Musa Al-Hindi* on Lebanon's "stateless aliens" The 21st anniversary of the Massacre of Sabra and Shatilla will be commemorated September 16-19. Palestinians living in Lebanon, numbering between 380,000 and 400,000, will observe this anniversary feeling more apprehensive about their precarious existence in their host country. The political climate within Lebanon, Palestine and the rest of the Arab world has rendered them vulnerable to adverse political, economic, and social circumstances. By highlighting some of those conditions, many of which are the result of discriminatory policies by the Lebanese state, this article hopes to draw attention to the suffering of Palestinian refugees. Lebanon should realise that granting the refugees their civil rights would bolster their resistance to any agreement that fails to repatriate them to their original towns and villages. One must emphasise from the outset that the main, underlying cause of the refugees' plight was their expulsion by the Zionists. As such, Israel bears the ultimate responsibility for their predicament. The United Nations is equally responsible, owing to its decisive role in the creation of Israel, as well as to its failure to enforce its numerous resolutions calling for the repatriation of the refugees to their original lands and homes. The international community's failure to adequately finance the UNRWA's (United Nations Relief and Work Agency) provision of temporary health, educational and social assistance to Palestinian refugees, coupled with their abandonment by the PLO, have deprived the them of essential basic services. Since 1948, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have constantly faced severe political, economic and social problems. Their status deteriorated sharply in the wake of the PLO's departure from Beirut in 1982, and again in 1987, when the Lebanese government annulled the 1969 Cairo Accords which guaranteed them, among other things, unrestricted right to work and residency. This situation was further aggravated after the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles (Oslo Accords) in 1993. Fearing that the so- called peace process would lead to the permanent settlement (tawteen) of Palestinians in Lebanon, thereby altering the country's sectarian balance, the Lebanese state enacted a series of discriminatory measures aimed at marginalising its refugee population and limiting their civil rights. Claims by Lebanese officials that these and other damaging policies were carried out in order to protect the refugees' right of return are absurd at best. Lebanese law defines Palestinians as "stateless aliens". As such, they are excluded from work in the public sector. They are also prohibited by law from all occupations requiring membership of a syndicate, including law, medicine, and engineering. Further restrictions have been imposed on Palestinian employees by the principle of "state reciprocity". According to Lebanese labour laws, foreign nationals are permitted to practice any profession in the private sector as long as they are citizens of countries where Lebanese nationals may work in the same profession. Since Palestinians are considered "stateless", they are unable to meet the reciprocity requirement. As a result of those and other restrictions, Palestinians in Lebanon are excluded from 73 white-collar professions. Lebanese law delineates a second category of professions which are open only to those Palestinians who have been granted work permits by the Ministry of Labour. These include most of the banking, administrative and managerial jobs. According to the Palestinian Human Rights Organisation (Hoqouq), in 1995 only 100 out of several thousand Palestinian applicants were granted work permits, to be renewed every 12 months. Areas of employment open to Palestinians without permits comprise, by and large, the most manual sorts of jobs primarily in the areas of construction, sanitation, agriculture, textile and carpet manufacturing, and car wash. Lebanese labour laws vis-à-vis Palestinian refugees violate a host of international treaties and covenants. The United Nations Declaration Against Racism and Discrimination prohibits states from enacting policies that discriminate among individuals based on race, colour or ethnicity. Similarly, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights emphasises the right of everyone to earn a living through a profession of his or her choice. All Palestinians registered with the UNRWA are considered legal residents of Lebanon. However, the Lebanese government's obsession with the tawteen has caused it to enact a series of policies with the purpose of decreasing the number of Palestinians in Lebanon. Consequently, thousands of Palestinians living abroad were prevented from returning to Lebanon. An additional 40,000 were stripped of their residency papers by the Lebanese General Security upon obtaining passports from a third country. An equal number of naturalised Palestinians are on the verge of losing their Lebanese citizenship due to a new decree by Lebanon's highest court. Palestinian residency rights are further undermined by restrictions on camp development and reconstruction, as well as on refugees' right to own property. Half of the Palestinian refugee population in Lebanon (between 185,000 and 200,000) reside in the 12 officially recognised refugee camps, most of which were partly destroyed by Israeli invasions and bombardments, and during the "War of the Camps" in 1985-87. Another 17, non-registered small camps house around 40,000 refugees. All 12 camps, intended to accommodate no more than 100,000 refugees, suffer from severe overcrowding. Official restrictions on building and