Migrants flee conflict – but face hardships

In the Syrian governorate of Tartous on the Mediterranean coast, a group of Filipino women are spending their days in a shelter – but they are dancing with joy.

They are just a handful of thousands of migrant workers who not only have fled the conflict in Lebanon, but also left a life of hardship. The mistreatment they experienced at the hands of their employers and recruiting agencies only worsened when they tried to flee Lebanon.

“The [recruitment] agency [in Beirut] only gave me US $50 and I was owed three months pay [US $450]. Now I’m going back with nothing,” a Sri Lankan migrant worker, Arti Chitram, said.

Many Migrant workers in Lebanon – some legal residents, others not – have found it difficult to leave the country since the current conflict started on 12 July, after Hezbollah, the armed wing of the Lebanese political party, captured two Israeli soldiers.

Israel has carried out a vast ground offensive in the south and has hit targets all over Lebanon, while imposing a sea, land and air blockade over the country. Hezbollah has responded by launching hundreds of rockets into northern Israel.

With some individual governments unable to afford to evacuate their citizens from Lebanon, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), working with the United Nations, has been bussing stranded migrants across the border to Syria and then sending them back to their own countries.

"To date we've evacuated over 8,500 migrants, around 90 to 95 percent of whom are women," said Rana Jaber, who is co-coordinating the Syrian operations of the IOM.

Before the fighting began a month ago, an estimated 200,000 migrant workers were living in Lebanon, the majority of them Sri Lankan women informally employed by Lebanese families as domestic staff.

Many Filipinos, Ethiopians, Bangladeshis and Ghanaians also work in Lebanon and have been taken across to Syria, Jaber said. "Normally they stay for about one night in the shelter, and then we fly them back home."

The majority of workers had been brought into the country by recruitment agents who act as intermediaries between Lebanese employers and agencies in the home countries.

Once in Lebanon, many work 10 hours a day, seven days a week in return for a monthly wage of US$100 to US$150. Although this wage is small enough to make them affordable for Lebanese, many of the workers wire money back to their home countries where the wages are significantly lower and jobs are hard to come by.

Some domestic workers say they have been cheated or even physically abused when they requested to leave the country because of the war between Israel and Hezbollah.

One Sri Lankan woman, who did not want to be named, showed an IRIN reporter her injuries. To prevent her from leaving Lebanon, the recruiting agent beat her so severely that she could not stand up on her own, she said.

IOM’s Jaber said there have been several cases where fleeing migrants were locked in their houses by their employers, who fled to mountain refuges. To escape, some workers resorted to jumping out of windows or climbing down from balconies using sheets.

Others encountered more problems at the Lebanese-Syrian border, with the IOM reporting that some workers were temporarily delayed by the Lebanese authorities for lacking the correct paperwork necessary to leave the country.

"There have been a few cases of this," says Jaber. "Although, as the number of escapees continues to grow, the authorities are becoming more and more flexible."

Relief and even delight were the immediate reaction for many of those migrants who left Lebanon behind, but opportunities for a better life may be few and far between.

"All these girls are young girls, suffering because of their jobs,” said Tigrist Gegachew, an Ethiopian worker who recently arrived by bus at a shelter near the town of Tartous.
"If our government gives us a job or a chance, we will stay in our own country."

aw/ar/ls

watch video