سودانيزاونلاين تدعو الجميع الى التضامن والعمل على مساعدة السودانيين بلبنان

For refugees in Lebanon, racism is part of life
Christian Henderson
Special to The Daily Star

For Joko Lolayoung, his first visit to Lebanon gave him an experience that is not advertised in any of the tourist brochures. “I have always heard about racism but I had never experienced it, until I moved here, and that is when I really felt it.”
Lolayoung (a pseudonym) is a refugee who is unable to return to his native Sudan and who is seeking asylum in Europe or Australia. He has been in Lebanon for three years ­ and they have not been easy.
Discrimination “affects every aspect of my life, such as my work. I don’t get paid what a Lebanese or European gets paid for the same job,” Lolayoung said. “I go out a lot, for example. If I visit a friend’s place and if it is a nice place then the janitor is suspicious of me.
“If I go to a cafe I always feel like they serve other people first. It is dangerous for me to hang out at night ­ the least I get is people calling me names. Twice I had a beer bottle thrown at me and once I got spat at,” he added.
“Compared to other countries in the Middle East, Lebanon is the worst. In Syria they have racism but it’s not open,” said Lolayoung, who has also lived in Syria and Egypt.
Like any society, Lebanon has its problems with racism.
“There is pervasive racism in our society, and it applies to all sectors of society in Lebanon. The poor, the rich, the Muslims and the Christians,” said Georges J. Assaf, director of the Institute for Human Rights at the Beirut Bar Association.
Nizar Saghieh, a lawyer who works on the cases of migrant workers, said that within the context of migrant workers, racism in Lebanon has particular characteristics.
“Racism (here) has nothing to do with racism in Europe. It has completely different causes. It’s not because there is some hatred toward them, it’s not because there is some fear against them. It is because they are despised because they are weak, because they are poor, because they have no means and because they are not strong,” Saghieh said. “We are mistreating the domestic workers and consider them as being a very despised group because they are weak.

“I don’t believe that there is a natural racism or an instinctive racism in Lebanese society, there is more a distinctive hatred of weakness,” Saghieh added. “You are speaking about a system where power is respected and weakness is despised.”
Jim Kelly, a forced migration specialist with the International Catholic Migration Mission, also pointed to the issue of status.
“I do believe the persistence and the institutionalization of some of the rules around migrant labor and migration, coupled with long-standing differences in power, have contributed to a situation where there is a kind of racism here in Lebanon.”
There are hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from Asia and Africa in Lebanon. Many of them are women and many find themselves exploited or abused; all of them are inadequately protected by the law.
Although Assaf said he did not believe that the legal system was institutionally racist, he did say that the legal system was ultimately responsible.
“The legal system is responsible for that (racism) because if the legal system is not per se racist or doesn’t encourage racism, it allows people to act or behave as racists if it is not punished by law. And in Lebanon you don’t have such a thing as racism punishable by law.”
Saghieh agreed, and said that Lebanese law does not even mention the issue of racism toward non-Lebanese.
“In the Penal Code in Lebanon you have only two articles which mention racism.” Saghieh said that both of these articles were just concerning discrimination and hatred within the religious communities in Lebanon. “We can say that Lebanese law does not recognize that racism itself is a crime or a bad thing,” Saghieh added.
Due to the nature of the sectarian system in Lebanon, people who are not from one of the recognized communities are not recognized in Lebanese law. “If you are not in any of these communities you have no status in this country,” he said.
Lolayoung is exasperated by some of the treatment he has experienced. “I don’t feel like this is the right place (for me). Back home there are lots of whites and some Lebanese and we treat them well. The reason I think they are doing this ­ I don’t want to be hard on them ­ they have been through a civil war and they don’t even trust themselves, so how can they trust other people?”