The military siege of the Palestinian Nahr Al-Bared refugee camp has exposed the desperation of Lebanon's Palestinians, reports Lucy Fielder When news of a temporary truce reached the Abu Radi family last week, they seized the chance to flee the Nahr Al-Bared refugee camp near Tripoli in the north of Lebanon. But the bus kept stalling, recalled 12-year-old Youssef Abu Radi from his bed in Safad Hospital in neighbouring Beddawi camp. "It was as if God knew something would happen to us and was telling us not to leave." Fifty metres from the army checkpoint the bus, with two families on board, came under fire, Youssef whispered, his pelvis, chest and belly wrapped in bandages and punctured with shrapnel. The driver slumped dead over the wheel, shot in the head and chest. "The bus flipped over and my mother tried to get out and they shot her in the head." Six-month pregnant, Muntaha Abu Radi died on the spot, said Abu Radi. "My sister was screaming and I tried to shield her. A bullet entered my back and came out of my stomach," he said. The family say the shooting came from the direction of the checkpoint. Youssef's two-year-old sister Janna is also in hospital and cries constantly for her dead mother. And it's Palestinian civilians who paid a high price as the Lebanese army continued their siege of the camp with no end in sight at the time of going to press. At least 18 civilians were killed and about 80 wounded. Furthermore, a military raid on the camp by the Lebanese army remains a strong possibility, despite fears that many more civilians could be killed and a general understanding between the Lebanese government and the Palestinians that the Lebanese military would never enter the camps. If they do enter this could lead to uprisings in the other Palestinian refugee camps and the army could then find itself embroiled in street to street battles, a scenario for which it is ill-prepared. Palestinian clerics are in the process of mediating with the Sunni militants from Fatah Al-Islam, an Al-Qaeda-inspired organisation that established itself in the camp last November, with the support of other Palestinian factions. The clerics are trying to persuade the militants to hand over members suspected of attacking the army, said Marwan Abdul-Aal, a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) official, who left Nahr Al-Bared last Thursday for the southern city of Sidon. The army says it will accept nothing less as a condition for ending the standoff, during which it has sustained its worst losses since the civil war. Furthermore, many Lebanese back a raid on the camp. Fatah Al-Islam is led by a Palestinian but its members are mostly northern Lebanese or Arabs from other countries. Palestinian factions have distanced themselves from the group but at first supported the army's heavy shelling of Nahr Al-Bared last week. "Fatah Al-Islam is not a Palestinian phenomenon," Abdel-Aal said. "This issue was intended to create problems between the Palestinians and Lebanese and we're trying to prevent this and show that the camp is not a perpetrator of violence but a victim of it." Some Lebanese, however, have failed to make the distinction, instead resurrecting anti-Palestinian sentiment, said Mohamed Ali Khalidi, a philosophy professor at the American University of Beirut and researcher for the Institute of Palestine Studies. "Whatever happens -- siege, raid or political solution -- the general impression left is that the Palestinian presence in Lebanon is problematic and not conducive to security in Lebanon." Many Maronite Christians and others accuse Palestinian factions of igniting the 1975-90 Civil War when they moved to southern Lebanon's squalid refugee camps and fought Israel from there after Jordan's King Hussein drove them out of Jordan in 1970. Broadly speaking, rightwing Christian militias armed themselves against the Palestinians; leftist and Muslim groups fought with them. Following discussions last year, Lebanese leaders agreed to dismantle the leadership of the armed Palestinian camps in Lebanon, run mostly by militant factions such as the Syrian-backed PFLP-General Command, and to organise weapons inside the camps through quotas, permits and greater coordination with the Lebanese army. In return, Lebanon started to examine laws banning Palestinians from about 70 professions, owning property and even enlarging their homes within the camps. A Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) office re-opened in Beirut last May for the first time since the civil war. Lebanon has perhaps the worst conditions for Palestinians in the diaspora, with about 210,000 people crammed into 12 UNRWA camps and a further 200,000 outside, victims of legal discrimination and local rancour. Fatah Al-Islam is far from being the first militant group to mushroom in the camps' squalor and lawlessness. Lebanese officials argue that giving the Palestinians more rights would be a step towards naturalising their presence, thereby, the theory goes, damaging their chances of returning to what is now Israel, although that right is enshrined in international law. But at least as important are Lebanese fears that settling large numbers of Sunni Palestinians would tilt Lebanon's precarious ethnic balance in favour of the Muslims. The decision to shell and besiege Nahr Al-Bared is aimed at disarming, not only dismantling, the Palestinian militias, said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb of the Carnegie Endowment Middle East Centre in Beirut. "The Lebanese government's larger goal is to disarm the Palestinians inside the camps, not just Fatah Al-Islam but also the other factions as well and then move on to Hizbullah. "When you've got US arms being shipped in so blatantly and Arab governments providing military aid and unabashedly encouraging the army to wipe out this movement and to raid the camp, then this is a war against the Palestinians," she said. The US expedited previously agreed arm shipments to Lebanon, and cargo planes loaded with military supplies from Washington, Jordan and the UAE landed in Lebanon over the past week. The army's scorched earth policy, criticised by Amnesty International, has fomented anger in the camps and given the Al-Qaeda-inspired groups a certain legitimacy in the eyes of some, creating a link the US and Israel have sought to establish for years, Saad-Ghorayeb said. "Al-Qaeda was never associated with the Palestinians and now it is, thanks to the Siniora government and the Americans. In the camps now, it's a case of 'my enemy's enemy is my friend'." Talks between the government and Palestinian factions started in October 2005, spurred by UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which called for the disarming of all militias in Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syrian troops. Syria pulled out after Rafik Al-Hariri's assassination in 2005 but the other call remains unanswered. "Following discussions, they were unable to implement 1559. Neither were they able to implement it following last year's war with Israel. The current political crisis has also made it impossible. This is simply another means of trying to establish the resolution and again you've got the same regional alignment -- the Arab governments, the Western world and the Siniora government on one side; Hizbullah, the Palestinians and the Arab street on the other side of the divide," Saad-Ghorayeb said. Hizbullah backed the army's actions at first, but in a speech last Friday Secretary- General Sayed Hassan Nasrallah said attacks on Palestinian civilians were as much of a "red line" as those on the army and called for a political solution and for the militants to stand trial. Khalidi said Nasrallah's position made it hard for the army to storm the camp, which would almost certainly kill many civilians. About 15,000 Palestinians have fled, most to neighbouring Beddawi camp, but thousands remain inside, with the outlaws and the deteriorating conditions. "Now it looks like we might be in for a protracted siege," he said. A military raid risks fuelling widespread Palestinian anger but a camp uprising was far from a foregone conclusion, he said. Many Palestinian refugees and leaders, including Fatah's Lebanon leader Sultan Abul-Aynayn, have been careful not to criticise the army so as to avoid a Lebanese backlash.
