These are mainly women. Migrants working as domestic workers in Lebanon have found themselves locked in homes by their employers who fled Israeli air raids. A situation that the UN migration agency expressed concern on Friday in Geneva.
“We saw in the south (of Lebanon) that employers were leaving but they were leaving their domestic workers on the street, without taking them with them or, worse, locking them in the house to make sure that “She is guarded while they seek safety elsewhere,” lamented Mathieu Luciano, head of the office of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Lebanon.
“Nowhere to go”
Others, who often do not speak Arabic, find themselves abandoned on the streets, he added during a press briefing in Geneva via video link from Beirut. “Many are undocumented (…). As a result, they are very reluctant to ask for humanitarian aid because they fear being arrested and perhaps deported,” explained Mathieu Luciano, according to whom there are also “huge mental health problems » among domestic staff.
The IOM has looked into the plight of 170,000 migrant workers in Lebanon, many of whom are domestic workers from Ethiopia, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Bangladesh and the Philippines. “We are receiving more and more information about domestic workers abandoned by their Lebanese employers and left either on the street or at home while their employers flee,” said Mathieu Luciano.
Their options for shelter are very limited, underlined this official, who visited on Thursday a shelter in the Lebanese capital where 64 Sudanese families have taken refuge who “have nowhere to go”.
Precarious situation
The situation of migrant workers is all the more precarious in Lebanon as their legal status is often linked to that of their employer within the framework of the “kafala” sponsorship system which governs foreign labor.
According to human rights organizations, this system opens the way to many abuses, such as withholding salaries and confiscating official documents. The IOM is increasingly contacted by migrants who want to return home and a number of countries have requested its assistance to evacuate their nationals.
However, such aid “would require significant funding, which we currently do not have,” noted Mathieu Luciano. Israeli strikes on Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon have killed more than a thousand people since September 23, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health, and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes.