Flood response in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon – what have we learnt?

After a powerful storm, the Delhamiye plane close to Zahle city is entirely covered by strangely still floodwater. It is already night and the waters reflect the faraway city lights, like a nearby galaxy’s evil twin. A vehicle from the Ministry of Social Affairs lies half sunk in a nearby canal. We are improvising a wooden boards bridge over the roaring canal to rescue more than one hundred refugees from a flooded refugee settlement. Two terrified cats watch the narrow bridge, hesitating. The temperature is dropping quickly but the Syrian children are still taking the whole thing as an adventure, perhaps as an opportunity to see more of the Bekaa valley, to exit the informal refugee settlement from which they rarely travel.

The 2019 winter storms in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, inhabited by more than 360,000 Syrian refugees, have been the worst in many years. They have destroyed crops, flooded refugee sites and forced more than one thousand Syrian refugees to be evacuated to secure camps. Now that they are over, it is a good moment to take stock and learn some lessons from the response.

Prevention and preparedness

In the almost three years I have worked in the Bekaa, we have gone through a number of emergencies, some predictable, some not. Thousands of refugees were evicted by authorities in 2017. Heavy combats rocked the border municipality of Arsal later in the same year. Fires regularly ravage the informal refugee sites, made of plastic and wood, with children often being the victims.

Levels of prevention and preparedness have varied. Combats in Arsal were preceded by three months of detailed and also discreet contingency planning. Emergency SOPs cover small and medium scale floods and fires. Contingency plans are in place for big refugee influxes from Syria – whose likelihood has, at any rate, significantly dropped since last year.

The first lesson from the floods is perhaps the need for contingency and response mechanisms also for medium-scale emergencies, affecting several municipalities at the same time – and to spend more time and effort on preparedness. There is a high rotation rate among NGO and UN staff, and frequent refreshers of contingency mechanisms are needed.

It is often remarked than stable, post-emergency refugee situations are a good opportunity to reflect and improve on the much commented relief-development gap. The storms and the response to them have added a nuance here – rather than the relief-development gap, the one that the storms have exposed is that between refugee-specific humanitarian programmes and regular disaster prevention and response mechanisms. The extent of the recent floods have only exposed more clearly the gap, as well as the limitations of regular humanitarian programming for disaster prevention and response.

Regular disaster management mechanisms

These are more glaring when we realize, as it happens to local populations in many slums, the extent to which poverty pushes refugees into vastly inadequate living conditions, in particular informal settlements on flood-prone areas. Somehow paradoxically, given that refugees are much more exposed to these risks than host communities, mechanisms for regular disaster prevention and response mechanisms have not always covered informal refugee settlements – with the important exception of fire incidents, in which Civil Defence and the Lebanese Red Cross respond timely and effectively. During the floods, credit goes to the Ministry of Social Affairs, Ministry of the Interior, local authorities and law enforcement for effective emergency response, often without sufficient tools and equipment.

Local NGOs, local language

Other important lessons can also be learnt from the recent floods. Some local NGOs, often with very effective crowdfunding, quickly offered alternative accommodation to refugees displaced by floods. They also bypassed established coordination mechanisms. As UNHCR, we were off to a rocky start with some of the NGOs – they critiziced us in the press for being slow, and we critiziced them in meetings for not coordinating.

These differences were, however, quickly put aside. Together with functionaries from the Ministry of Social Affairs, we asked NGOs to call on us for advice and assistance. We also reached out to them and quickly established a modus operandi, training them in registration of newly displaced refugees in displacement sites and facilitating coordination of food and non-food assistance in the new displacement sites.

The active role of local NGOs in flood response also exposed language issues in coordination. Many coordination meetings are still in English in Lebanon, in a country where English is not an official language – which is somehow puzzling. My own reading of this is that Lebanese local NGOs are too polite to ask – and that expats have, somehow selfishly, normalized the situation, perhaps not realizing that local NGOs vote with their feet and just stop coming to meetings when not feeling welcome. Realizing this, we have now in the Bekaa a bilingual interpreter in all interagency meetings, so that everybody can express themselves in the language they feel more comfortable with.

The language gap also runs inside the local NGO community. Big Beiruti NGOs, as well as Lebanese NGOs set up by the educated Syrian diaspora, manage themselves very well in English. This is, however, not the case for long-established, smaller local NGOs in the Bekaa. This does not mean that they have less effective transnational connections – just that in many cases, they are not necessarily with the Western world.

Minorities and natural disasters

A final important lesson. Many of the most affected communities by the floods have been minorities – Turkmen, Dom and Bedouin, in particular. Some of them are even Lebanese-born and even before the Syrian crises, had already been pushed by poverty and discrimination into what are now the living conditions of refugees: informal, flood-prone settlements close to the main river courses.

The floods and the fact that many of them were temporarily displaced to bigger camps have made their situation more visible. They have also uncovered some inadequacies of current refugee response in addressing their specific problems, ranging from statelessness, lack of documentation, lack of access to education to even very poor Arabic language skills among Lebanese-born Turkmen children, which worsens their social acceptability and access to schooling. We quickly jumped to the opportunity, carried out a rapid protection assessment and obtained some additional funding for education and protection.

Their situation, and the fact that a sizeable number of them are Lebanese, also opens an oft-encountered dilemma in humanitarian response: must humanitarian aid be directed to prevent and mitigate the consequences of the crises at hand, or shall it be directed to the most vulnerable, no matter the origin of their problems? This is not a philosophical question. Right after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, some NGOs and UN agencies were quite reluctant to engage chronic sexual violence at Port-au-Prince slums, such as Cite Soleil. They preferred to prioritize IDP camps in the city, under the argument that the humanitarian operation needed to focus on protection problems and needs exacerbated by the crisis at hand, in this case the earthquake.

This is an ethically problematic proposition. During the floods, reality has shown that if belonging to an ethnic minority is an efficient entry point to assess vulnerability (for instance to sexual violence, child labour and abuse) then that vulnerability must be addressed if at all possible, including within the limits of the refugee response and no matter whether it has been the Syrian crises or long-standing poverty and discrimination that has put the population into vulnerable, informal refugee camps.