a little perspective

I have a list on my desk of things that I've been meaning to blog about, but I got this email this afternoon from my friend Emily who is studying in Syria on a Fulbright grant:

Dear Friends and Family,

I don't know how many of you have been following the news, but in the past five months there has been a lot of fighting between a religious group, Fatah-Islam, and the Lebanese government in Northern Lebanon. It took place in a Palestinian refugee camp called Nahar alBared (Cold River.) 45,000 Palestinians who lived in the camp were forced to flee their homes. In September, the Lebanese Army defeated Fatah-Islam; it seems that afterward, they burned and looted the camp. About a week and a half ago, the army started letting Palestinian residents back in. They've generally refused journalists and westerners admittance. My mother, father and I got into the camp four days ago. The Lebanese army had destroyed the town. There were no buildings left. Fifth stories sat on the ground where first stories should have been. The houses were still smoking.

The Lebanese Army has set up barbed wire and guards. We went up to the soldiers, and Fayez said my sister was married to his brother, so they let us in. He showed the soldiers his Palestinian identity card and they moved aside the barbed wire for us. A woman patted me down; she has an uncle in the states she wanted to talk about.

We saw a family and the woman shouted at us. They had come back yesterday. I was scared, but she was just upset, she kept saying "Take pictures, document, document this, this is wrong, this is wrong." We climbed the stairs over the rubble. Sometimes the stairs had no wall attached, and we could see out into the town. There were Lebanese soldiers and UN workers with surgeon's masks because the air was bad. No one else was given masks.

We climbed to the fourth floor. There were holes in the wall the size of cars, from the bombs. The walls were black, and we were standing on ash. Ash crunches. My mother and the woman were crying. I went to take a picture of the car-sized holes in the walls. The woman thrust her children at me. "Take a picture," she said. "Take a picture of my dirty children. They must sleep in this." Her children were dirty. The soot covered their faces and their clothes. There was no water to wash the house. There was the end of burnt wall-paper. It was clear the house had been very pretty. It was clear she was middle-class. Everything was black. "This is my house," she said. There was a doll in the closet with its head to the wall. It had no clothes. The closet was burned. We went into the kitchen. Light came through the hole in the wall. We could see the Mediterranean.

There was a broken stove in the kitchen. I stepped over the rubble to open the cupboards. The china was burnt black. The serving-spoons were hung as if to dry above the sink; they were black. I could feel loose stones under my feet. "Look here, look here," the children said. They opened the cupboards to show me more black dishes. They saw I liked dishes. Their mother was crying. We went up to the roof. All around were demolished buildings, and the sea. All around the air was smoking. There was talk the soldiers had bombed two houses today.

We were on the roof and below us was the Lebanese Army. Their flag was supported by sandbags. They were in camouflage and green berets. There was a bridge. On the other side of the bridge, the Lebanese Army was building a road over a cemetery. The ruined tombs were bright spots of blue and green in the dust. There was a bulldozer and some soldiers, building the road over the graves. We looked out to sea. Buildings were still smoldering. The roof was full of bullets. We picket them up; the smaller ones were M-16's: they are made in America. It stank on the roof from the smoke and the dead chickens. All around us were dead chickens. Fayez said a week ago it smelled worse until they removed the dead bodies from under the buildings. I was suddenly glad I had not come a week ago. They say Fatah-Islam (Islamist rebel-fighters) buried all their dead in a mass grave under one of roads. The smoke and the dust were very thick; it was a little hard to breathe. Four months ago, Fayez and his friend were going out to get bread and Lebanese soldiers started shooting at them. His best friend was killed. A UN driver in his UN truck was killed. The army paid someone off so the story about the UN driver would not get out.

We drank tea with Fayez and his neighbor. The old man's house had a door and no wall attached. Fayez went to open the door; it was locked. He called through the empty space where the wall had been, "Open up, Uncle." The old man was in a plastic chair. He got up and unlocked the door for us. We could see all of it through the space the destroyed wall had left. The man's wife apologized for the tea. She had gone to get tomatoes and cucumbers; the Lebanese army had taken them from her at the entrance to the camp. They took everyone's gold and silver. The old man had a brief-case (the lockable kind;) there was a hole ripped through the middle. The old man had a present from his daughter. The army took his present and left the wrapping for him. He said, "This is to make me sad." They do this to make people sad. They use men's nice shirts as toilet-paper.

