Nawaf Salam: 5 Permanent Members Agree to Distance Lebanon from Regional Crises

A Sept. 25 meeting of an international support group for Lebanon at the United Nations General Assembly will be based on a presidential statement issued by the Security Council this month, Lebanon's permanent representative to the U.N. said.

Ambassador Nawaf Salam told An Nahar daily published on Saturday that the meeting, which will be headed by U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon and President Michel Suleiman, will take as its starting point an international call for a strong support to Lebanon to confront the challenges that are threatening its security and stability.

The foreign ministers of the five permanent Security Council members, the head of the World Bank, in addition to officials from different U.N. agencies such as the UNDP and UNHCR will attend the high-profile conference.

“The five countries totally agree on distancing Lebanon from the crises of the region,” said Salam. “The Lebanese government is also fully committed to the dissociation policy which has no other alternative to protect Lebanon and preserve its stability ad unity.”

The World Bank has prepared an assessment report for the New York meeting.

Spillover from the Syrian war has cost Lebanon billions of dollars, deeply damaged its economy and harshly strained social services such as health, education and electricity, the World Bank has reportedly said in the report.

The report, which hasn't been released yet, estimates that the total costs of spillover will shave close to 3 percentage points off gross domestic product growth per year between 2012 and 2014. Unemployment will double to more than 20 percent and about 170,000 additional Lebanese will be plunged into poverty on top of some 1 million currently living below the poverty line.

For the three years 2012-2014, the report estimates $1.5 billion in government revenues will be lost while simultaneously, government spending will have to increase by $1.1 billion because of the surge in demand for public services. That will bring the total negative impact on the Lebanese budget to $2.6 billion.

"Across all key public services, the surge in demand is currently being partly met through a decline in both the access to and the quality of public service delivery," the report said.

It estimates that Lebanon will have to spend another $2.5 billion to bring access and quality of public services back to their pre-Syrian conflict level.

A day before the conference, Suleiman will meet with U.S. President Barack Obama to discuss the influx of Syrian refugees to Lebanon, Obama's deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, said Friday.