“Here’s the lat­est dispatch”:http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1216115,00.html I did for TIME​.com:

Despite the rel­a­tive quiet in Beirut on Tues­day, the jit­tery sense of des­per­a­tion is get­ting worse. The West­ern­ers are being evac­u­ated, but that’s not nec­es­sar­ily good news for the Lebanese stay­ing put. Once the West­ern­ers are gone, peo­ple on the streets won­der what will hold the Israelis back. The lull in bomb­ing, in fact, is widely seen as a delib­er­ate break by the Israelis to allow the for­eign nation­als to get out.
And yet for all the press that the West­ern evac­u­a­tion is get­ting, there’s another group of refugees that isn’t being noticed. Lebanon has a large pop­u­la­tion of Iraqis, Sudanese and Soma­lis, as well as guest work­ers from the Philip­pines and Sri Lanka, who are too poor to pay their way out. And their gov­ern­ments are either inef­fec­tive (Iraq, Sudan) inat­ten­tive (the Philip­pines, Sri Lanka) or non-existent (Soma­lia) to offer any resources for these peo­ple.
Out­side the office of the United Nations High Com­mis­sioner for Refugees office in east Beirut, Abdou Shafai Ismael, 38, from Sudan, has a story that con­trasts sharply with that of the Amer­i­can tourists and stu­dents being floated to safety on Nor­we­gian cruise ships. While they may com­plain about hav­ing to pay back the U.S. gov­ern­ment for the costs of their evac­u­a­tions, from the dart­ing look in his eyes, I think Ismael would go to great lengths (per­haps ques­tion­able ones) in order to have a spot on a boat to Cyprus. Many of the 100 or so other men milling around with him prob­a­bly think the same. Theirs are tales of con­stant flight from one cri­sis to another. Ismael, for exam­ple, fled Dar­fur in Sudan to work in Iraq, until the Amer­i­cans invaded and he fled to Syria, where he was arrested for enter­ing the coun­try ille­gally. For two months, his Syr­ian jailors beat him every day, he said, before releas­ing him to go to Lebanon.“Where will I go now?” he asks. He can’t return to Sudan, where he fears Arab mili­tias will kill him and he says he won’t go to Syria because he fears being arrested and beaten again.
Alaa Mah­moud, 42, is Iraqi, from the noto­ri­ous Haifa Street in Bagh­dad; he’s one of about 20,000 Iraqis in Lebanon. He fled the nascent civil war in Bagh­dad in 2004, and now he is sick, he says, with an infec­tion of his hip. He has no med­i­cine and can’t work at his job as a jan­i­tor any­more. As his eyes tear up, he pleads with me to call his sis­ter in Bagh­dad to tell her he is alive. At this point, he breaks down and cries.
Inside his air-conditioned office, look­ing out on the street where the drama plays out, Arafat Jamal, the senior regional offi­cer for the UNHCR, tells me that in one week, 400,000 peo­ple in Lebanon — 10% of the country’s pop­u­la­tion — have been dis­placed. The peo­ple in the street below him will not be taken out of the coun­try, he said, but instead moved to “safe havens” in schools in the moun­tains and near Tripoli in the north. He looks tired, and he should be; he’s incred­i­bly short-staffed at the moment because the Lebanese employ­ees of the UNHCR have fled to the moun­tains them­selves.
But if Beirut’s poor and state­less have the U.N. to look after them, Beirut’s rich and almost-rich can look after them­selves. The signs of a mass exo­dus of Lebanon’s wealthy class are every­where – and telling. The city’s ATMs, which nor­mally dis­burse both Lebanese pounds and Amer­i­can dol­lars, are now only spit­ting out the brightly col­ored pounds, a sign that those who could have already fled — and took their hard cur­rency with them. I took out 1 mil­lion pounds today, about $670, but I worry about how long that will last. Even the West­ern Union is unable to give out dol­lars.
At least credit cards still work. An upscale super­mar­ket was packed as I stocked up for what might be a long siege of Lebanon. I found myself in a grim race with another man grab­bing bot­tles of orange juice, each of us try­ing to get as many as we could before the other could claim them. This will be a sav­age place in two weeks if this keeps up, I thought.
We’re already see­ing the begin­ning of short­ages. Bread is hard to find, for exam­ple. And the scratch cards to recharge our mobile phone accounts — already out­ra­geously expen­sive in peace­time — have jumped in price from about $40 to $50 for 80 min­utes of talk-time. Soon, even that con­nec­tion to the out­side world will van­ish.
As it is, Lebanon is already dis­ap­pear­ing before my eyes.

A more in-depth piece on the Third World refugees I did for the _San Fran­cisco Chronicle_ is “here”:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/19/MNG3HK1JJP1.DTL&hw=allbritton&sn=001&sc=1000.