Lebanese Deputy Speaker to Asharq Al-Awsat: Return of Syrian Refugees Priority After Government Lineup

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by aawsat.com -- Lebanese Deputy Speaker Elie Ferzli told Asharq Al-Awsat on Friday Lebanese politicians will start working on the return of Syrian refugees to safe areas inside their country, directly following the government lineup. “We will refuse that 24 hours pass after the birth of the new cabinet without the presence of serious talks for the return of Syrian refugees to their country,” he said, adding that Lebanon would not mind demanding the help of the international community to speed up their arrival to Syria. General Security chief Abbas Ibrahim uncovered Thursday the presence of ongoing contacts with the Syrian regime in order to repatriate the Syrian refugees. “Contacts with Syrian authorities are underway to secure the return of thousands of refugees back to their homes. The issue is imminent,” he said

His comments came after Maronite Patriarch Cardinal Bechara Boutros Rai said he had asked French President Emmanuel Macron to encourage Syrians return to their country, during a meeting between the two men this week in Paris. Ferzli criticized officials who refuse to negotiate with the Syrian regime on the issue of Syrian refugees. “Those people announce they are against the presence of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. But, this position is not enough to assure their return home. What is important is to work for that end,” he said. There are more than one million Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Their presence drove division among political forces: The Free Patriotic Movement and Hezbollah do not mind holding contacts with the Syrian regime to secure their return to Syrian safe areas. However, the Mustaqbal Movement reject any coordinating with Bashar Assad’s regime, saying their safe and secure return should be realized through the United Nations.

Lebanon: Aoun Signs Controversial Naturalization Decree

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Beirut - Asharq Al-Awsat --Lebanese President Michel Aoun signed a decree to naturalize dozens of personalities, including Syrian businessmen, stirring a wave of controversial reactions amid fears of resettlement plans. A Lebanese minister, who declined to be identified, said the decree included the names of businessmen of Syrian, Syrian-Palestinian, Western and Gulf nationalities, noting that the Lebanese authorities had considered individual and collective requests for businessmen facing problems and obstacles in their work. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the minister said that the largest batch of names came from the Maronite Foundation in the World, and only 10 Syrians were included in the new decree. The decree gave citizenship to around 300 people, including Syrians, Palestinians, Iraqis, Jordanians, Yemenis, Tunisians, Egyptians, Saudis, Germans, French, British, Iranians, Chileans, Americans and Indians.

The Central News Agency quoted well-informed sources as saying that those benefiting from the new decree included businessmen whose naturalization might contribute to stimulating the economy through the creation of investments and employment opportunities. Kataeb parliamentary bloc member, MP Nadim Gemayel, said: “This is the start of a nationalization project at the national level which is categorically rejected,” pointing out that “the naturalization decree is a real threat to the balance between the communities.” “The president usually takes this step at the end of his term, but when the naturalization scandal is to compensate for election expenses and other expenses, it becomes totally unacceptable,” he stressed. “We have to know who has been given citizenship, and this subject will not pass unnoticed; we will examine the possibility of appeal before the Shura Council immediately after it is published in the Official Gazette,” Gemayel also said.MP Neemat Frem expressed his support to the naturalization of expatriates of Lebanese origins, meaning giving citizenship to those who are entitled to it. “But if what is said about the naturalization of others is true, then it would be a surprise and questions must be raised about the background” of such decision, he added.

Lebanese man sets World Record for fastest crossing of Lebanon on foot

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by lebaneseexaminer.com -- A Lebanese man set a Guinness World Record for the fastest crossing of Lebanon on foot — in just 1 day, 15 hours and 49 minutes! Ali Wehbi set the record in the town of Naqoura, one of the southernmost points on the Lebanese coast. The avid runner started the run on March 31 and ended on April 2, which is World Autism Awareness Day. “This run is dedicated to all persons with autism, all families dealing with it,” Wehbi said. “It’s also dedicated to all autism organizations offering support, research and treatments, each and every person is touched by it directly and indirectly.” Wehbi ran through some of Lebanon’s most iconic landmarks, including the Tropoli Castle, Raouche Rock, Saida Castle and Sour Old Heritage, the Guinness World Records reports. The landmarks were lit in blue for the #LightItUpBlue campaign to raise awareness for autism.