reconstruction in the camps make the problem of overcrowding much more acute. In Ein Al-Hilweh Camp, for instance, the ratio of person to square metre is 18:1. The problem was exacerbated in 2001 as a result of the enactment of a new law prohibiting Palestinians from owning real estate in Lebanon. The new legislation, which was contested by a few Lebanese MPs, forbids from owning property anyone who is not a citizen of a recognised state, or anyone whose access to property undermines the Constitution's provisions against tawteen, an unambiguous reference to Palestinians. Therefore, not only are Palestinian refugees prevented from buying land needed to accommodate their natural growth, but they are also prohibited from passing lands they already own to their descendants. This constitutes a clear violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations' Declaration against Racism and Discrimination. Lebanon's punitive labour, residency and ownership laws vis-à-vis the Palestinians, coupled with the poor state of the Lebanese economy, have pushed the refugee community into a state of severe poverty. On the economic front, UNRWA puts Palestinian unemployment at 40 per cent, while local human rights organisations put it at close to 60 per cent. This is reflected in the fact that UNRWA's proportion of "severe hardship" cases amongst refugees in Lebanon is the highest in the Arab world. In addition to the Lebanese policies outlined above, there are additional factors which have likewise worsened the situation of Lebanon's Palestinian refugees. The departure of the PLO in 1982 led to a substantial decrease in the number of those economic and social services it once provided. However, all aid from that organisation, including its monthly indemnities for families of martyrs, ceased following the signing of the Oslo Accords. This was the result of a decision by Yasser Arafat and his aides to divert the PLO's resources to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, causing the refugees in Lebanon to feel intense bitterness towards the organisation and its leaders. The perilous situation of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon was compounded by the UNRWA's decision in 1994 to scale back its services to the camps, in part due to a sharp decrease in donor countries' contributions to the agency. This led to a sharp decline in the quantity and quality of health and other services provided by UNRWA. Palestinian patients in need of hospitalisation have been particularly vulnerable since they have been declared ineligible for subsidies from the Lebanese government. Local human rights organisations have documented several cases of death at hospital doors due to lack of adequate funds up front to cover the necessary hospital fees. The plight of the Palestinians in Lebanon stems primarily from their expulsion and continued dispossession by Israel. Therefore, campaigns in support of granting the refugees full civil rights by their host countries must be seen as part of, and not a substitute for, the Palestinian struggle for national liberation and return. Despite all the hardships facing them, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon continue to cling to their historical and legal right to return to their original towns and villages. According to a recent study conducted by the Palestinian Human Rights Organisation, close to 80 per cent of Palestinians in Lebanon reject resettlement in Lebanon and insist on their right to return to their original homes and lands in Palestine. Those results correspond to a similar study conducted by the Foundation for Palestinian Human Rights a couple of years ago. Hence, Lebanese fears that the refugees want to resettle in Lebanon permanently are unfounded. In fact, by depriving the Palestinians of their civil rights, Lebanon may be unwittingly driving them to despair. The Lebanese government needs to be reminded that its treatment of its Palestinian community is not only endangering their capacity to survive, but violates international treaties and covenants as well. For its part, the UN's failure to implement its resolutions reaffirming the refugees' inalienable right of return is inexcusable considering its role in the creation of the refugee problem in the first place. The UN must be pressured to extend the legal and political protections outlined by the 1951 Refugee Convention to all Palestinian refugees until their right of return is actualised. In the meantime, the international community must furnish the UNRWA with the financial means to meet its responsibilities towards the refugees, especially in the fields of health and education, in accordance with UN Resolution 302 (IV). Finally, the Palestinian Authority does not have the right to negotiate on behalf of the Diaspora refugees. None of the PA's officials was elected by them. Nor did the refugees give them or the political elite in the West Bank and Gaza the mandate to represent their interests. This is hardly surprising, considering the PA's ambiguous stance on the right of Palestinians to return to their original homes and lands. Palestinians in Lebanon feel particularly embittered by the PA's betrayal of the right of return. Not only have they played a decisive role in nurturing and protecting the PLO against Israeli and Arab attempts to destroy it, they sustained heavy casualties in the process. It is not surprising, therefore, to hear Palestinian widows and mothers repeating a phrase that refers to their lost children, "They (the PLO) took our milk and blood then left us here." * The writer is a Palestinian refugee from Acre, born and raised in Lebanon and active with Al-Awda, the Palestinian Right to Return Coalition.
