I’m writing this in the Beirut airport, on the other side of customs, an exit stamp in my passport, at liberty to go where I want.  Welcome to one of the countless ways that my own life bears almost no resemblance to those of the estimated fifty thousand Iraqi refugees in Lebanon.  For them, leaving is not an option.  They cannot safely return to Iraq (and nor do many of them want to: well over half of those I talked to said that even peace would not lure them back to the site of so many traumatic memories).  But nor can they readily go elsewhere anytime soon.

I met a man today, for instance, who arrived in Lebanon in September with nothing but the clothes on his back.  Having been tortured in Baghdad, threatened and robbed in Damascus, and beaten almost to death in Beirut, he is desperate to be settled somewhere safe.  Yet his first meeting with UNHCR – a meeting that does nothing more than determine if he is eligible for refugee status – was not set to take place until December 29th.  (Safety issues aside, how he was supposed to survive in Lebanon in the intervening four months was woefully unclear.  Without UNHCR recognition, refugees can’t access any of the services provided by aid organizations.)  And that meeting represents only the first step in the long and chronically uncertain process of resettlement.  Those refugees hoping to get into the United States, for example, must undergo three separate screenings by three different agencies: UNHCR, ICMC (the International Catholic Migration Commission, an intermediary organization used by the U.S. to vet potential refugees), and, finally, the Department of Homeland Security.

Iraqi women and children waiting at a UNHCR refugee processing center in Beirut

In  applying for resettlement, refugees are competing for an extremely scarce resource.  Earlier this month, the United States set its 2010 quota for refugees of all nationalities at 80,000.  The global figure is not much higher, hovering somewhere around 120,000.  Compare those figures to the 2.5 million Iraqi refugees (to say nothing of the estimated 8 million other people fleeing conflict and persecution in other places), and it becomes clear that the resettlement process amounts to a painfully slow, painfully poor-odds crapshoot.

And here’s what makes it worse: the Iraqi refugees in Lebanon can’t leave, but they can’t just decide to stay, either.  Lebanon hasn’t signed on to the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the international protocol that outlines the responsibilities of those nations that accept asylum seekers – responsibilities that include granting them legal status.  The Lebanese government could decide to extend such status to refugees from Iraq anyway, but there is roughly zero chance that it will do so.

That resistance has nothing to do with the Iraqis, and everything to do with the most intractable problem facing the Middle East as a whole: Palestine.  Lebanon has long played unwilling host to some 400,000 Palestinian refugees – nearly one-tenth of the country’s total population.  Legalizing those refugees is politically unthinkable.  (That’s its own long and complicated story, but the short version is that doing so would threaten the status and power of Lebanon’s Christian community and foment fears about further tensions with Israel).  And that makes legalizing the Iraqis essentially impossible as well.  As a result, virtually every Iraqi refugee in Lebanon is, technically speaking, living there illegally.

An Iraqi man being interviewed at the UNHCR center

Despite that fact, the Lebanese government has, in many respects, treated the incoming Iraqis fairly well.  Most are granted entry at the border, all have access (in theory, although seldom in practice) to the nation’s education and healthcare systems, and the authorities routinely turn a blind eye to the widespread visa violations.  But by failing to legalize the refugees, Lebanon leaves them frighteningly vulnerable to every form of exploitation and abuse: the shorting or withholding of promised pay by employers, the use of child labor, and forced sex work, to name just a few.  There are laws to protect against such abuses, of course – but the law can’t help you much if you yourself are illegal.

Then, too, there are the psychological costs of living in a country that refuses to recognize that you are likely to remain there.  For Iraqis, Lebanon is not a home so much as a holding pen.  Over and over, the refugees I met there told me that they are living a slow death, that they are just marking time, that they cannot think about the future beyond hoping to be resettled somewhere new.  Because there is a political myth that they are merely passing through (a myth that is even more laughable in the case of the Palestinian refugees, who have been there since 1948), the Iraqis there cannot and do not begin to construct new lives.  Dreams of the future are confined to desperate fantasies of life in the United States or Sweden or Australia – fantasies that are made all the more poignant by being all the less likely to come true.