Pioneering oil and gas work begins offshore Lebanon

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infosurhoy.com --BY TOBY MURPHY---  The first effort to pull oil and gas from the waters off the coast of Lebanon began Tuesday, less than a year after bids, the country’s energy minister said Energy Minister Cesar Abi Khalil said efforts are under way after the government signed off on development plans late Monday, The Daily Star reported. Decrees put forward by the Lebanese government outline a model for revenue sharing, something that derailed previous efforts to court foreign investors. Few companies have waded into Lebanese waters since bidding opened last year. French energy company Total serves as the operator at two blocks in Lebanon’s deep waters. It’s working alongside Italian energy company Eni and Russian company Novatek. The companies signed two exploration and production agreements in Lebanon’s first international offshore licensing round. Eni said in February those agreements open Lebanon up for exploration. Lebanon last year filed a request to join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a body that aims to cast light on how countries manage their oil, gas and mineral resources. Khalil said that, as the country opens itself up to foreign energy investors, accountability was essential. The Lebanese government estimates there are 95 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 750 million barrels of oil in its territorial waters. The country, however, has been at odds with its neighbors over maritime borders in the Mediterranean Sea.

Maronite Patriarch Asks the World to Encourage Syrian Refugees to Return Home

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Paris -by  Michel Abu Najm aawsat.com -- --  Maronite Patriarch Bshara Al-Rai will return to Lebanon on Thursday following an official visit to France, where he met with President Emmanuel Macron and called for encouraging the Syrian refugees to return to their homeland. The issue of refugees was one of the main topics addressed by Rai with French officials, based on the Lebanese people’s fear of an international “desire” to keep the displaced persons in their hosting countries. The Maronite patriarch told Asharq Al-Awsat that when international conferences on Syrian displaced and refugees “insist on integrating them into the communities in which they are located, and facilitating their entry into the labor market, this indicates a tendency to keep them where they are,” describing such “insistence” as a threat to the Lebanese demographic balance.

In a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Rai said that Lebanon was under the burden of the huge number of refugees, warning that their continued presence in Lebanon would change the country’s demographic structure. In figures, the patriarch said that one third of the Lebanese people lived below the poverty line. In addition, 60 percent of Syrian displaced, according to specialized international agencies, suffered from the same situation. Therefore, the patriarch called for solutions to the problem of the refugees “to save Lebanon”, so that the Lebanese “do not find themselves strangers in their homeland” and to preserve the country as a “message” to the Arab and Islamic worlds. Rai underlined his rejection of two statements: the first is calling for a “forced” return of displaced and refugees, and the second is the commitment to their voluntary return. In this regard, he called on French officials to “encourage the Syrians” to return to areas that have become safe in Syria, and not to link their departure to a political solution and reconstruction.

Assad's new housing law is a veiled attempt to displace tens of thousands of Syrians – but even that won't help him win the war

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This article may not necessarily represent khazen.org 

