.Palestinian Plight in Lebanon Worsens
BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) - Mahmoud Khalifa has tried five times to sneak into Europe. Each time, he was caught and sent back to Lebanon, the country where he was born but is denied some of the most basic rights because he is a Palestinian refugee.
"The most important thing for me is to leave this country. Ask any Palestinian youth in Lebanon and that's what they will say," the 24-year-old Khalifa said.
Khalifa works as a barber, but only occasionally. He quit school in the eighth grade, deciding education would have no benefit when there's little chance of a promising career.
Extreme poverty and despair grip Lebanon's 12 crowded Palestinian camps, home to 400,000 refugees. Crammed into a country half the size of New Jersey or Belgium, they live under severe restrictions on work, travel and education - a marked difference from their fellow refugees in Syria and Jordan, who have been largely integrated into society.
Next year Palestinians mark the 60th anniversary of the war that drove hundreds of thousands of them into exile when Israel became a state. And this month Palestinians in Lebanon observed the 25th anniversary of one of their darkest episodes - the massacre in the Beirut camps of Sabra and Shatila by Israeli-backed Christian militiamen in which between 1,200 and 1,400 people died, by Lebanese Red Cross count.
And the tragedy goes on. Four months ago, thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes in the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon as the army fought al-Qaida-inspired Islamic militants of various nationalities. Officials say at least 20 civilians died in the three months of fighting.
Previous generations of Palestinians in Lebanon had it a little better. In the 1970s, Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization was here, providing refugees with protection, employment and elaborate social and health institutions. But the PLO's virtual state-within-a-state did not sit well with their Lebanese hosts.
In 1982, Israel invaded to drive out the PLO, and since then it has been a long, slow decline for the refugees.
For them, nothing marks the start of that decline as starkly as Sabra and Shatila - a horror that still echoes to Khalifa's generation.
It came two weeks after Arafat and his guerrillas left. For three days - from Sept. 16 to 18, 1982, the Christian militiamen, sworn enemies of the PLO, rampaged through the two camps, slaughtering men, women and children. An Israeli commission of inquiry later found Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible. Sharon had to resign as defense minister.
At his home in Shatila last week, Khalifa stared at the floor, head bowed as he listened once again to his grandmother, Eftekar Shallah, and mother, Jamila Shallah, tell the story of how his grandfather was killed in the massacre, a year before he was born.
On the evening of Sept. 16, the family emerged from an underground shelter. The grandfather, Mohammed, gave his radio to his 10-year-old daughter Ikhlas to hold, then headed back to their house to lock it up.
There were gunmen on the roofs. The militiamen had ordered people to surrender, promising they would be spared - a promise often broken. Jamila grabbed her father's hand as he headed back to the house and begged him to surrender. He left her and kept going.
As his wife, Eftekar, waited across the road, Mohammed headed back to her, only to fall to the ground, shot in the head by a single bullet.
"He died in front of our house, in front of me," Eftekar, 71, said quietly.
Their story, told and retold over the years to keep the memory alive - has knitted together the lives of the grandmother, mother and son through the 25 years of despair that followed.
"I've heard the story many times," Mahmoud Khalifa said gravely. "We've suffered too many tragedies and have gotten used to suffering. Every day is a tragedy for us. It's become as normal as drinking a glass of water."
Khalifa's is a story of struggle, anger and longing for a normal life.
"We Palestinians in Lebanon are buried alive. We have no rights. In Europe, animals have more rights than we have here," he said bitterly.
While Palestinians in Jordan have become naturalized citizens, those here have faced strong resistance from Lebanese politicians and the population at large to any debate on the issue for fear of tilting the demographic balance of the country of multiple Christian and Muslim denominations. Palestinian refugees are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims.
Lebanese law bars Palestinians from employment in the public sector and limits their entry into some 70 different professions. In the camps - crowded, densely built neighborhoods - jobs are scarce. Palestinians are denied the right to own homes or enlarge those they have.
Even a simple outing with friends or a drive around Beirut is a hassle. Khalifa's blue ID card identifies him as a Palestinian, so he is stopped at every security checkpoint and subjected to prolonged checks - more rigorous since the fighting at Nahr el-Bared.
He tried five times to get to Sweden - the last time three years ago when he paid $5,000 to an Iraqi smuggler who dumped him in Spain where he was caught.
