" Damn the day I was born. " Bashir (the names have been changed) is a tired man. Bent over his chair, dressed in jogging pants, this 57-year-old Syrian from Idlib province has been a refugee in Lebanon for eight years already. Cramped in a prefab installed in the premises of the French consulate in Beirut, he says. His house destroyed by the bombing, the flight with wife and children, the days without eating, the years without news of his brothers and sisters…
In the middle of his story, he asks for permission to cross his legs, causing dismay for his interlocutor, who has been trying since the beginning of the interview to make him comfortable. But Bachir knows that he is playing his future against the agent of the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (Ofpra) who will decide whether or not to grant him asylum in France.
In February and March, Ofpra teams carried out missions to Lebanon and Jordan during which they examined the situation of nearly 350 Syrians, preselected in these two countries by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees ( UNHCR) to benefit from resettlement due to their particular vulnerability.
Bachir never ceases to see his life elude him. He believed he would find security by settling in Tripoli, in the north of Lebanon, but one of his teenage sons died there in 2014. Collateral victim of clashes between the districts of Bab El-Tebbaneh (mostly Sunni) and anti-Assad) and Jabal Mohsen (majority Alawite and pro-Assad), he took a stray bullet in the heart while watching television in the family apartment. It was also during this period that Bachir had to stop working due to heart problems. So her children left school to act as little hands on the neighboring vegetable market for 1 or 2 euros a day.
"I couldn't pay for the operation"
"Resettlement provides a prospect for the most vulnerable refugees, defends the director general of Ofpra, Julien Boucher. France has committed to resettle 10,000 refugees on its territory between 2020 and 2021, as much as over the period 2018-2019. Syrians make up the majority of them. According to the UNHCR, just over half a million Syrians scattered between Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt are in need of resettlement.
Ali, 42, heard by Ofpra in Jordan, suffers from kidney stones and inflammation of the prostate, for example, while his wife has a herniated disc and her daughter has to undergo lacrimal duct surgery. "But I couldn't pay for the operation"he said. As for Zéna and her husband Bilal, 59 and 68, they cannot afford to go to a doctor in Amman either. If France welcomes this couple, Bilal promises that he can "Learn the language" – "I was a school principal for forty years. " Zena wants to live “As close as possible to the German border. " The couple's three children have been living in Frankfurt and Essen for several years.
