A question from Lebanon to international humanitarians…

By Nadine Saba 

Nadine Saba

[also found in From Poverty to Power]

As organisations race to respond to the unfolding crisis in Lebanon, Nadine Saba – representing hundreds of Lebanese and Global South NGOs – spoke at the recent Grand Bargain humanitarian gathering in Geneva. Here, we share an edited transcript of her powerful address…

On Sunday night, I was getting ready to pack to come here to join you in Geneve after a long day replying to calls from mayors and school directors asking for help; preparing with team members 1200 hot meals from a small community kitchen; preparing to dispatch drinking water for a new collective shelter that had just opened; following up with sector lead on hygiene kits to be delivered. I sat down, thought about this week, I thought about today and asked myself: what should I say?

Should I tell you what we feel? Or should I tell you what we fear? And would that make much difference? Should I tell you about the numbers of displaced, the number of injured people, the number of lives lost, the number of aid workers dead? I am pretty sure that all of you have these numbers, these reports, somewhere in your inboxes, on your desks.

But does it matter? With everything going on in the world, will you be shocked by a couple of thousand of people killed in the space of two weeks and a million or more that are internally displaced within a country of 10,452km square? Looking at the last decade, we have seen a lot of misery, at least in the region that I call home: from Syria to Yemen, Sudan, Gaza to Lebanon… The last crises, the last years, have raised the threshold of misery, and maybe because of that we got used to the suffering of people, to diplomacy failing to solve or halt conflicts, to a slow response in supporting people, to a lack of accountability for violations of IHL [International Humanitarian Law]; where the terminology used of “forgotten crisis” gets another meaning, but forgotten by whom? Not the affected people…

Now, going back to Lebanon, the place where you would witness all the risks you would identify in your risk identification matrix, from the economic crisis, currency devaluation, the fragility of institutions, protests, the impact of the Syrian crisis, the pandemic, the port explosion, social tensions and now the war…

What can I tell you about that? Should I talk to you about our needs? I assume that you know that Lebanon, in this crisis, needs almost everything, from shelter to mattresses, water, from food to health support – just an hour ago I heard about a first case of cholera in my region, Akkar – without forgetting mental health, protection, child protection and responding to gender based violence… And that everything is taking long to arrive…

In the past weeks, there are people who left their homes with nothing, sleeping in the streets of Beirut. Communities did not stand by in the face of suffering: they are coming together to help each other – not only the local civil society but also individual initiatives of neighbors who stepped in to provide necessities. Governorates have activated disaster risk management units; directors of schools and municipalities are trying to find the resources to respond to the needs of displaced families.

‘Why were they not ready? It’s been over year now that the risk of a regional spillover of the conflict in Gaza was very evident. Or at least, it was very evident to us in Lebanon and in the wider region.’

And yet they are still waiting to get enough support. Instead, we see international humanitarian actors running around to organise the response. You have sector leads – all international actors – trying to “coordinate” at the national and sub-national levels.

I have a question and a request for you: first, why were they not ready? It’s been over year now that the risk of a regional spillover of the conflict in Gaza was very evident. Or at least, it was very evident to us in Lebanon and in the wider region. And yet, international actors waited for a drastic increase in hostilities and a massive displacement of people to what was deemed safe zones, to start scaling up the response. For us, local and national civil society in Lebanon, we do not need to scale up our presence, we are already on the ground, before, during and after any crisis.

And now I have a request for you, for all of us: I want more, I want more of all of you, of all of us here, in the room. I want more and better of the system. Because when I look around this room (whether face to face and virtually), the first thing I can think of is the power that each one of you hold, here in Geneva and in other capitals, over the people in Lebanon and in any crisis-affected context.

I have been taught that power and responsibilities go hand in hand, as much as your power increases so does your duty and responsibility, or if I want to use our jargon, your accountability; actually our accountability, because we as LNNGOs [local and national NGOs] are part of the system as well. For now, I do not feel that we are living up to that accountability. And we cannot afford not to.

Nadine Saba is the co-founder and director of Akkar Network for Development (AND), and has 18 years of experience with NGOs in Lebanon. In the above address, she was representing NEAR (Network for Empowered Aid Response), a movement of 276 Local and National Civil Society Organisations from around the world. Nadine also is a Steering Committee member of the LHDF (Lebanon Humanitarian and Development Forum), serves on the NEAR leadership council and acted as the Global South Sherpa for the Grand Bargain in 2023-2024.