"They don't like us," Khalifa said of the Lebanese. "They see us as a virus. They blame us for everything that's gone wrong in the country."
Lebanese commonly blame Palestinians in Lebanon for the outbreak of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war. In addition to the Christian militias and the Israelis, their enemies included the Syrians who controlled the country until two years ago, and Amal, a Syrian-backed Shiite militia that waged a war in the camps in the mid-1980s which killed more than 1,000 Palestinian civilians.
"We were always being chased by one group or another," said Eftekar Shallah, "we were always taking to the streets barefoot... We lost our home. .. They killed us as we slept."
The elder Shallah's odyssey began when she was 12 and living in a nice home in the Tel Aviv suburb of Jaffa. During the 1948 war, a Jewish neighbor and friend of her father's came to their home with a warning. "He said, 'Abu Salameh, leave tonight. There's going to be a massacre,'" recalled Shallah.
No massacre was reported, but war was raging and Israeli forces shelled the city. Thousands of Palestinians fled, while thousands remained and became Israeli citizens.
At first, life in Lebanon wasn't so bad for Shallah. She made good money working in an ice cream factory in a Christian neighborhood in Beirut, then studied nursing and worked as a nurse there for five years until she married a refugee from Jaffa.
Her daughter, Jamila, still remembers vividly the moment her father let go of her hand to go back to lock the house.
"I wish I had died with my father. I'm not happy in my life, even though I love my children," she said. "All I want is to have a stable life, for my husband to have a job, my children to go to school. I don't ask for more," she said. "I don't ask for a limousine or a villa. All I need is a sense of security."
Jamila went to anniversary ceremonies at the mass graves where most of the Sabra and Shatila victims are buried under a row of lemon and olive trees. But she dismissed the speeches of Palestinian officials.
"They come here once a year, talk and open our wounds. Then they go back to their posh homes, drink coffee, eat their nice meal and forget about us until next year," she said.
As for Sharon, who is still in a coma, she says: "God willing, he won't die soon and continues to suffer. He killed my father."
MyWay
Well maybe instead of tying to move to France, and then trying to change France, they should stay home, and change home from the hell hole it is.
Well wait a minute, that would almost be like agreeing with the US? Second thought, Paris here we come.
"The most important thing for me is to leave this country. Ask any Palestinian youth in Lebanon and that's what they will say," the 24-year-old Khalifa said.
Khalifa works as a barber, but only occasionally. He quit school in the eighth grade, deciding education would have no benefit when there's little chance of a promising career.
Extreme poverty and despair grip Lebanon's 12 crowded Palestinian camps, home to 400,000 refugees. Crammed into a country half the size of New Jersey or Belgium, they live under severe restrictions on work, travel and education - a marked difference from their fellow refugees in Syria and Jordan, who have been largely integrated into society.
Next year Palestinians mark the 60th anniversary of the war that drove hundreds of thousands of them into exile when Israel became a state. And this month Palestinians in Lebanon observed the 25th anniversary of one of their darkest episodes - the massacre in the Beirut camps of Sabra and Shatila by Israeli-backed Christian militiamen in which between 1,200 and 1,400 people died, by Lebanese Red Cross count.
And the tragedy goes on. Four months ago, thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes in the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon as the army fought al-Qaida-inspired Islamic militants of various nationalities. Officials say at least 20 civilians died in the three months of fighting.
Previous generations of Palestinians in Lebanon had it a little better. In the 1970s, Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization was here, providing refugees with protection, employment and elaborate social and health institutions. But the PLO's virtual state-within-a-state did not sit well with their Lebanese hosts.
In 1982, Israel invaded to drive out the PLO, and since then it has been a long, slow decline for the refugees.
For them, nothing marks the start of that decline as starkly as Sabra and Shatila - a horror that still echoes to Khalifa's generation.
It came two weeks after Arafat and his guerrillas left. For three days - from Sept. 16 to 18, 1982, the Christian militiamen, sworn enemies of the PLO, rampaged through the two camps, slaughtering men, women and children. An Israeli commission of inquiry later found Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible. Sharon had to resign as defense minister.
At his home in Shatila last week, Khalifa stared at the floor, head bowed as he listened once again to his grandmother, Eftekar Shallah, and mother, Jamila Shallah, tell the story of how his grandfather was killed in the massacre, a year before he was born.
