As fighting raged into its fourth week at Nahr Al-Bared, the Lebanese government toughened its stance towards the Palestinians, reports Lucy Fielder Prime Minister Fouad Al-Siniora may have hinted at a significant policy shift this week when he told a French news channel that the system whereby the Palestinians in Lebanon's 12 refugee camps police themselves had failed. "Fatah Al-Islam's entry into the Nahr Al-Bared Camp shows the failure of the Palestinians' autonomous security system", Al-Siniora said in an interview with France 24. Although the Cairo agreement which banned the Lebanese army from entering these camps and left Palestinian armed factions to police them was abrogated in 1987, in practise it still applies. Officials have also talked about using Nahr Al-Bared, a camp north of Tripoli where the army is besieging the militant Sunni organisation, Fatah Al-Islam, as a "model", says Mohamed Ali Khalidi, a philosophy professor at the American University of Beirut and researcher for the Institute of Palestine Studies. The battle has killed at least 140 people, more than 60 of them soldiers, and shelling has destroyed parts of the camp, once home to about 40,000 refugees. Between 3,000 and 5,000 remain, aid agencies say, most either trapped inside by the fighting or unwilling or afraid to leave their homes. Two Lebanese Red Cross workers were killed on Monday by gunfire from within the camp. An army source said the siege would continue until the militants surrendered. Analysts say the army appears to be counting on the radical group's ammunition and supplies running out. After early predictions of a swift battle, few now predict a speedy end to the crisis. "I think potentially something very alarming could take place after this dies down. The Lebanese authorities might go in, rebuild it as they think it should be rebuilt and install a very harsh security regime that would clamp down on the Palestinians," Khalidi said. All sides in Lebanon agree that the status quo in the country was impractical and unstable from way back, as well as disastrous for the roughly 400,000 Palestinians who are denied the right to work in more than 70 professions, effectively restricting them to mostly manual labour, and property ownership outside the camps. Last year, a dialogue between various Lebanese political leaders reached a rare agreement, sanctioned by the mainstream Palestinian factions, on the need to regulate weapons inside the camps and ban them outside -- a reference to the remote armed checkpoints manned by radical groups. In return, more civil rights appeared to be on the cards. War with Israel and deepening political paralysis between Al-Siniora's government and the opposition led by Hizbullah shelved these proposals. But draconian security measures would almost certainly deepen Palestinian misery and foster a deep sense of alienation. Arguably, such steps could also intensify friction with their Lebanese hosts, many of whom blame the Palestinian population for the outbreak of the 1975-90 civil war. Furthermore, none of these measures would undermine the popularity of the militant groups which flourish in the lawlessness of the camps, even if attempts were made to suppress them. History provides a cautionary tale. Tightening the security noose around the Palestinians risks invoking the "model" of Lebanon's infamous "deuxieme bureau" army intelligence agency that controlled the Palestinians with an iron fist during the 1950s and 1960s, Khalidi says. Curfews, curbs on Palestinian movement outside the camps, arbitrary arrests and incarceration were visited on the people that had fled or were driven from their homeland after Israel's creation in 1948. "Looking back, you could say that militancy arose partly as a result of this intense clampdown," Khalidi says. When Jordan expelled Palestinian fighters after "Black September" in 1970, they landed amid a disenchanted and frustrated population in Lebanon. Intensified security measures during the past month have already hurt some Palestinians in Lebanon, even outside the camps, Khalidi says. He echoes widespread reports from human rights activists of harassment and "profiling" of Palestinians. A Palestinian part-time drama teacher was stopped and beaten by Lebanese police in the Beirut district of Hamra a few weeks ago, he said. Human Rights Watch reported this week that the Lebanese army and internal security forces had arbitrarily arrested and physically abused some Palestinian men fleeing Nahr Al-Bared. Reports of beatings were deterring some refugees who had stayed behind from leaving. "Lebanese forces can question Palestinians from Nahr Al-Bared about Fatah Al-Islam, but resorting to physical abuse is clearly against Lebanese law and international human rights standards," said Sarah Leah Whitson, the US-based rights group's Middle East director. Al-Siniora warned aid agencies this week to take care of civilians leaving Nahr Al-Bared Camp, in case they were fighters in disguise. "That sends out a terrible message to the Palestinians: you're guilty until proven innocent," Khalidi said. A number of friends and acquaintances in Lebanon had experienced "profiling" of one form or another in the past few weeks, he added. The Lebanese also stand to lose if a persistent atmosphere of tension is used to deny civil liberties. Attention turned anew to the presence of Palestinian weapons in Lebanon with the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1559 in September 2004, which called for all militias to be disarmed -- a reference to Shia guerrilla and political group Hizbullah as well as the Palestinians. Washington and France were strong backers of the resolution. The United States flew in shipments of ammunition, requested long ago, to the Lebanese army and repeated its support for Al-Siniora, perhaps seizing on the opportunity to portray itself as backing a Middle Eastern government that is "fighting Al-Qaeda". The Security Council reiterated its "full support for the legitimate and democratically elected government of Lebanon" on Tuesday and condemned the "ongoing criminal and terrorist acts in Lebanon, including those perpetrated by Fatah Al-Islam". There is no indication that the fighting in the north was instigated in order to tackle the Palestinian weapons issue -- the fighting broke out with a police raid on the Tripoli hideout of alleged bank robbers linked to Fatah Al-Islam. And Fatah Al-Islam is not considered to be a Palestinian group, with most of its members being Lebanese and other Arab nationalities, with some Palestinians. Radical Salafi ideology and Al-Qaeda inspire the group rather than Palestinian resistance. Yet those in power, inside Lebanon and outside, appear to have taken advantage of the situation. "It's quite plausible that they're seizing the opportunity to transform the relationship between the Lebanese authorities and the camps," Khalidi said. The "security islands" the camps represented once suited all sides, despite official pronouncements to the contrary, Khalidi said. The arrangement protected the Lebanese army from potentially dangerous policing that could have dragged it into confrontations with Palestinian groups and this would have been disastrous given the fraught nature of host-refugee relations. Furthermore, this arrangement allowed the army to relinquish responsibility for the camps, while providing it with an excuse if skirmishes broke out that were beyond its control. Additionally, during the days of Syrian hegemony which ended in 2005, it gave Lebanon's larger neighbour the opportunity to stir up conflagrations when it so desired, he said. Severe security measures for the Palestinians are not the answer to their problematic presence in Lebanon. "Security for the Palestinians should be the same as for the Lebanese, these are not ghettos," Khalidi added. "Lebanon should grant civil rights to the Palestinians and normalise their situation here. This in no way abrogates their right of return," he concluded. By Lucy Fielder
