The recent killings of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have turned the spotlight on the harassment and discrimination faced by Palestinians in the country, writes Franklin Lamb in Beirut The killings of three Palestinian refugees recently, including Ahmed Qassim from the Nahr Al-Bared camp near Tripoli and 15-year-old Khaled Al-Youssef from the Ein Al-Helwa camp 30 miles south of Beirut in Saida and the wounding of more than a dozen others by the Lebanese army, were not, as some Lebanese politicians have claimed "accidental security incidents". Instead, they were avoidable negligent homicides like those that the Zionist occupation forces and settler/colonists in Palestine regularly commit. It is true that Lebanon's army, like the country itself, is confessionalised, and, as it has done before, the army will likely fracture if civil conflict erupts. The army is also undertrained, weak on discipline, and ill-equipped. But from this observer's experience and learning from friends in the army, the least that can be said on its behalf is that it is no worse and is probably better than some others in the region. Some in the Palestinian community in Lebanon fear that the recent killings of refugees by the army represents a revival of what the Lebanese army has often meted out to Palestinians and that this may be intensifying 30 years after the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra-Shatila camps in Beirut in the early 1980s. The Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon include the worst 12 of the 57 UN-established camps in the Levant, including in Jordan, Syria, Gaza and occupied Palestine, in terms of poverty (65 per cent of Palestinian families living in camps in Lebanon live on less than six dollars a day), health, education, general living conditions, discrimination, isolation, joblessness, shanty housing and a lack of proper elementary and secondary schools. Palestinians are forbidden by law to enroll in state colleges, they lack adequate clinics, hospitals and sewage systems, and they have essentially no potable water, little fresh air and sunlight in many areas of the camps, giving rise to respiratory diseases, domestic abuse and psychological health issues. Contributing to the above has been the forbidding of Palestinians from enjoying the elementary civil rights of working or owning their own homes. During a recent visit to the camps, Mohamed Farwana, a member of Hamas's politburo, described the Nahr Al-Bared camp in which "around 38,000 people are living in deplorable conditions unfit for humans." He added, "I visited Nahr Al-Bared, and no human being can lead a normal life in it. Not even animals can have a normal life in it." No refugees on earth are so targeted and discriminated again as Lebanon's Palestinians, and only some political help and economic assistance arrives sporadically from the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah. Not even the employees of the Palestinian embassy in Beirut have been paid over the past two months, significantly due to the shrinkage in US and EU aid, aimed at forcing yet more concessions from the PA in favour the Zionist occupiers of their country. Every Palestinian family in Lebanon can recount cases of arbitrary arrests, beatings, false imprisonment and harassment from the Lebanese army's Military Intelligence Unit, the supposedly disbanded "Deuxieme Bureau". This Stasi-type organisation, now supposedly reformed, hunted and terrorised Palestinians following the PLO's departure from Beirut in August 1982. According to long-time PLO representative in Lebanon Shafiq Al-Hout in his book My Life in the PLO, the Deuxieme Bureau was a major factor in 70,000 Palestinians departing from Lebanon in 1983 via Beirut airport. In the recent incident, the army initially suspected that the motorbike riders it stopped at the Nahr Al-Bared camp did not have IDs. This was a reasonable assumption, because thousands of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have no IDs because the country where they were born, Lebanon, refuses to provide them with them, thus depriving them of even the few rights given their fellow refugees. Most Palestinians, for example, who arrived in Lebanon after being expelled from Jordan in 1970 never registered with the Lebanese barely-functioning bureaucracy, and despite a quarter of a century of promises by politicians to remedy "the non-ID problem" it has been a case of just more idle talk with no action being taken. Once more, the non-ID issue has become a deadly one, with officials promising yet again to solve the problem. Lebanon's politicians will likely do nothing unless they see some significant personal benefit. Hence, Palestinians without IDs will remain subject to arrest at any time, will not be able to register their marriages or get IDs for their children, or carry out a score of other civil acts that require a government-issued ID. While a meeting has been held between Lebanese army officers including the head of army intelligence Edmond Fadel with a delegation of the representatives of Palestinian factions in order to try to restore calm, there is little confidence that much has been achieved aside from another pledge on behalf of army commander Jean Qahwaji to uncover the details of the crime "through a swift investigation that will determine the perpetrators and prevent a similar incident from occurring in the future". Given past experience, few believe that the investigation will be serious or will even be