Human Rights/Development

Fair deal for domestic workers?



BEIRUT (IRIN) - Eighty Ethiopian women have been in Tripoli Women’s Prison in north Lebanon for over a year, accused of not having a passport, which was either taken from them when they started as domestic workers or which they never had in the first place. Most were arrested on the street after running away from their employers — usually because of abuses ranging from forced confinement and starvation to physical harm and rape. 

Families of the disappeared seek answers



BEIRUT (IRIN) - It was the summer of 1982 when Zahira Najjar, 66, last saw her son Abdallah, then 17 years old. The family was in Bhamdoun, a mountain resort east of Beirut, at the height of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war. Only Syrian forces were on the ground when Abdullah went to find transport to the capital to get his wounded leg seen to, Najjar said. She has seen and heard nothing of him since. “I can’t describe my feelings. A mother’s heart cries blood,” Najjar said, pulling a black-and-white photograph of the youth from her wallet. 

Life set to get harder for Nahr al-Bared refugees



NAHR AL-BARED (IRIN) - As he picked plastics and paper off the rubble-filled conveyor belt, Issam Sayyed indicated to a white house behind him pock-marked with bullet holes and with its roof caved in. “That’s my home,” said the father of nine, a Palestinian refugee displaced from the Nahr al-Bared camp in northern Lebanon, which was ruined in a 15-week war last year between the army and Islamist insurgents. 

Migrant workers' children face discrimination



BEIRUT (IRIN) - Children of domestic workers in Lebanon are an invisible segment of society. Many of the estimated 200,000 migrant domestics living in Lebanon — most of them women from the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Ethiopia — have no legal status in the country. Their children born in Lebanon thus have no official identity, and no statistics on their numbers exist. 

Despair, trauma, discontent among Nahr al-Bared's impoverished Palestinians



NAHR AL-BARED (IRIN) - They look like cargo crates: long lines of prefabricated steel units, stacked two high, set on the edge of the ruined Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon. Inside each airless 18 square meter unit there is a toilet, gas burner and tatty mattresses on the bare wooden floor. 

"Incoherent" agreement spells the way forward



BEIRUT (IPS) - The Lebanese unity government has finally came to terms with its ministerial declaration after weeks of political haggling. What promises and threats does the incoherent declaration hold for Lebanon in a polarized local and regional context? “The ministerial declaration is an impossible document that carries many contradictions,” says Oussama Safa, director of the Lebanese Center for Political Studies, a local Lebanese think tank. 

Displaced Allawis find little relief in impoverished north



HISA, AKKAR (IRIN) - They may have been uprooted “more than 40 times” over the years since Lebanon’s Civil War began in 1975, but Hussein Mohammed and his family say they have rarely felt as threatened as they do today. “When Israel did air strikes [in 2006] they dropped leaflets warning us to leave the village. These Salafis are trying to drive us out of the country,” said Mohammed, a member of the Allawi sect. 

Months after Qatar talks, fighting continues in northern Lebanon



TRIPOLI, LEBANON (IRIN) - A few hours after evacuating their bullet-riddled three bedroom flat on the street which divides Sunnis from Shia Allawis in Tripoli’s poorest neighborhood, Khaled Mansour and his new wife were woken by the sound of their front room exploding. “The rocket came through the window at dawn,” said the 23-year-old accountant with scraggly black beard and traditional white tunic, who had moved his veiled wife and mother into his uncle’s flat next door. 

Pages