"Around 38,000 people are living in deplorable conditions and unfit for humans."
Are Palestinians Being Scapegoated Over Army Killings in Lebanon
Franklin Lamb
Nahr al Bared Palestinian refugee camp
The killings of three Palestinian refugees this past week including Ahmad Qassim from Nahr al Bared ( "cold river') camp near Tripoli and 15 year old Khaled al-Youssef from Ein el Helwe (" the beautiful eye') 30 miles south of Beirut in Saida, and the wounding of more than a dozen others by the Lebanese army were not, as some Lebanese politicians are claiming, " accidental security incidents". They were avoidable negligent homicides as much so as Zionist occupation forces and settler/colonists in Palestine regularly commit.
It is true that Lebanon's army, like the country itself, is confessionalized and as it has done before, the army will likely fracture if a civil conflict erupts. It is also undertrained, weak on discipline, and ill equipped. But from this observer's experience and learning from friends in the army, the least that can be said on its behalf is that it is no worse and is probably more humane than some others in the region.
Some in the Palestinian community fear that the recent killings of refugees by the army represents a revival of what in the Lebanese army it has often meted out to Palestinians and that it may be intensifying 30 years after the massacre at Sabra-Shatila.
Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon are the worst 12 of the 57 UN established camps in the Levant including Jordan, Syria, Gaza and occupied Palestine in terms of problems of poverty ( 65 per cent of Palestinian family living in camps in Lebanon live on less than six dollars a day), health, education, general living conditions, discrimination, isolation, joblessness, shanty housing and a lack of proper elementary and secondary schools, forbidden by law to enroll in state colleges, lack of adequate clinics, hospitals and sewage systems as well essentially no potable water, little fresh air and sunlight in many areas of the camps, rising respiratory diseases, domestic abuse and psychological health issues. Contributing to all of the above is the outlawing of Palestinians enjoying the elementary civil right to work or the own a home.
During a recent visit to the camps, Muhammad Farwana, a member of Hamas's politburo described the Nahr al-Barid camp in which "around 38,000 people are living in deplorable conditions and unfit for humans." He added: "I visited Nahr al-Baredd and no human being can lead a normal life in it. Not even animals can have a normal life in it."
No refugees on earth are so targeted and discriminated again as Lebanon's Palestinians and only some political help and negligible economic assistance sporadically arrives from the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. Not even the employees at its Embassy of Palestine in Beirut have been paid their salaries for the past two months due significantly to US and EU aid shrinkage aimed at forcing yet more concessions from the PA in favor the Zionist occupiers of their country.
Every camp Palestinian family in Lebanon can recount cases of arbitrary arrests, beatings, false imprisonment and harassment from the army's Military Intelligence unit, the supposedly disbanded Deuxieme Bureau. This Stasi type organization -- supposedly reformed -- hunted and terrorized Palestinians following the PLO departure from Beirut in August of 1982. According to long time PLO representative in Lebanon Shafiq al Hout in his wonderful book, My Life in the PLO , the Deuxieme Bureau was a major factor in 70,000 departing Lebanon in just1983 via Beirut airport.
The army initially suspected that the motor bike riders it stopped at Nahr al Bared camp had no ID. This was a reasonable assumption because thousands of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have no ID because the country where they were born, Lebanon, refuses to provide them ID, thus depriving them of even the few rights given their fellow Palestinian refugees. Most Palestinians, for example, who arrived in Lebanon after being expelled from Jordan in 1970 never registered with the Lebanese barely functioning bureaucracy and despite a quarter century of promises by politicians here to remedy "the non-ID problem" it's been just more idle talk with not action being taken. Once more the non-ID issue has become a deadly one and officials promising yesterday to solve the problem. Lebanon's politicians will likely do nothing unless they see some significant personal benefit. Hence non-ID Palestinians will remain subject to arrest at any time, not able to register their marriages or get ID's for their children or achieve a score of other civil acts that require a government issued ID.
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