to go or stay, the dilemma that torments young people

“To leave.” This verb, used without complement, comes up frequently in the discussions of French-speaking Lebanese. “I would like to leave, but my husband has to stay here”, we hear on the terrace in the upscale district of Achrafieh, in the east of Beirut, the capital. In Lebanon, however, the desire to emigrate transcends languages ​​and social classes. But it seems to concern more young people, who are struggling to envision a future in a country plagued by unemployment and rampant inflation. Students or young workers, they often have fewer ties and more chances of obtaining valuable visas for abroad: the United States, Canada, France and Germany in the lead.

“This summer alone I have ten friends who are gone”, deplores Sarah, 19. “Already this return to school is very difficult”, confides this law student at Saint Joseph University in Beirut. The economic crisis, gasoline and electricity shortages are a burden that the young woman would have done well. “At home, I can no longer study after 11 pm, because there is no power”, she plague. If he misses his friends “terribly”, she understands their choice. “Me too, I’m going to leave, she announces. I already have to go to Paris in 2022 for a semester of study, we’ll see later. ” An expatriation that his parents encourage. “They would even like to follow me. But if we all leave, then I will never come back to Lebanon. “

Beside her, Chloe, her classmate, thinks to herself “torn”. Her family also pushes her to emigrate, but the 20-year-old student cannot bring herself to do so. “We talk about this almost every day, she relates. And at the university, some professors tell us to leave, to take a one-way ticket. ” She refuses to do so for the moment. “It would be too heavy emotionally”, she slices. In his eyes, the economic crisis places young people “in survival mode”. “The 2019 protests and the explosion [du port de Beyrouth le 4 août 2020] gathered the Lebanese, but it only lasted a while, she regrets. So everyone makes their plans, and we try to keep in touch as we can. “

On their phones, the two friends frequently see scrolling messages from their comrades who have gone to other regions.“They find it difficult to acclimatize, in Europe in particular”, Sarah explains. And at every major event in Lebanon, the group’s expatriates invariably jump on their phones. During the shooting of October 14 in the district of Tayouneh (Beirut), which left six dead, the two students say they received “an avalanche of messages” from all over the world. “How are you ?”, “Close your windows!”, “Hide !”, says Sarah, going up a group conversation. “We have to reassure them all the time “she breathes, her voice dead.

For two years, the Lebanese press has been trying to quantify the wave of emigration the country is undergoing. The number of passport applications has doubled in a year, with more than 6,000 documents issued every day since June, the daily reported. L’Orient-Le Jour. From January to April 2021 alone, around 230,000 Lebanese went abroad, out of the country’s 6 million citizens, according to the employment NGO Labora. Despite the lack of official figures on the issue, young Lebanese are the most affected by this mass exodus. The latest edition of the survey Arab Youth Survey underlines that in 2020, 77% of young Lebanese said they were actively thinking about leaving their country (article in English). Either the highest rate in the Arab world.

“There is nothing left here, it’s like a war zone”exclaims Jad, a mechanical student in Beirut. His smile contrasts with his dark, disillusioned gaze, which points to the ground when he answers questions. He does not want to mention the name of his university, for fear of “reprisals”. “I saw how the leaders treated the protesting students in 2019, I care about my health and my future”, he justifies himself. At the time, the images of injured demonstrators had dissuaded him from joining this movement which he referred to, as a majority of Lebanese, under the name of thaoura : “the revolution”.

Although he comes from a modest family in Mount Lebanon, Jad also wants to “leave”. At 19, Jad dreams of living in a country where “wages allow you to live normally”. He is betting everything on a student visa, his “exit ticket” to obtain a scholarship and complete his studies, before considering a career as an engineer.

Sally, 26, has chosen to start her career in Lebanon. After studying psychology in Beirut, she now works for the National Mental Health Program and the NGO Embrace, which provides hotline dedicated to mental health. The young woman says she only has a handful of friends, “and the most important are gone”, she regrets. They now live in Dubai, Canada, France, where Sally’s sister has also just left on a whim. “We feel left out, she confides. We stay here, in this mess, and we don’t know what’s going to happen to us. ” Despite the distance, friendships survive thanks to social media. “We have groups on WhatsApp, which were used to organize picnics or trips for example, and which are now our main means of telling our lives with friends from different countries.”

If she says to herself “more introverted than before”, Sally keeps morale high thanks to her work in particular. “I am much more useful here than abroad, people in Lebanon have very little access to psychological help”, she emphasizes. His family, hit like many others by the economic crisis, now needs financial assistance. “I find that I am well paid and I support them as best I can”Sally explains shyly. A weight which, added to the situation of the country, ends up weighing heavily on the shoulders of the young woman. “I feel like I took thirty years in the space of a year”, she breathes. Thanks to her training, Sally knows how to recognize the signs of mental exhaustion and warns that if her daily life deteriorates, she will not hesitate to emigrate. “As long as I hold on, I stay here”, she sums up, while showing pictures of Equu, her big white dog, “one of the reasons” that help him hold on.

For the Lebanese of the popular classes, those who could not study at the university for example, the question of emigration arises all the same, but involves different strategies. In the living room of his modest apartment in Tripoli, northern Lebanon, Suleiman remembers his first attempt at exile. “I had no other choice but to attempt a clandestine passage to Europe”, says the 32-year-old man, his misbaha (Muslim rosary) in his hands.

Often referred to as the poorest city in the Mediterranean, Tripoli is half an hour from the Syrian border. The city has seen thousands of Syrian refugees flock since 2011, while witnessing the departure of many residents. In September 2015, Suleiman tried, like hundreds of other Tripolitans, to move to Europe. In his bag at the time, “a second pair of shoes and $ 3,500 in cash, nothing else”, he lists. His departure was motivated by the economic slump in Tripoli. “There were no job prospects, and therefore no marriage, no possible life”, he says. In the plane that took him to Turkey, the first stop on his journey, were 14 Tripolitans, including 9 people from his street.

After landing in Izmir, on the west coast of Turkey, Suleiman paid $ 1,000 to get to Greece by boat. A perilous trip, organized at night on an overloaded boat. After nine hours of wandering, the crew were rescued by the Greek Coast Guard and brought back to the island of Samos. “That night, twelve people from another boat drowned”, he says. With his group, he traveled up Europe through the Balkans to Denmark by night bus, where he hoped to be able to settle down thanks to his level of English. “correct”. But after a year and a half of proceedings, without being able to work, his case was rejected. Suleiman was forced to leave Denmark for Germany, where he decided to take a return flight to Tripoli.

“I found a job, I am a window installer, and I got married”, he explains. Sitting on an armchair next to him, his wife Reyane, 29, shudders when she hears the story of the shipwreck, which her husband has not told her “only once”. The couple have two children, aged 3 and 4, who are playing in the next room. A peaceful home, but hard hit by the crisis. Two years ago, Suleiman was making the equivalent of $ 400 per month. He now only earns 100, “and everything becomes more expensive” he laments. Then his emigration plans resurfaced.

“I’m ready to go by boat, despite the risks. My bag is done!” he says in a confident voice, pointing to his bedroom door. His wife objects: she will follow him, but does not want to put the lives of their children in danger. “He will have the last word all the same”, she sighs. “People keep leaving, there are still smugglers, but the costs are higher than before”, details Suleiman. The couple are waiting for the start of 2022 to put a plan together. To go where ? “Maybe in Turkey, the Lebanese there tell us on Facebook that life is a million times better than here”, answers the father of the family, a glimmer of hope in his eyes.