By Michael Karadjis
BEIRUT — Bourj al Barajneh camp is home to 20,000 Palestinian refugees, crammed into one square kilometre on the southern outskirts of the city. While life in the camp was always challenging, to say the least, the situation has deteriorated drastically since the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO in 1993.
According to Olfat Mahmoud, social worker and former nurse in the camp, whose parents were expelled from Palestine in 1948, both the United Nations Work and Relief Agency (UNWRA) and the Palestinian Red Crescent have virtually ceased aid since 1993, directing all of it instead to the occupied territories. Apparently, since the Palestinians now have a "state", there are no longer refugees.
On September 9, all Palestinian refugees working in UNWRA institutions in Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza went on strike to protest against these cuts.
The taps in the camp have no drinking water, and there is legally no electricity — what they have is a result of dangerous manual wiring efforts. Raw sewage runs down to the lowest point in the camp; in winter "the camp becomes a lake", according to camp resident Hatim.
All this is because the refugee situation is a "temporary" one — for 50 years. The "temporary" nature of the camps allows world bodies and regional governments to leave people living in this monstrous situation. For most, camp life is their entire life.
"Palestinians are banned from 52 professions in Lebanon", explains Hatim.
However, most work illegally, without the pay and conditions of the Lebanese. Hatim, for example, works as an accountant two hours a day longer than Lebanese workers, for less money.
Education means 60 students per class, while in terms of health care, "About 10 people have died in the last three months outside hospitals because they had no money. One man went on TV to sell his son, because he had no money to pay the hospital for his father."
"The PLO has forgotten us" since Oslo, says Olfat. The accords mention the refugees only as one of the last issues to be dealt with in the "final status" negotiations. There are no promises, and given that Israel has violated every aspect of the accord that it did agree on, there are no hopes here that anything will come out of such talks.
Israel has made it clear all along that it will never accept the return of the refugees it expelled in 1948, openly violating UN resolutions.
However, leaving the 500,000 Palestinians in Lebanon out of a settlement would leave a massive problem. The Lebanese government has long refused either to offer citizenship or to alleviate the "temporary" conditions it imposes on the Palestinians, insisting that they must go.
For their part, every Palestinian I spoke to insisted they would completely reject Lebanese citizenship even if it were offered.
The older people still have the keys to the houses they were expelled from in 1948, when the state of Israel was created in an orgy of massacres and ethnic cleansing of 900,000 Palestinians. However, the bulk of camp residents have never set foot on their homeland: they are born, bear children and die in the camp.
Yet even the smallest child can tell you the name of the occupied village in Palestine which they aim to return to. "It is the dream of every Palestinian to go back to Palestine", says Hatim.
"Everyone in the camp supports Hamas and Hezbollah", according to camp resident Khalil. Khalil and his group of friends at his photography studio are typical young secular Palestinians, with the appearance of anything other than the western stereotype of a supporter of such Islamic groups.
"We support them because they fight Israel. All the others just talk. We don't care if they are Christians, Muslims, Communists, whoever, as long as they fight Israel", explains Khalil.
Evidence of support for the Lebanese organisation Hezbollah on the walls of the camp is far more obvious than support for any PLO faction, because of what they see as the betrayal of Arafat and the ineffectiveness of his opposition.
The poverty stricken Shiite areas of south Beirut border on the Palestinian camps and hence share a common existence. Relations have not always been good — the thousands of bullet holes in the walls of the camp and the surrounding buildings are evidence of the criminal war waged against the camps by the Shiite chauvinist group Amal in the 1980s, until Amal was expelled by the rival Hezbollah.
The arrival of Hezbollah was depicted in the media as the victory of a more "fundamentalist" current among the Shiites.
The question is, just what does "fundamentalism" mean? If it means the attempt to impose reactionary religious restrictions on how people live, dress, work and so on, there is precious little evidence of it in the area.
Next to Bourj al Barajneh is an area under direct control of Hezbollah forces, yet one needs to be told to know. There are women wearing scarves like anywhere in the Middle East, but just as many without scarves, dressed as they please, working in shops and offices alongside men, even in the local Pizza Hut.
Asked if Hezbollah had tried to impose strict religious restrictions on the population, Olfat replied, "We heard a lot about that in the western media, but I never noticed it here".
This may be superficial, but the contrast with the medieval uniformity of the Mea Sharim region of Jerusalem controlled by Jewish fundamentalists couldn't be greater. Further, if Hezbollah once raised the highly illogical slogan of an "Islamic republic" for Lebanon, this has long since been forgotten, as it concentrates instead on the liberation of Lebanese territory from Israeli occupation.
Hezbollah has emerged as the leading force in the national resistance to the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, gaining wide respect from both the Christian and Muslim population of the country, and the Palestinians.
There is a contradiction between an organisation that can mobilise people on the scale necessary to carry out such a task, and one that oppresses the population through imposing reactionary restrictions on their daily lives. It seems Hezbollah has resolved this contradiction by forgetting about the latter.