The United Arab Emirates has expelled dozens of long-term Lebanese Shia residents from the country over their presumed affiliation with Hezbollah, a representative said on Wednesday.
"The common factor among all those expelled in the past three months is that they are all Shia and as such are part of a community that supports the Resistance," Hassan Alayan, a Journalist who heads a committee representing them, said.
Alayan, 50, said he was recently ordered to leave Sharjah, one of the city states that makes up the mainly Sunni Muslim UAE, where he had been living for 22 years.
In Abu Dhabi, the UAE capital, officials had no immediate comment on the matter.
A foreign ministry official in Beirut said the UAE ambassador had been summoned several times over the affair but had so far given no explanation.
Alayan said the expulsions began in the aftermath of Lebanon’s June parliamentary elections.
Leading Lebanese Shiite cleric Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah called on UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan to deal with the matter.
"We call on you to save hundreds of Lebanese families who have contributed to the development of your country," Fadlallah said in a statement. "We refuse to believe that the expulsions were motivated by politics, religion, security concern or any outside pressure.
Hussein Masood, a 39-year-old businessman who had lived in the UAE since the age of four, said he still does not understand what prompted his expulsion in July.
"I was returning from vacation and was held at the airport and told that I could not enter the country for security reasons," Masood said. "I wept at the time because my whole life is in the UAE.
An estimated 100,000 Lebanese work in the UAE.
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