BEIRUT (Reuters) –By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent Jad Haider is ready to pack his bags for Germany, fed up with Lebanon’s political instability, simmering sectarian strife and economic malaise. I love this country so much. It’s a beautiful country, but honestly I just can’t take it any more," said the 32-year-old university English teacher. "The energy is so negative."Jolted by last year’s war between Israel and Hezbollah and the power struggles and Sunni-Shi’ite clashes that have followed, thousands of Lebanese — many of them young and talented — are leaving to seek jobs and new lives abroad.
"I’m not willing to stay in a country where one day you wake up and there’s a war, the next day you wake up and everything’s fine," Haider said. "This is no way to live."The scale of the hemorrhage is hard to pin down, especially in a land with a long, fluid history of migration and return, but researcher Eugen Dabbous said a survey he had helped to run had confirmed many Lebanese are heading for the exits."Sixty percent of those surveyed want to leave," he said. The project, conducted by the Lebanese Emigration Research Center, questioned about 600 residents from two groups — students or recent graduates and middle-aged people."The younger people want to leave because they don’t see a future in Lebanon, and the older group because they want to get their children out of harm’s way," Dabbous said.