completed. Compounding all these problems are politicians who lack the political will to provide a simple solution. Lebanon's interior minister told the Akhbar Al-Youm news agency on 20 June that "the disturbances" (the army's killing of Palestinian civilians) that had occurred in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein Al-Helwa were not related to what had happened in the Nahr Al-Bared refugee camp. "What happened in the two Palestinian camps has nothing to do with the security situation in Lebanon. They were just coincidences. The problems inside the camps have been resolved by the Lebanese army." This gross mischaracterisation of what occurred at the camps has further inflamed the situation. Every nine-year-old anywhere in Lebanon knows that the "incident" in Ein Al-Helwa was a direct and predictable result of the army's killings in Nahr Al-Bared. What is remarkable is the restraint shown by the refugees in the other 10 camps and the dozens of additional "gatherings". Taking the opposite view from the interior minister, the speaker of Lebanon's parliament chipped in with the observation that "the incidents at the Palestinian camps and the targets against the Lebanese army are not a coincidence and not innocent and they call for concern. A foreign plot is present, but there is internal participation in it," he warned. Defence Minister Fayez Ghosn's declaration on 20 June "that attacking army posts is dangerous and does not serve the interests of the Palestinian brothers at all" raised the question of whether he was even aware of what had happened at either camp. At least he rejected the foreign plot thesis, designed to undermine the Lebanese army's accountability. What is clear is that local politicians will skew the facts to suit their political instincts and that they are incapable of analysing the events objectively. The killings at Nahr Al-Bared and Ein Al-Helwa are not the result of the chaos in neighbouring Syria. It is perhaps remarkable that the camps have to date not exploded into violence, even as those living in them have exercised their legitimate rights to protect themselves against those, including the Lebanese army, perceived as killing their children and families. Were Lebanon politicians sincere in their hand-wringing claims to be seeking a solution to army attacks on Palestinians, they could make an immediate difference by conducting a full and transparent investigation of the army killings of refugees, giving amnesties to camp residents who have protested against them, unless it is proved that the refugees committed any crime by exercising their right of free speech. They could also take measures to end army provocation, insults and harassment of entering and exiting camp residents, which are causing distress to the Palestinians in the Nahr Al-Bared refugee camp, and to respect the refugees' dignity and humanity. They could pull the army out from inside the Nahr Al-Bared camp, where it acknowledges that there are no weapons, and withdraw it to 2km from the entrances to the other five camps, thus removing the likelihood of bored or malevolent troops harassing camp residents. They could withdraw military deployments among the residents of the camps and end the army's system of permits, which refugees are forced to secure in order to enter and exit their camps, these having been authorised originally in 1949 by the United Nations. They could end the practice, in force at the Nahr Al-Bared camp, of sending intelligence personnel into the camp with every visitor in order to monitor conversations between visitors and camp residents. They could immediately order the army to vacate the camps' public spaces, including the Nahr Al-Bared camp's graveyard, football field, and all residential buildings annexed and now occupied by the army. They could release the foreign and domestic aid donated to the Nahr Al-Bared camp, in order to rebuild it five years after its needless and vengeful destruction. They could stop the media campaigns and fabricated news that are helping to ignite sedition and increase tension in order to create "fake instability". Perhaps most fundamentally and crucially, they could take a few hours of a parliamentary session to repeal the racist 2001 law outlawing home ownership for Palestinian refugees and grant Palestinian refugees the internationally mandated right to work. The US government also has a special obligation to remedy this crisis, given its work to prevent the refugees from returning to their own country. The White House should now enforce the provisions of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act and cut aid to Lebanon, including its army, until it complies with international law in its treatment of the Palestinian refugees. The US would do well to desist from piling sanctions on Iran and Syria and apply a few to Lebanon instead, until the latter country grants civil rights to its guests from occupied Palestine. Unfortunately, when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telephoned Lebanon's prime minister last week to lobby for Lebanese support against the Al-Assad government in Syria, she omitted, as always, to insist that Lebanon comply, as a condition of future US aid, with its internationally mandated obligations toward the Palestinian refugees. The ball is in the Lebanese parliament's court. Time is running out for Lebanon's refusal to grant elementary civil rights to its sisters and brothers from occupied Palestine. The writer is a researcher in Lebanon.
