Lebanon (all aspects)

[Rex Brynen]

Lebanese troops crush Islamists in siege camp
2 September 2007

NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon (AFP) — Lebanese troops on Sunday took full control of a devastated refugee camp that had been besieged for three months and held by diehard Islamist militants of Fatah al-Islam, the military said.

The Palestinian camp, a honeycomb of tunnels and houses reinforced against possible Israeli air attack, finally fell to a mass assault on Sunday after troops killed at least 37 Islamist militants as they made a desperate pre-dawn bid to break the siege, army and security sources said.

Another 15 Islamists were arrested, some of whom had managed to make it to nearby villages but were caught in the manhunt that included troops searching roofs and watertanks.

More than 220 people, including 158 Lebanese troops, were killed during the standoff which started on May 20 near the sprawling camp outside the northern city of Tripoli.

Now the hard part starts.

More than 32,000 people were displaced from Nahr al-Barid refugee camp, most of them fleeing to nearby Baddawi camp where they've been put up in refugee homes and UNRWA and Lebanese government schools since May 20. Nahr al-Barid is, from the UNOSAT (Ikonos) satellite imagery that I've seen, very badly damaged. UNRWA will need to find space for temporary accommodation for the displaced Palestinians (a sensitive issue in Lebanon), and then will have to reconstruct the camp (another sensitive issue, complicated by a host of land ownership and other questions). The costs will be significant, with camp reconstruction possibly running well over $150 million (equivalent to about one-third of UNRWA's annual budget for all 4.5 million refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the West Bank).

The Lebanese government was at pains to signal to refugees that the camp would be reconstructed, and that (in contrast to all previous governments) it was also committed to improving their general standard of living. However, given both the costs of continued reconstruction after the Israel-Hizbullah war last summer, high levels of government debt, and a Lebanese view that responsibility for the Palestinian issue is international, the funds for doing so will have to come from external (especially Gulf) donors.

Failure to reconstruct will not only prolong humanitarian suffering of the displaced, but will also be seen as confirmation of constant rumours that the Nahr al-Barid fighting was somehow engineered by the Siniora government and the US to destroy the camp, liquidate the refugee problem, etc.

Moreover, while the current government's position on Lebanese-Palestinian relations has been much more positive than past governments, the loss of so many Lebanese Army personnel (plus Fateh al-Islam rocketing of the Tripoli power station and nearby villages) has hardly improved relations at the popular level (despite few of the militants being Palestinian, and the government's emphasis that this was NOT a Lebanese-Palestinian conflict).

[goesh]

Personally, I think they will continue to be used as pawns by all factions in the ME. From the PLO expulsion by Jordan to Sabra and Shatila, to hamas attemtping to usurp the legitimacy of the palestinian authority to the intentional squalor of the refugee camps left unchecked by palestinian officials, their pawn status continues unabated. Little of the oil wealth of the ME will be donated, save but a few token million. Rich 'donors' know all too well the graft that occurs in ME. I was reading the other day in a local paper the fiscal analysis of our own 'charities', well regulated and monitored as they are, and I was quite amazed at how very little of the donated money actually is applied to the needy. Out of every 1 million given to the ME, my guesstimate would be 50-60K of it actually gets to the needy.

[Rex Brynen]

By global standards, very few Palestinian refugee camps are truly "squalid" by global standrads--in most places (Syria, Jordan, the West Bank) only a minority of refugees live in the camps, which have simply become low-income housing areas. Refugee incomes and standards of living in those areas are equal to those of the non-refugee population.

Gaza is slightly different because it is overcrowded, much poorer, and most of the population are refugees.

Lebanon is even more different still because refugees have, in the past, been barred from using government social services, from working in most professions, and even from owning property. (The Siniora government would like to change this.) Moreover, ever since the civil wars refugees have tended to cluster in camps for security. All of this reflects the enormous demographic and political sensitivity of the refugee issue in Lebanon, where the constitution explicitly forbids permanent settlement of the Palestinians there.

