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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— April – May 2013
L
OOK at a map of Beirut and there is no
mention of Shatila, despite up to ,
people living in an area the size of a foot-
ball stadium and despite its being there
for years. Lebanon is a grudging host and
would prefer Shatila, and the country’s other
eleven Palestinian refugee camps, didn’t exist
at all.
When you talk to Shatila’s residents about their
Nakba (the Arabic word meaning “catastrophe”
as Israel’s ethnic cleansing, massacres and
demolition of villages is euphemistically called),
you feel as though they are not fully present, that
they are still in Palestine, their homeland of olive
trees. Anwar has lived there for all of his years.
“It’s a misery. It’s a shame. We need as Palestinians
to be outside the ghettoes. We have heaven in
Palestine, here we have hell” .
In the squalid Shatila camp, there is nothing
that looks like Palestine. You walk through dusty
alleys where light is dim even in broad daylight
since the overlapping houses were built at random.
There isn’t a hint of greenery; even the school
doesn’t have a playground. The residents have
spotty electricity and rare hot water. Palestinians’
income here is lower than anywhere except Gaza
and the cash-starved United Nations Relief and
Works Agency has had to make severe austerity
cuts in basic services to its education, health and
welfare programmes. Stateless, ID-less, jobless
and without the international legal protections
of other refugees from other countries, it’s a
relentless struggle to live any kind of life at all.
What they do have are place names, old libera-
tion songs, photos of eternally absent relatives
and sometimes still, the rusted key to the front
door of their lost home.
In many respects, Shatila is a microcosm of
a failed Arab state and its anger and politics:
packed, frustrated, hot-housed. Its inhabitants
are oppressed and kept poor by a Lebanese gov-
ernment petrified by the political power the
Palestinians could wield if allowed to. But with the
civil war that is ravaging Syria now into its third
year Lebanon, a country the size of a postage
lorraine courtney
foreign
Beirut bides
Seven years after the last Israeli invasion, Lebanon’s still violent existence is, as
always, fragile
Entrance to Shatila
stamp, has absorbed about a million Syrians,
around , of whom are refugees who fled
with little more than the clothes they were wear-
ing. The Syrian Government bombed a refugee
camp there from the air. There are refugees living
in storefronts, in garages, underneath bakeries.
Many simply live in other people’s homes. You can
have four or five families under one roof.
The Shatila camp has taken in at least
families. Each has a story unheard, untold. Iman,
, walked from Damascus in December with
her three young sons. Her husband was killed in
the Syrian onflict. The family have moved into a
small shed-type hut in Shatila. There’s just one
tiny room, ten feet by ten feet. The children hud-
dle on thin mattresses spread on the floor while
Imran prepares a dinner of chickpeas and stale
bread soaked in yoghurt. A neighbour pokes a
head in, wondering if she’s heading to the pro-
test at the UN building against cuts. “Every day
my mind is more preoccupied”, Imran says as she
strokes her toddler’s head. “I used to not sleep
because of the missiles. Now I don’t sleep because
I worry about our future”.
The refugee situation has authorities panicked
about how to absorb and feed these newcom-
ers but most worrying of all is the fragility of
Lebanese society where sectarian, ethnic and
proxy regional tensions constantly bubble around
the surface. Just as I arrived here, the prime min-
ister resigned: there’s no real government in place
right now and all the while there are street bat-
tles in Lebanon’s second, northern city of Tripoli,
with six people killed the week I arrive, and the
threat of more kidnappings.
Najib Mikati resigned because his government
had become unworkable, and MPs had failed to
draw up a new election law. He had threatened
twice before to go. The first time was in November
when the government was slow to finance
the tribunal investigating the assassina-
tion of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri, in
which the Syrian government and Hezbollah have
been implicated. The second was after a car bomb
killed Wissam al-Hassan, the police intelligence
chief and an enemy of the Syrian government.
Both times Mikati stayed, saying that he had got
assurances that the interests of all factions would
be protected.
Lebanon’s civil war may have fizzled out over
two decades ago, but the influence of its major
players is still all too visible. Six kilometres south-
east of downtown in Dahieh, Iran’s patronage of
Hezbollah and the Shia sector of the city is very
apparent, with flags and posters of Ayatollah
Khamenei, Iran’s hegemon. And in northern
Lebanon, the Sunni heartland, Turkish and Saudi
flags fly alongside the Lebanese banner. The UN’s
Humanitarian Rights chief, Antonio Guterres, has
warned of an “existential threat” to Lebanon
caused by the Syrian crisis and urged interna-
tional support for this poor, brittle state.
In a tiny landscaped square in downtown
Beirut is the statue of Samir Kassir, an outspo-
ken journalist who died in a car bomb in June
. This simple tribute is just a grenade throw
from the An Nahar newspaper offices where he
worked and is a reminder of the dangers anyone
in Lebanon faces when daring to speak the truth.
A poignant quote in Arabic is his rallying cry to
the Lebanese that’s particularly appropriate in
these uncertain times: “Return to the streets, dear
comrades, and you will return to clarity”.
Supported by the Simon Cumbers Media Fund.
Lebanon, a country the size
of a postage stamp, has
absorbed about a million
Syrians
The Shatila massacre was the slaughter of around
2000 civilians, mostly Palestinian and Lebanese
Shia, by a pro-Syrian Lebanese Christian
Phalangist militia in the Palestinian refugee
camps in Beirut, Lebanon in 1982, in retaliation
for the assassination of Lebanese Maronite
Christian president, Bachir Gemayel.
Israel had invaded Lebanon with the
intention of rooting out the PLO, the Palestinian
representative body which had taken refuge there.
Israeli troops took West Beirut in violation of
a ceasefire agreement after the PLO withdrew,
effectively permitting the murderous Phalangist
raid.
The Israel Defence Forces surrounded the
camps and at the Phalangists’ request fired flares
at night to illuminate the massacre. In 1982, a UN
commission chaired by Sean MacBride concluded
that Israel bore responsibility for the violence.
Ariel Sharon, then Israeli Defence Minister,
bore personal responsibility and resigned, later
to return as Prime Minister. The leader of the
massacre subsequently became a Lebanese
Minister.
Main Street Shatila
Bob Fisk, Beirut, topical reading
