Last Friday, January 4, a long-awaited macro-economic report by the McKinsey consulting firm, was released by the Lebanese government. Originally scheduled to be publicly released after the new cabinet was inaugurated, caretaker Economy Minister Raed Khoury said Monday that delays with government formation, together with Lebanon’s worsening economic situation, had pushed him to publish the report sooner.
Read further in Muftah Magazine.
Football in Lebanon continues to be plagued by sectarian violence. The final game of last year’s Alfa One League season between Al Ahed F.C. and Nejmeh Sporting club was played on April 15, 2018 in an empty Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium (capacity: 49,000) in Beirut surrounded by the army and its tanks. The first encounter that season between the two rivals was also considered a “high-risk” match, and was rescheduled at the last moment, at the request of the Lebanese Football Association and Internal Security Forces (ISF).
Read further in Muftah Magazine.
BEIRUT — Prime minister Saad Hariri returned to Lebanon today after announcing his resignation from Riyadh more than two weeks ago. To the surprise of many he suspended his resignation and called for national dialogue. My analysis for Deutsche Welle News.
BEIRUT — The number of migrants in the Middle East has more than doubled since 2005, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center.
Migrant workers, asylum seekers, refugees and internally displaced persons increased from around 25 million in 2005 to 54 million in 2015. This 120% increase is much higher than in North America and Europe (both around 20%) over the same period despite the arrival of 1.3 million asylum seekers in Europe last year, of whom many were from the Middle East. Forced and voluntary migration in the Middle East also grew at a faster pace than in Africa (90% increase), the Asia-Pacific (26%), and Latin America and the Caribbean (77%).
The share of migrants of the region’s population grew from 7% in 2005 to approximately 13% in 2015. In other words, one-in-ten people currently living the Middle East is either an international migrant or displaced. The Pew Research Center based its analysis on data from United Nations agencies.
This growth of migration in the Middle East is mainly caused by two factors: conflict and economic opportunity.
Armed conflict in Syria, Iraq and Yemen has displaced millions. This forced displacement accounts for the majority (60%) of the growth of the migrant population. The aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and subsequent civil war, the war in Syria since 2011, the rise of Daesh and the various conflicts in Yemen since the Arab Uprising had (internally) displaced 23 people by the end of 2015, about half of them living in Syria or Iraq, followed by Jordan, Yemen, Turkey and Lebanon.
Economic opportunity has attracted millions of migrant workers — mostly from countries outside the region — particularly to the oil-rich Gulf States: Saudi Arabia (10.2 million), United Arab Emirates (8 million), Kuwait (2.9 million) and Oman (1.8 million). But also Israel and Lebanon continue to attract migrants.
The figures from the Pew Research Center show how war and armed conflict have wreaked havoc on the region: the portion of migrants living in the Middle East that were not displaced fell from 78% to 57% in the past decade.
With winter approaching and no end in sight of the civil war, Syrian refugees in Lebanon are running out of time and money.
Nearly 90 per cent of Lebanon’s over one million Syrian refugees are today trapped in a vicious cycle of debt, according to the findings of a recent assessment by UNHCR, UNICEF and WFP, the World Food Program.
Full article published in the National Post on 21 November 2015.