by Robert Fisk -- independent.co.uk -- When wars end, the winners redraw the maps. That’s what the British and French did to the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. It’s what Hitler did in Eastern Europe when he thought he was winning. And what the Allies did after the Second World War. It’s what the Israelis did during the Palestinian Nakba (disaster). And what Saddam did to Kuwait after he invaded the UAE. But now a subtle twist. Even before it’s won back all of Syria, the Assad regime is doing a little redrawing of its own. Not of its national frontiers. But within its cities. For the new Law No 10 calls for what looks like mass property expulsion in those areas of the country which rebelled against the Syrian government after 2011. Even inside their borders, many Syrians claim that it will strip tens of thousands of citizens of their homes – especially in those pulverised districts of the country’s big cities which have been turned into miniature Stalingrads and Dresdens by years of fighting. And it will benefit the regime – author of the law – since all unclaimed property will become the property of the state. Is this the way to bring about the “reconciliation” which the Russians, the Syrian state itself and its supporters talk about so emotionally? “It’s true that Syria has lost the best of its youth and its infrastructure,” Bashar al-Assad said last year, “…but on the other hand it has gained a more healthy and more homogenous society.” Is this what Law No 10 is supposed to achieve? For it effectively deprives anyone who has opposed the regime or is thought to have opposed the regime or relatives of those who have opposed the regime or relatives of those who are thought to have opposed the regime, from regaining their property. The system of doing this – and the machinery of the law – has a special and sinister touch all on its own.

Here’s how it works. Destroyed areas of Syria are to be reorganised, developed and reconstructed. To prove your claim to property – damaged or destroyed – you must appear in person with your real estate documents within 30 days. Clearly, nobody outside Syria who opposes the government can do this – nor can those tens of thousands who live outside Syria’s frontiers to evade the military draft who, in theory and probably in practice, face arrest warrants if they go home. I took this up with a senior figure in Syria’s Chamber of Trade. No problem, he said. Property holders may appoint others – relatives or lawyers – to prove their claim to property. And this is true. Fourth degree relatives – second cousins, for example – can make this claim within the same 30 days. But proxy authorisation requires a security clearance which is unlikely to be given if those second cousins are representing relatives who are on a “wanted” list. All this is before we confront the hopelessness of millions of Syrians abroad whose documents of ownership were burned in their homes or in government buildings during the Syrian war. If you don’t have your papers, how do you prove you own your land?

Even Lebanon, whose government contains sympathisers of the Syrian regime – the president is one of them – has publicly expressed criticism of Law No 10 – mainly because their country hosts far more than a million Syrian refugees who, like the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and 1967 who fled to Lebanon, may now never return home. Ghassan Hasbani, the Lebanese health minister (and deputy prime minister) bluntly told a Saudi television channel that many of the Syrians in Lebanon “have lost their identity papers and some are prevented – out of safety fears – from returning to the country they left, fearing persecution.” The UN Refugee Agency says that more than 11 million Syrians have been displaced internally or to host countries during the war. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, more than 70 per cent of refugees lack basic identification papers. There are painful parallels here to the plight of the 1947/8 Palestinians refugees and their families, who are deprived of their homes under Israel’s 1950 Absentee Property law which effectively prevents any Arab returning to his land inside present-day Israel who was expelled, fled or who left the country after 29 November 1947.

Gebran Bassil, the Lebanese foreign minister, has received no reply to a letter he sent to his opposite number in Damascus, Walid Moalem, and to the UN Secretary General, expressing his own concern. “The inability of the displaced to prove their ownership within the given period,” he wrote, “may cause them to lose their property and sense…of national identity, which deprives them of one of the main incentives for their return to Syria.” Not that Lebanon is standing up for Syria’s refugees; it just wants them to leave – and regards Law No 10 as a severe disincentive since the legislation may deprive them of the homes they would go back to. Hasbani’s objection is straightforward: the implementation of the new law and the time frame: why only 30 days to produce papers and claim ownership? For Assad’s opponents, it’s much simpler. For them, the regime is trying to dispossess its largely Sunni Muslim opponents, rebuild the devastated areas in which they lived and then sell them off at vast profit. This, they say, is a form of sectarian ethnic cleansing since the government will inevitably allow its Shia Muslim allies, including the Alawite minority, to live in the newly reconstructed areas.

