Coronavirus crisis has devastated the Middle East’s migrants and urban poor

Earlier this month, a Pakistan International Airways flight carried 227 passengers from Dubai back to Pakistan. They were the first of 40,000 Pakistan immigrant workers requesting assisted repatriation from UAE, because of the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Millions of immigrant workers across the Gulf have been left jobless, without income, and under severe lockdown restriction because of the virus.

Few could expect to get their jobs back. The requests of most had gone in before the oil futures price hit zero on the international markets. Roughly 80% of the population of the Emirates is expatriate, a total of more than 8 million people, which is roughly the same number as in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In Kuwait, where the expatriates are smaller in number but over three quarters of the resident population, 6,000 Egyptian teachers have requested passage home.

The physical, psychological and political impact of the virus varies from area to area. The world will have to learn from the sum of the differences in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf – as it will feel for a long time the effects of the virus in Africa, where the epidemic is just starting.

Most vulnerable are the communities of migrant workers crowded in their tenements and shanty housing. Lockdown may be heavily imposed, as in the Emirates, but social distancing in the crammed workers’ dormitories and housing is a fantasy. In the informal economies of huge mega-cities like Cairo or Karachi, isolation and lockdown are impossible.

“It just isn’t an option in large parts of Africa,” says Chris Maclay, who runs an aid project for employment of refugees in Kenya. “Public health resources are too scarce, and so many live day to day.”

Outbreaks of the virus are particularly feared in the large refugee communities along the Syrian-Turkish border, home to more than three million fugitives. But there have been surprisingly few cases of the virus reported from the besieged enclave of Idlib in North West Syria.

The fighting has slackened there as news of the virus has spread. Hamish de Bretton Gordon, who is involved with two charities helping the refugees in the region says: “It is baffling – the Damascus regime is hunkered down in the capital because Assad himself seems scared of what the virus might do there, and just hopes it will take its toll in the rebel areas.

“In Idlib, though, they are proving remarkably resilient – they are so used to living on nothing. I spoke to a consultant in one of the few remaining hospitals, Omar, and he remarked that they are all so used to handling death – it’s just a daily occurrence for them. They live on top of death.”

In many countries of the region health facilities are excellent – for those who can access them. Egypt has more hospital beds available than the UK, though poverty and overcrowding present the country with major problems. A panel of experts at the Royal United Services Institute webinar conference this month concluded that Egypt was managing surprisingly well. “The campaign for Corona is not being run by the military – for once – though they are responsible for lockdowns,” said one contributor. “But most of it has been set up by the civilians of the medical profession.”

The panel could not see a clear pattern in how the extremist Islamist groups had responded to the pandemic. Al Shabab in East Africa had been on the offensive, but were preoccupied by what the virus might bring to their own communities. Initially there had been some wild preaching that this was the revenge of God on an infidel world, but this has been more muted of late. The novelist and author Mohammed Hanif, a practising Muslim, commented in the New York Times, in his native Karachi most worry about food.

“When you can’t trust the government to deliver food you need, you have to defy lockdowns and step outside and leave the rest to God”, Hanif wrote. “You can challenge even a testy God, but you can’t say no to hungry children.”

Lockdowns in crowded housing and high-rise flats in Lebanon, Tunisia, Israel, and the crowded tower blocks crammed with asylum seekers in Rome and Naples, have brought reports of increasing domestic violence, as many women’s groups have been reporting to social media.

A few clear themes are emerging. There is little to show the world what a serious surge of pandemic would bring out of Africa. It is sure to have global effect, as would similar pandemic from India. Measurement of cases and accurate records are scarce, and mostly where we need them most, such as the migrant working communities of the Gulf, and above all in the besieged and beleaguered refugee communities in and around Syria. It also is having huge impact on the ravaged and rejected communities in Yemen.

With the collapse of oil prices, the impact is already hitting communities dependent on migrants, in the Gulf States especially. How the crisis will be used by terrorist groups is uncertain – because it is sure to affect them sooner or later.

The virus has actual and potential impact on the four big regional powers – Turkey, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia there is concern about the virus reaching into the déraciné masses of abandoned pilgrims, forced into squatter camps outside Mecca and Medina as they lack the means to get home.

These are the symptoms of the major shakeout across the Middle East – a ragged reordering of events and circumstances of which we are just at the beginning.