Are Palestinians Being Scapegoated Over
Army Killings in Lebanon?
10 July 2012By Franklin Lamb
The killings of three Palestinian refugees this past
week including Ahmad Qassim from Nahr al Bared ( ‘cold
river') camp near Tripoli and 15 year old Khaled al-Youssef
from Ein el Helwe (‘ the beautiful eye') 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 are claiming, " accidental
security incidents". They were avoidable negligent
homicides as much so as Zionist occupation forces and
settler/colonists in Palestine regularly commit.
It is true that Lebanon's army, like the country
itself, is deeply confessionalized and as it has done
before, the army will likely fracture if/when a civil
conflict erupts. It is also under trained, 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 more humane than some others in
the region.
Some in the Palestinian community fear that the recent
killings of refugees by the army represents a revival
of what in the Lebanese army it has often meted out to
Palestinians and that it may be intensifying 30 years
after the massacre at Sabra-Shatila.
Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon are the worst 12
of the 57 UN established camps in the Levant including
Jordan, Syria, Gaza and occupied Palestine in terms of
problems of poverty ( 65 per cent of Palestinian
family 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, forbidden by law to enroll in state
colleges, lack of adequate clinics, hospitals and
sewage systems as well essentially no potable water,
little fresh air and sunlight in many areas of the
camps, rising respiratory diseases, domestic abuse and
psychological health issues. Contributing to all of
the above is the outlawing of Palestinians enjoying
the elementary civil right to work or the own a home.
During a recent visit to the camps, Muhammad Farwana,
a member of Hamas's politburo described the Nahr al-Barid
camp in which "around 38,000 people are living in
deplorable conditions and unfit for humans." He added:
"I visited Nahr al-Barird 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 negligible economical assistance
sporadically arrives from the Palestinian Authority in
Ramallah. Not even the employees at its Embassy of
Palestine in Beirut have been paid their salaries for
the past two months due significantly to US and EU aid
shrinkage aimed at forcing yet more concessions from
the PA in favor the Zionist occupiers of their
country.
Every camp Palestinian family in Lebanon can recount
cases of arbitrary arrests, beatings, false
imprisonment and harassment from the army's Military
Intelligence unit, the supposedly disbanded Deuxieme
Bureau. This Stasi type organization — supposedly
reformed — hunted and terrorized Palestinians
following the PLO departure from Beirut in August of
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
departing Lebanon in 1983 via Beirut airport.
The army initially suspected that the motor bike
riders it stopped at Nahr al Bared camp had no ID.
This was a reasonable assumption because thousands of
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have no ID because the
country where they were born, Lebanon, refuses to
provides them ID, thus depriving them of even the few
rights given their fellow Palestinian 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 century of promises
by politicians here to remedy "the non-ID problem"
it's been just more idle talk with not action being
taken. Once more the non-ID issue has become a deadly
one and officials promising yesterday to solve the
problem. Lebanon's politicians will likely do nothing
unless they see some significant personal benefit.
Hence non-ID Palestinians will remain subject to
arrest at any time, not able to register their
marriages or get ID's for their children or achieve a
score of other civil acts that require a government
issued ID.
While a meeting was held between a number of officers
including the head of Army Intelligence, Edmond Fadel,
with a delegation of Palestinian factions in order to
restore calm in the camp there is little confidence
that much was achieved except another pledge on behalf
of Army Commander General 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 the investigation will be
serious or even completed.
Compounding these problems is a number of Lebanese and
international politicians who lack the political will
to acheive a simple available solution. Lebanon's
Interior Minister on 6/20/12 told Akbar al-Youm news
agency that "the disturbances" (army killing of
Palestinian civilians) that occurred lately in the
Palestinian refugee camp of Ein al-Hilweh were not
related to what had happened in 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 coincidence. The problems inside the
camps have been resolved by the Lebanese army."
This gross mischaracterization of what occurred at the
camps this past week is inflaming passions even more.
Every 9 year old anywhere in Lebanon knows that the
"incident" in Ein el Helwe was a direct and
predictable result of the army's killing in Nahr al
Bared. What is remarkable is the restraint shown by
refugees in the other 10 camps and dozen ‘gatherings'.
Taking the opposite view from the Interior Minister,
the Speaker of Lebanon's Parliament chimed in with the
observation that: "The incidents at the Palestinian
camps and the targets against the Lebanese army are
not coincidence and not innocent and call for concern.
A foreign plot is present but there is an internal
participation in it," he warned, reiterating that the
security incidents from the North to the South are not
a coincidence.
Defense Minister Fayez Ghosn's declaration on 6/20/12
"that attacking Army posts is dangerous and does not
serve the interests of the Palestinian brothers at
all" raised a question whether he was even aware what
had happened at either camp. At least he rejected the
foreign plot thesis designed to undermine Lebanese
Army accountability.
What is clear is that local politicians will
consistently skew the facts to suit their political
instincts and are incapable of analyzing the events
objectively and that the killings at Nahr al Bared and
Ein el Helwe are not the result of the Syrian chaos.
It is perhaps remarkable that the camps have to date
not exploded into violence while exercising 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
differences by implementing the following:
– Conduct a full transparent investigation of the army
killings of refugees and amnesty for camp residents
who have protested the past week unless it is proved
that the refugees committed any crime by exercising
their right of free speech.
-Take measures to remove army provocations, insults,
and harassments of entering and exiting camp residents
that are causing distress to the Palestinians in the
Nahr al-Bared refugee camp and to respect the
refugee's dignity and humanity.
-Pull the army from inside Nahr al Bared, where it
acknowledges there are no weapons and withdraw to two
kilometers from the entrances to the other five camps
it surrounds thus removing the likelihood of bored and
or malevolent troops harassing camp residents.
-Withdraw military deployment among the residents of
the camp. End the army's system of permits, which
refugees are forced to secure in order to enter and
exit their camp authorized originally in 1949 by the
United Nations.
-End the practice, such as is the case at NAB camp of
sending in Mabarrat personnel with every camp visitor
to monitor conversations between the visitors and camp
residents.
- Immediately order the army to vacate the camps
public spaces including Nahr al Bared's graveyard, the
football field, and all residential buildings annexed
by and now occupied by the army.
- Release the foreign and domestic aid donated to Nahr
al-Bared in order to rebuild the camp, after five
years since its needless and vengeful destruction and
to stop the media campaigns and fabricated news that
are helping in igniting sedition and increasing
tension to create "fake instability."
And perhaps most fundamental and crucial:
Take a few hours during a current Parliamentary
session to repeal the racist 2001 law outlawing home
ownership for Palestinian refugees and grant
immediately grant Palestinian refugees the
internationally mandated right to work.
The American government also has a special obligation
to remedy this crisis given its work to prevent the
refugees from returning to their country. The White
House should 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 refugees. The US
would do well to desist from piling sanctions on Iran
and Syria and apply a few to Lebanon until it grants
civil rights to its unwanted guests from occupied
Palestine.
Unfortunately when US Secretary of State Clinton
telephoned Lebanon's Prime Minister Miqati last week
to lobby for Lebanese support against the Bashar 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
its Palestinian refugees.
The ball is in the Lebanese Parliaments court. Time is
running out for impunity relative to Lebanon's refusal
to grant elementary civil rights for their sisters and
brothers from occupied Palestine.
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EsinIslam.Com
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