As we talked, through the bombed-out walls we could see the Lebanese soldiers, sitting on plastic chairs. We walked down the road. They motioned us to go back the way we'd come; they were going to detonate a bomb. We saw it make a thick black mark in the sky, and nose-dive; it was top-heavy, it looked like a caricature of tadpoles you find in children's books. It made a sound. These men are the ones who destroyed this town. Now they sit in plastic chairs and talk to the Palestinians; tell them when it is safe to walk. There is barbed wire around the sections that have not yet been de-mined.

It seems the Lebanese army does not want Palestinians to move back. People have no way to clean out the mess, so they sleep on it. There is no plumbing, no electricity. The army had written slurs along the walls. They have ripped up Qur'ans. Fayez was praying in a mosque when it was bombed. The front half fell away in front of him. The Lebanese army has systematically destroyed every building in the camp. It seems a conscious attempt to destroy this community's will to survive.

My parents and I are still struggling to understand what we saw. We try to compare it to the catastrophes that are most familiar to us; "This looks like an atom bomb hit it." We use what we can.

love, Emily



PS, If you want an explanation of the conflict and Nahar alBared camp, here's a very short one.

Background on the Fighting this Summer
Fatah-Islam is a fundamentalist religious group that came to Nahar alBared from the outside. It is made up of around 150-200 men; they are from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Lebanon, I was told there were three from Russia. None of the members are from Nahar alBared camp.

In late may of 2007, Fatah-Islam raided a bank in the Lebanese town of Tripoli. I think they also attacked some Lebanese soldiers. In general, Palestinians control the security of their camps. However, in response to the attack, the Lebanese Army entered the camp. Four months of fighting ensued. The first things the Lebanese Army hit were the water and electricity for the camp. This and the fighting forced Palestinian residents to flee; they lived from May until October (most are still living) in crowded conditions in schools and mosques around Tripoli. When they originally fled, they thought it would be only for a few days, and they were forced to go very quickly. For this reason, most did not take their valuables with them.
In September, the Lebanese Army defeated Fatah-Islam. Palestinians were allowed back into the camp starting 10 October. So far it is estimated that 4,000 of the 45,000 residents have come back.

For a good article on Fatah-Islam, go to www.mideastmonitor.org click
on "The Rise of Fatah-Islam" under LEBANON.

Palestinians in Lebanon and the Civil War (very briefly)
In 1948 with the creation of Israel, between 250,000 and 500,000 Palestinians came to Lebanon as refugees who had been evicted from their homes. They were welcomed at first and set up residence in refugee in camps, of which Nahar alBared is one. In general, the Lebanese government is weak, and after the 1967 war it found it hard to control the camps, which have been sites of resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In 1968, Israel attacked Lebanon's Beirut airport in retaliation for attacks launched from Lebanon's Palestinian camps. In 1968-9, Lebanese forces clashed with Palestinian fighters, who demanded the right to run their own camp security and launch attacks into Israel. Because the Lebanese Army was no match for the Palestinian fighters, it was forced to sign an agreement meeting most of the Palestinian's demands. Maronite Christians opposed the agreement, and fighting broke out between them and Palestinian guerillas on the streets of Beirut. After Jordan drove out Palestinian guerillas from its own country, the guerillas came to Lebanon and started launching attacks on Israel, with little regard for its effect on the local (Shia) population. Tensions led to a civil war in Lebanon which officially started in 1975. Israel subsequently invaded Lebanon (it also supported Christian militias who carried out the infamous 1982 massacre on the Palestinian camps Sabra and Chatila). Israel only withdrew completely from Lebanon in 2000. It was in resistance to Western occupation of Lebanon that Hezbollah (Shi'ia group who went to war with Israel last summer) formed in the 1980's.

Palestinian Rights/Life in Lebanon
For those who have not seen Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon, they look like any town, and it is often difficult to tell where a city ends and a camp begins. There are no tents. Most Palestinians live in cement apartment buildings. Before the war these past five months, Nahar alBared had several mosques and a thriving marketplace. It was known for its gold and silver, and of course had schools, doctors, and lawyers as any neighborhood would. The residents of Nahar alBared are very proud of the camp's prosperity; they feel they were an economic threat to the nearby Tripoli, and that is part of the reason the Lebanese Army destroyed the camp.

While Palestinians were at first well-received in Lebanon, over the years Lebanon has implemented several laws that discriminate against Palestinians. The jobs a Palestinian can hold are limited. Palestinians cannot own land outside the camps. The camps themselves have not grown in area, although the Palestinian population has at least doubled since 1948. This leads to overcrowding. Palestinians do not have Lebanese citizenship, nor the rights (like social security) that go with it.