals in Akkar and Tripoli, where the wounded have access to
specialized doctors.
He says the group’s official
records show they provide aid to around 3,000 refugee families, or about
15,000 people – or about double the number taken care of by the UNHCR in
the north.
“We cannot maintain direct
communication with all the families because we don’t have the resources to
do it. All our work is on a voluntary basis,” he says.
But he says their aid provision
performance is tenuous at best, as there are no government benefactors and
donations trickle in from personal donations on an irregular basis.
Sheikh Yasser evaluates the
refugee situation based on security, economic conditions and housing, and
finds no front particularly satisfactory. The refugees suffer from
overcrowding and a lack of basic services where they reside, while the
activists live in fear of being detained by the authorities or kidnapped by
pro-Syrian groups.
Sheikh Yasser stays out of the
spotlight by avoiding public gatherings and spending time only with people
he can trust.
The core network under Sheikh
Yasser’s supervision isn’t entirely made up of aid workers. They are also
activists, dissidents trying to keep the hopes of regime change alive from
inside Lebanon.
The activists say that the
Lebanese authorities have asked the Coordination Committees to focus their
efforts on humanitarian aid work, but the network is also working to
bolster the opposition movement.
They organize rallies among the
refugee community, busing people to downtown Tripoli and providing them
with posters and flags supporting the Syrian opposition.
Many of the activists were
leading protests in Syria before they fled across the border to Lebanon.
Ahmad Moussa is the group’s main
media coordinator; he relays news from his network of opposition contacts inside
Syria to the outside world – a contact of his in the Baba Amr neighborhood
of Homs was one of the main sources of information from the city when the
Syrian army laid siege to it.
“The most important thing is
following up on news of our people back in Syria,” he says.
In a suit and slicked hair,
Moussa takes several phone calls a day from international media looking for
the latest news, but he must also stay on the move to avoid groups loyal to
the Assad regime.
He says he’s been warned that
Syrian authorities want him to stop his work, and that unknown gangs have
already tried to kidnap him twice.
“My job starts with the
humanitarian issue and ends with the political one,” he says.
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