Palestinians in Lebanon Lost Amid Peace Talks

Jamal Kadi, a gaunt and penniless 48-year-old, was born a refugee. As a teenager, he became a refugee once again. He has raised eight children as refugees. And the question on his mind now is: Will he die a refugee too?

Like the estimated 370,000 other Palestinians living in uneasy exile in Lebanon, Kadi is all but forgotten in most of the discussions taking place over Middle East peace.

In his rat-infested, tin-roofed shack next to a garbage dump, where his wife does the laundry in a gutter and his children use a communal latrine, Kadi insists that the refugees in Lebanon must not be ignored in the larger issues of land, occupation and statehood.

“They cannot do a deal without us,” swears the former fighter, who lost his big toe to an Israeli bullet in 1982 and now lives in limbo in this camp on the outskirts of the southern Lebanon city of Sidon. “We will not stand still for it.”

As the likelihood of an Israeli pullout from southern Lebanon increases--Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has pledged to accomplish it in about a year--editorial writers and government officials in Lebanon have been talking more and more about their other problem, their “Palestinian problem,” and especially the need to avoid this population’s permanent settlement in Lebanon.

In Jordan and Syria, Palestinian refugees have managed to integrate into society without forfeiting their identity. But to most Lebanese, the Palestinians are still very much strangers in their midst--bitterly resented, segregated and forced to cope with diminishing levels of aid from the international community and little or no help from their hosts.

Palestinians in Lebanon are discussed in various ways: as a political stumbling block to a final Middle East peace settlement, a drain on the country’s scarce resources, a potential source for instability in the region, and as a humanitarian shame that reflects badly on Lebanon as it struggles to rise from the ashes of its 1975-90 civil war.

It is unclear whether the state that was reborn in 1991 is confident enough to seriously address the question of what to do about the Palestinians, who by some estimates make up as much as 10% of the population of 3.5 million.

“In general, the government wants to give the impression that the Palestinian presence here is temporary,” said Lebanese Telecommunications Minister Issam Naaman, who has acted as an informal liaison with the Palestinians. Still, he said, that should not prevent “bettering their position” for humanitarian reasons.

The status of refugees in Lebanon is especially difficult. That is due in part to Lebanon’s national myth that the inflow of Sunni Muslim refugees between 1948-70, and particularly the armed Palestinian guerrillas who established a virtual state within a state in southern Lebanon in the 1970s, upset Lebanon’s delicate ethnic and sectarian balance and thereby caused its 15 years of fratricidal bloodletting.

The civil war eventually led to Syrian, U.S. and Israeli intervention and ushered in a long midnight of political killings, terrorism and hostage-taking. When it was over, Lebanon had become an unofficial protectorate of Syria, with its southern flank taken by Israel for a self-declared “security zone.”

Whether or not the Palestinians were truly the cause of the suffering is a matter for debate, but the resentment they engender is not.

“The camps have become havens for terrorists, assassins and outlaws who seek shelter there,” Edmund Rizk, a former lawmaker with the right-wing Christian Falangist Party, complained in a recent newspaper article.

The government of Prime Minister Salim Hoss that came into power in December has made one gesture warmly welcomed by the Palestinians, lifting a requirement that they must get visas when they travel in and out of Lebanon. But many Lebanese still fear that the Palestinian presence undermines hard-won national stability. These anxieties were not helped by two recent events--the bombing of a supporter of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in southern Lebanon and a court massacre in which unknown gunmen in Sidon mowed down three judges and a prosecutor trying a group of Palestinians on drug charges.

Commentators point out that the constitution forbids the Palestinians’ permanent settlement in the country, a sentiment shared by all of the country’s sects and political groupings. Maronite Christians, who before the war were Lebanon’s dominant sect but are now a minority, in particular do not wish to see a large Muslim group added.

Palestinian leaders say they are in full agreement: They insist that their people do not wish to become Lebanese and are only waiting for the time when they can return to their former villages on land now controlled by Israel.

The trouble is that they have already been waiting half a century. And so, the Palestinians suggest, perhaps more could be done in the meantime to improve their situation.

Despite their long stay in Lebanon, their camps remain eyesores, rife with crime and poverty, agglomerations of jerry-built structures, policed by rival gangs of militias.

With 65,000 inhabitants in an area smaller than one square mile, Ein el Hilwa is the largest. It is a warren of low-built structures on narrow alleyways where large families often have only a single room for eating, sleeping and bathing and use water carried from a few public taps.

The structures were never meant to be permanent. They let in rain in winter and are broiling in summer. The odor of garbage piled in empty lots overhangs the camp. Bulldozers come at the end of the day to collect most of the refuse.

There is also a pervading sense of hopelessness. “I have lived here 30 years, doing nothing,” said Kadi, whose parents bore him in a refugee camp in Jericho after having fled their ancestral home near Haifa in 1948. In 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank, Kadi went across the Jordan River to Jordan, until he settled in Lebanon in 1969.

Getting occasional work in construction, Kadi said he had not been able to educate his children beyond the fifth grade and complained that the unhealthful air in the camp leads to frequent illness.

In most cases in Lebanon, refugees cannot work legally because of laws to preserve jobs for Lebanese.

“We’re working, but black-market work, without permits, without social security,” said Suhail Natour, a Palestinian politician in Beirut’s Mar Elias Camp. “We have to work 10 hours to be paid 20-30% less than a Lebanese working six or seven.”

In addition, they do they not receive minimal health and social benefits available to Lebanese citizens.

Other rules also make refugee life intolerable. In the camps, refugees are forbidden to build sturdier homes or do repairs, on the grounds that they must not give the impression that their stay is permanent.

The country’s 12 large camps have been the stage for long-running and sometimes violent rivalry between factions that support Arafat and his negotiations with Israel and those linked to the so-called “rejectionist” groups in Damascus.

“Most of these camps are what we commonly call ‘security islands,’ ” said analyst Tawfik Mishlawi, editor of the Middle East Reporter newsletter. “In Lebanese political parlance, this means areas which neither the Lebanese army or security people can enter.”

Western observers believe Lebanese security forces could force their way into the Palestinian camps, but only at a heavy cost in blood. Mishlawi said authorities might eventually enter via a different route, negotiating a quid pro quo with the Palestinian factions.

“There is talk of a deal,” he said. “Give us civic rights, improve living conditions, allow flexible employment laws, health services, education and better housing. And in return we will let you maintain law and order in the camps.”