UNRWA--the UN agency that deals with Palestinian refugees--generally does an excellent job, as the social indicators suggest. (Donors have sometimes criticized the agency for budgetary planning and management/reporting issues, but not for corruption and waste.)

Gulf money financed the reconstruction of destroyed refugee housing in Jenin and Rafah/Khan Yunis (Gaza)... I suspect it will be the same in Nahr al-Barid.

[goesh]

http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1023/p7s1-wome.htm


Refugees grasp at bin Laden's words

Palestinian groups in Lebanon's Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp have little sympathy for US battle.

By Nicholas Blanford | Special to The Christian Science Monitor

AIN AL-HILWEH, LEBANON
Ali Al-Ali, a former Palestinian fighter, resides deep inside the slums of Lebanon's largest Palestinian refugee camp.

Living in appalling squalor and surrounded by 70,000 Palestinian refugees, many of whom long ago lost hope of returning to their former homes in what is now Israel, Al-Ali has seen how his neighbors are desperately seeking to salvage some hope from Osama bin Laden's speeches of support for the Palestinians.

They may disapprove of his methods, and most condemn the Sept. 11 attacks, but for some in Ain al-Hilweh, Mr. bin Laden has become a symbol of defiance to the US, Israel's main ally.

Al-Ali has lived for nine years in the Ozo district of the refugee camp. Ain al-Hilweh is Arabic for "Sweet Spring," the waters of which once irrigated the orange groves surrounding the coastal city of Sidon, 20 miles south of Beirut. But today, the only running water is the raw sewage trickling down open drains. Barefoot children play in the filth outside Al-Ali's front door.

His wife and four children sleep on the floor of his cramped home. "I get the bed," he says, pointing at a rickety iron bedstead next to the glassless window. The tin roof lets in clouds of dust in the sweltering heat of summer, torrents of rain in the bitter winter.

[Rex Brynen]

By global standards, very few Palestinian refugee camps are truly "squalid" by global standrads

Ugh, I need to learn to proofread.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1023/p7s1-wome.htm
Al-Ali has lived for nine years in the Ozo district of the refugee camp. Ain al-Hilweh is Arabic for "Sweet Spring," the waters of which once irrigated the orange groves surrounding the coastal city of Sidon, 20 miles south of Beirut. But today, the only running water is the raw sewage trickling down open drains. Barefoot children play in the filth outside Al-Ali's front door.
.

As I noted earlier, conditions in all of the camps in Lebanon are much worse than those in Syria, Jordan, and the West Bank. Until fairly recently, Palestinians (and often even the UN) were prohibited from taking building materials into the camps by the Lebanese army--again, out of fear of "tawtiin" (permanent resettlement). That policy has now been changed.

Ayn al-Hilwa is the largest camp in Lebanon (about 45,000), has particularly bad conditions, and appalling local security conditions: as with all camps (except now Nahr al-Barid) there is no Lebanese security presence in the camps, which instead is full of myriad armed factions, including various militant Islamist ones (notably Jund al-Sham). You'll find a camp profile here.

In addition to UNRWA statistics, the best source of information on Palestinian refugees is FAFO.

The very informative website of the Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee (despite its name, a Lebanese government policy unit) is here. Full disclosure: I worked as a policy advisor for these folks this summer.

[Sarajevo071]

DNA tests on body thought to be Abssi's come back negative

The Lebanese Army continued on Thursday to hunt down fleeing members of Fatah al-Islam, killing one and capturing seven within the vicinity of the battered Northern refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared as DNA tests came back negative for a body earlier identified as that of Shaker al-Abssi-leader of the group.
...

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article....ticle_id=85098

[bourbon]

Reading this now:

Al Qaeda in Lebanon: The Iraq War Spreads, by Nir Rosen. Boston Review, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2008

[Rex Brynen]

Nir Rosen's piece is excellent.

So too is Bernard Rougier's Everyday Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam among Palestinians in Lebanon.