PM Salam from Berlin: Refugees are affecting our economy and security...

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Prime Minister Tammam Salam voiced hopes on Tuesday that the international community would become aware of Lebanon's huge financial needs to address the burden of Syrian refugees in the country.

“The refugees are affecting our economy and security... We call for more funds to address the repercussions of the refugee crisis,” Salam noted at the opening of the Berlin conference on Syrian refugees, which was attended by Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil and Social Affairs Minister Rashid Derbas.

Foreign ministers and other representatives from around 40 nations met in Berlin to coordinate international support for the refugees from the Syrian war.

“We have huge challenges ahead, including the crisis of the Syrian refugees that Lebanon and neighboring countries are suffering from,” Salam said before attending a conference on refugees.

Salam also noted during a joint press conference with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier that Lebanon must cooperate with the international community, adding that Lebanon adopted "practical measures to deal with the crisis.”

Salam thanked Germany for hosting the conference and a meeting for the International Support Group for Lebanon.

For his part, Steinmeier said that the presence of 1.5 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon is "too much for the country and for the balance of coexistence," urging the International community to come to the aid of countries hosting refugees to help them "preserve stability."

Steinmeier, whose country has led the way in Europe by taking in 70,000 refugees and giving nearly 650 million euros in aid, said international efforts to stop Islamic State's "murderous rampage" would fail without a parallel solution for the growing refugee problem.

Steinmeier also praised the generosity of neighboring states for sheltering more than three million people who have fled Syria in a 3 1/2-year civil war that has killed nearly 200,000 people. But he said simply providing the basics was not enough.

"Hopelessness and despair make people vulnerable to radicalization and manipulation. This is a real threat as half of the refugees are children and teenagers," he said. "We must ensure that these people have a chance to receive an education."

Last week, the Lebanese government announced that it will ask the United Nations to stop registering refugees who enter the country from neighboring Syria.

Lebanon has the highest per capita concentration of refugees in the world, with one in four residents a refugee, many of them living in the poorest areas.

Lebanon is hosting around 1.5 million registered Syrian refugees, a huge burden for a country with a population of just four million.

More than three million Syrians have fled their war-torn country since the revolution that erupted in March 2011, with most taking shelter in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq.

In the same regard, Jordanian foreign minister Nasser Judeh said his country and other nations neighboring Syria are approaching "host-country fatigue" because of huge demand from refugees for housing, schools, jobs and healthcare and scant resources like water.

"We are approaching host-country fatigue in which the limit of our ability to address the needs of Syrian refugees is being tested and has already been reached," Judeh told the international conference in Berlin, adding that his country alone hosts 1.5 million Syrian refugees and economic migrants.

In turn, deputy foreign minister of Turkey Naci Koru said "the neighboring countries, including Turkey, have to date had to shoulder an unfair share of the humanitarian burden resulting from the conflict in Syria," which has taken in more than 1.6 million Syrian refugees so far, at a cost of $4 billion.

"The contribution that we have received from the international community - only $250 million - has fallen significantly short of our expectations," he said.

With IS posing a threat to an expanse of territory inside Syria that is home to about 5 million people, "we are faced with the risk of further humanitarian disasters and continued large-scale movements of Syrians towards our borders", Koru added.

LBCI/REUTERS

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