I grew up and spent most of my life in Beirut before migrating to Australia just over a decade ago. I had to leave and I cannot go back. I have come to terms with the reality that I am a forced migrant.
Forced migrants and refugees flee to seek safety. I watch photographs and videos of as many as a million Lebanese people internally displaced since September, living on streets, in schools and even in a nightclub. It appears to me that safety is a moving scale, and evidently not everyone is owed safety. That my people, and I, cannot access the safety promised in the refugee convention. Or that the safety we are owed looks very different.
