Resolving the Issue of War Displacement in Lebanon (Assaf and El-Fil)

An article in Forced Migration Review, a refugee studies journal published by the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, by Georges Assaf and Rana El-Fil of the Institute for Human Rights at the Beirut Bar Association. It states that at the height of Lebanon's seventeen year civil war up to one million people were internally displaced, that a single wave in 1985 displaced an estimated 367,000 people in Mount Lebanon alone, that the 1978 Israeli invasion displaced more than 120,000 people from the south, and that a decade after the 1989 Taif Agreement some 450,000 people, almost fourteen percent of the population, remained displaced. Its strength is that its authors worked directly on Lebanon's own postwar displacement file at the Beirut Bar Association. Its limit is that it reports Lebanon's own government figures rather than an independent demographic reconciliation of wartime displacement against postwar return.