Middle East’s refugees are vulnerable to an explosion of coronavirus cases - Financial Times

As the coronavirus pandemic rages across the world, little attention has been paid to the danger to and from the Middle East, especially Syria and neighbouring countries. Millions of vulnerable refugees, packed into a chain of failing states with wrecked health systems and racked by proxy and sectarian conflicts, have the potential to combine and combust.

Some analysts are warning that the Middle East could face catastrophe, that the arrival of Covid-19 means “all bets are off”, as Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, puts it in a chilling new paper. But little is being done specifically to address the mortal peril to more than 20m refugees and displaced people.

Syria’s civil war has scattered half the country’s prewar population: since 2011, about 6m are abroad, mainly in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and roughly 6m are internally displaced. To those must be added more than 1m displaced since December in Idlib in north-west Syria, where the Russia- and Iran-backed regime of Bashar al-Assad launched an offensive against the last rebel redoubt.

According to the UN, there are still almost 2m Iraqis inside that country displaced by the cycle of carnage since the US-led invasion of 2003. In Iran, one of the worst pandemic-hit countries, there are still an estimated 3m refugees from 40 years of conflict in Afghanistan. In Yemen, the poorest Arab country, where a Saudi-led coalition has waged a ruinous war against Iran-backed rebels since 2015, 4m are internally displaced, amid famine and a cholera epidemic.

This sea of lost souls is extraordinarily vulnerable, their immune systems weakened by poor nutrition and meagre, if any, healthcare, with precarious or sometimes no shelter (as in Idlib).

They are easily stigmatised, most typically as cheap labour undercutting host country workers or migrants trying to reach Europe and the west. But, this being the Middle East, there is plenty of scope, too, for the Saudi-led Sunni camp (backed by the US) and the Shia bloc led by Iran (supported by Russia and China) to use sectarian tropes to scapegoat each other for the coronavirus crisis.

“A perfect storm is gathering,” said one UN official for the region, who despairs of this mix of inaction and prejudice. “Many countries around the world are facing surges [in infections] but most of them can see it,” he says. “But here there is a risk we’ll wake up one day and find hundreds upon hundreds of thousands have already got it and there’s almost nothing to be done.”

Social distancing, even soap and water, are luxuries for many of these desperate people. So, too, is information on their plight. So far, there appears to be not a single case reported among Syrian refugees across the Levant. That in itself tells a story — unless you believe in miracles.

The Assad regime admitted to one case of coronavirus last Sunday. This sits oddly with a speech on Friday by Hassan Nasrallah, chief of Hizbollah — the Shia paramilitaries who dominate Lebanon’s politics, act as Iran’s spearhead in the Levant and helped salvage the Assads from defeat by Sunni rebels — who assured his followers all fighters coming from Syria and Iran were in quarantine.

Syria’s statement of its health position is not credible — and Hizbollah should know. The Assads have waged total war on the majority Sunni population for nine years and reduced much of the country to rubble. Backed by Russia’s air force they have destroyed scores of hospitals and hundreds of healthcare facilities in their attempt to exterminate the rebellion and its social milieu and change Syria’s demography. In the killing fields of Idlib the position is desperate.

The outlook for the region is bleak. It faces a cash crunch of collapsing oil revenues and remittance flows. Coronavirus is overwhelming the submerged trade networks that have kept these sinking states more or less afloat. Clinging to tattered shreds of legitimacy, their rulers are disinclined to provoke further peoples already in rebellion.

Security forces and militia in Tehran and Baghdad shot down hundreds of protesters last autumn. Last week, they did not dare try to restrict the mass movement of pilgrims in Iraq or Persian new year celebrants in Iran. This to-ing and fro-ing across the Levant, whether of paramilitaries or pilgrims, makes it difficult to contain any virus.

A wall of sanctions and serial conflicts divides the US and the west from Iran and its regional allies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. But there is urgent self-interest as well as a moral imperative in helping these countries help the refugees they shelter — and others such as Turkey and Jordan. This needs to happen before they are perceived to be vectors of coronavirus.

It would be vile for people who have suffered such abject misery to be painted as super-spreaders of a deadly virus that could so easily scythe them down.

david.gardner@ft.com

2020-03-26 08:02:22Z
https://www.ft.com/content/8e35a6e4-6de3-11ea-89df-41bea055720b