This post is more than 14 years old
Remember that politics move quickly, and people and their opinions evolve.
❊ Sensationalist Anti-Racism and Disaster Compensation
March 1, 2012 · Mustapha Hamoui
The government botched the Ashrafieh building compensation, but that doesn’t mean it was being racist.
(Source: Al-Akhbar)
There’s a fresh outcry in certain sections of the Lebanese web over the compensations relating to the collapsed Ashrafieh building. In question is the assertion that “each Lebanese is worth 7.5 Sudanese”. This one of those “fuck the government” headlines that sound horrible and spread well on facebook, but are actually less shocking when you get into the details.
The government is compensating the Lebanese and the Sudanese victims equally (20,000$ per head). So the main headline — that each Lebanese is worth 7.5 Sudanese — is unfair to the Lebanese government. The real source of the controversy is the relocation and furniture allowances (see table), but even those are not as blatant as they appear. Lebanese families are getting 7 times as much as Sudanese individuals, but once you realize that Lebanese families might have several members, the disparity becomes less pronounced.
In truth, this is more a matter of class than racism. It is reminiscent of the cold calculations in the home insurance business, where people with more valuable property are compensated more than people with less valuable property. According to the official in charge of compensations, it is well documented that the Sudanese shared small rooms with very little material possessions. There’s also an element of law and order, where most the Sudanese are undocumented and are illegally residing in the country.
That, however, does not mean that the government did this the right way. There was a lazy mixing of nationality and living conditions that naturally exposed the government to accusations of racism. What if in the building there was a middle class foreign couple with a south-east Asian ethnicity? How would it fit in the Lebanese-vs-Foreigners worldview? A better way to do this would have been to publish a case-by-case analysis based on a clear principle: That the government will relocate people to conditions similar to the ones they were living in before the disaster, regardless of color or race.