Citizenship order spurs tension over privileges of elite

BEIRUT — A Lebanese presidential decree to naturalize hundreds of foreigners, including Iraqi Vice President Iyad Allawi and other regional elites, has ignited a row over who deserves citizenship in this tiny Mediterranean country, where 1 in 4 people is a refugee and women married to foreigners cannot pass on their citizenship to their children.

News of the decree, which was signed in secret in midMay but leaked to the public two weeks later, has fueled the perception that citizenship, like so many other liberties in this country, is a privilege reserved for the wealthy. Meanwhile, Lebanese women married to foreigners don’t have the right to pass on their nationality to their children. And more than a million Syrian and Palestinian refugees toil away in vital but back-breaking labor, without any legal protections against abuse, wage theft, arbitrary arrest and deportation.

“This decree should rattle our conscience,” said May Elian, a Lebanese woman married to a foreigner and an activist with the campaign “My Nationality is My Right and My Family’s Right.”

But Prime Minister Saad Hariri has defended the decree, saying it is the president’s constitutional right to grant citizenship to whomever he pleases.

Customarily Lebanon’s presidents have waited until the end of their terms to issue a naturalization decree. In this case, President Michel Aoun signed an order less than two years into his sixyear term, and without disclosing it to the public, raising suspicions of malfeasance in this corruption-ridden country.

Hariri and Interior Minister Nouhad Machnouk, who cosigned the decree, challenged opponents to make their claims in court that some of the recipients were less than deserving.

Some politicians have alleged that the beneficiaries include businessmen linked to the government in neighboring Syria, though this was not immediately clear from the published list.

Legislator Wael Abu Faour, a harsh critic of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government, said “it is not acceptable that Lebanese citizenship becomes a commodity sold to killers and their assistants.”

Many struggling Syrians are quietly bitter that Lebanon is welcoming elites while turning its back on the laborers and menial workers who work long hours for little pay in Lebanon’s grossly unequal economy.

The decree has also galled campaigners who have pushed hard to have Lebanon reform its discriminatory personal status laws, which grant men wide-ranging rights over women, including the right to pass on their nationality to their children, while mothers cannot.

By Philip Issa and Bassem Mroue are Associated Press writers.

Bilal Hussein / Associated Press 2011 Lebanese women married to foreigners march during a Beirut rally in 2011 to demand that Lebanese mothers be able to pass their Lebanese citizenship to their children.