As far back as 2012, a Syrian legislative decree (number 66) allowed the government in Damascus to “redevelop areas of unauthorised housing and informal settlements [slums].” In the same year, legislation 63 allowed the Syrian finance ministry to seize the assets of people who fell under the Counterterrorism Law (again of 2012). But this law itself embraces the regime’s interpretation of what “terrorism” means. An opponent of the government? A critic of the regime? A civilian who turned to armed warfare when his home was attacked? One widespread claim is that the law enables Iranians to take over the property of exiled Syrians. By law, neither Iranians not any other foreigner can do so – but Iranian companies can own property if they join the reconstruction process, and so can Russian companies. There are repeated rumours in Syria itself that Iranian companies have bought hotels near the old city of Damascus, along with apartments near the Shiite Sayyida Zainab mosque in the city, a place of pilgrimage for Iranians and Iraqi Shia. In fact, Syrians are more concerned about Iran’s financial aspirations in Syria than they are about the Iranian revolutionary guard corps which so obsesses Israel and the US – and which may number fewer than 3,000 men in the whole of Syria.

All countries, of course, try to clear away their war ruins. The reconstruction of Rotterdam – blitzed by the Luftwaffe in 1940 – began under German occupation. Tens of thousands of ruined homes in Syria cannot be repaired or “restored” because they are damaged beyond repair or, in some cases, unrecognisable to the owners who have returned to them. And the recapture of most major Syrian cities gives the regime a chance to bulldoze the tens of thousands of illegally-built squats which surround Damascus, Homs and Aleppo, the so-called “informal settlements” referred to in legislation 66. Many of these slum structures were built by the destitute rural poor who flooded to the cities before the war after massive drought in the countryside, and who joined the armed and later Islamist militias which tried to destroy Assad. No legislation mentions why these young people were forced to build their slum homes – there was much wrong with the government’s rural policies before the war – nor how the buildings came to be constructed in the first place. Syrians know that bribes were paid. But then who were the bribes paid to? You can see why the laws choose not to go too deeply into the origins of these banlieues. There are contradictions. At least one regional governor has tried to persuade citizens to stay in their ravaged homes – and not to leave with the bus loads of rebel fighters to Idlib, the dustbin province of Syria which will surely suffer its own fire and death in the months to come (unless Russia persuades them to leave for Turkey). Talal al-Barazi, the governor of Homs pleaded with the civilians of Homs not to travel away with the bus loads of armed men escorted by the Russian army en route to Idlib or the Turkish border last year. He climbed onto one bus and promised its passengers that they could stay, that they would not be arrested or punished – until a Sunni cleric on the bus told al-Barazi quietly that the Islamist fighters had told the families they would be liquidated if they did not travel out of Homs. Al-Barazi, it’s said, may well be the next Syrian minister of reconciliation. But he will have a hard job after Law No 10.

So why the rush? Why now, when the war is still far from over, is it necessary to throw this legislation at the poor and the refugees and the displaced? True, there is likely to be a reorganisation of the internal security services, the mukhabarat, when the conflict is over – word has it that they will be placed under the control of the interior ministry in Damascus which might curb their often-freelance activities and brutality. And Bashar al-Assad knows that Syria’s continued existence comes only because of the Syrian army’s fighting abilities and the price it has paid – total military dead is now 87,000 – and with the help of the Russians. After this sacrifice, the army will have a major role in the rebuilding of Syria. So what is the purpose of Law No 10? We’ve seen property confiscation in Syria before. When it was part of Nasser’s United Arab Republic (along with Egypt), farms and plantations were nationalised, along with 23 private banks and other companies. The Baathists did the same in 1963-5 on a bigger scale. Most of the companies taken during this period collapsed under corruption and bad management. But this was small scale compared to Law number 10, which raises the all-important question of what kind of Syria Bashar al-Assad wants to see after the bloodletting is over and the Islamists are destroyed and all of Syria restored to central government control. Is this going to create the “more healthy society” of which he spoke last year? I guess it comes down to a simple equation: bad laws do not create “reconciliation”. And laws don’t win wars. They can restart them