On the evening of Sept. 16, the family emerged from an underground shelter. The grandfather, Mohammed, gave his radio to his 10-year-old daughter Ikhlas to hold, then headed back to their house to lock it up.
There were gunmen on the roofs. The militiamen had ordered people to surrender, promising they would be spared - a promise often broken. Jamila grabbed her father's hand as he headed back to the house and begged him to surrender. He left her and kept going.
As his wife, Eftekar, waited across the road, Mohammed headed back to her, only to fall to the ground, shot in the head by a single bullet.
"He died in front of our house, in front of me," Eftekar, 71, said quietly.
Their story, told and retold over the years to keep the memory alive - has knitted together the lives of the grandmother, mother and son through the 25 years of despair that followed.
"I've heard the story many times," Mahmoud Khalifa said gravely. "We've suffered too many tragedies and have gotten used to suffering. Every day is a tragedy for us. It's become as normal as drinking a glass of water."
Khalifa's is a story of struggle, anger and longing for a normal life.
"We Palestinians in Lebanon are buried alive. We have no rights. In Europe, animals have more rights than we have here," he said bitterly.
While Palestinians in Jordan have become naturalized citizens, those here have faced strong resistance from Lebanese politicians and the population at large to any debate on the issue for fear of tilting the demographic balance of the country of multiple Christian and Muslim denominations. Palestinian refugees are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims.
Lebanese law bars Palestinians from employment in the public sector and limits their entry into some 70 different professions. In the camps - crowded, densely built neighborhoods - jobs are scarce. Palestinians are denied the right to own homes or enlarge those they have.
Even a simple outing with friends or a drive around Beirut is a hassle. Khalifa's blue ID card identifies him as a Palestinian, so he is stopped at every security checkpoint and subjected to prolonged checks - more rigorous since the fighting at Nahr el-Bared.
He tried five times to get to Sweden - the last time three years ago when he paid $5,000 to an Iraqi smuggler who dumped him in Spain where he was caught.
"They don't like us," Khalifa said of the Lebanese. "They see us as a virus. They blame us for everything that's gone wrong in the country."
Lebanese commonly blame Palestinians in Lebanon for the outbreak of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war. In addition to the Christian militias and the Israelis, their enemies included the Syrians who controlled the country until two years ago, and Amal, a Syrian-backed Shiite militia that waged a war in the camps in the mid-1980s which killed more than 1,000 Palestinian civilians.
"We were always being chased by one group or another," said Eftekar Shallah, "we were always taking to the streets barefoot... We lost our home. .. They killed us as we slept."
The elder Shallah's odyssey began when she was 12 and living in a nice home in the Tel Aviv suburb of Jaffa. During the 1948 war, a Jewish neighbor and friend of her father's came to their home with a warning. "He said, 'Abu Salameh, leave tonight. There's going to be a massacre,'" recalled Shallah.
No massacre was reported, but war was raging and Israeli forces shelled the city. Thousands of Palestinians fled, while thousands remained and became Israeli citizens.
At first, life in Lebanon wasn't so bad for Shallah. She made good money working in an ice cream factory in a Christian neighborhood in Beirut, then studied nursing and worked as a nurse there for five years until she married a refugee from Jaffa.
Her daughter, Jamila, still remembers vividly the moment her father let go of her hand to go back to lock the house.
"I wish I had died with my father. I'm not happy in my life, even though I love my children," she said. "All I want is to have a stable life, for my husband to have a job, my children to go to school. I don't ask for more," she said. "I don't ask for a limousine or a villa. All I need is a sense of security."
Jamila went to anniversary ceremonies at the mass graves where most of the Sabra and Shatila victims are buried under a row of lemon and olive trees. But she dismissed the speeches of Palestinian officials.
"They come here once a year, talk and open our wounds. Then they go back to their posh homes, drink coffee, eat their nice meal and forget about us until next year," she said.
As for Sharon, who is still in a coma, she says: "God willing, he won't die soon and continues to suffer. He killed my father."
MyWay
Well maybe instead of tying to move to France, and then trying to change France, they should stay home, and change home from the hell hole it is.
Well wait a minute, that would almost be like agreeing with the US? Second thought, Paris here we come.
posted by madtom at 6:16 PM
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