Can't Go Home Again
For Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, life is hard and the prospect of return is fading by the day
FADI DAWISFI, 2S, IS BEHIND THE counter of his grocery store, counting change in almost total darkness. He gets only a few hours of electricity a day, just like the other crumbling shops and dwellings along Salameh Street in Beirut's Sabra refugee camp, where smelly piles of garbage sit uncollected and the water supply swims with disease. Even when the lights we on, Dawish has to strain as he adds up the day's receipts because of the deep shrapnel gash over his left eye from Israel's onslaught against Palestinians in Lebanon 19 years ago. Recently, Dawish saw his world become a little darker when Ariel Sharon, the architect of that 1982 invasion, returned top over as Israel's new Prime Minister. "Where are we to go?" he asks. "Into the sea?"
The stalemate the peace process is making Palestinians like Dawish more anxious than ever about their future. The despair-and the potential for new conflict-may be greatest among the 300,000 refugees in Lebanon. Living often five to a room in 12 camps run by the United Nations, they watched as Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat conducted years of talks with Israel yet failed to win a solution to the refugee problem, which dates to fighting during Israel's 1948 war of independence. With Sharon's comeback, their hopes have been all but destroyed: whatever his promises to make peace, they still see him as `the butcher,' the ex-general found by an Israeli ,report to bear' indirect responsibility" for the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians at Sabra and the neighbouring Shatila camp during the 1982 war.
What worries the refugees as much as Sharon, though, is a growing consensus in Lebanon that they must leave. The 2 million refugees in Syria and Jordan are Been as less of a problem because they have been granted more employment rights, citizenship or both. But Lebanon has always been far less hospitable, imposing regulations that prevent refugees from working in some 60 professions, lest they became rooted in the country. The refugees associate Sharon with the massacre, even though it was carried out by Israel-allied Lebanese Christians who had long fought Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. Christian fears that the mainly Muslim Palestinians threatened their survival helped spark Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war.
The days when the P.L.O. ran an unruly state-within-a-state have left many Lebanese with bitter memories. Over the last year, debates in parliament and editorials in Beirut dailies have echoed the rising sentiment that Lebanon will find it difficult to bury its past and build a democratic future as long as Palestinian refugees remain in the country. `We refuse any implantation," Information Minister Ghazi Aridi declared in December. "This is a basic Lebanese national issue on which we cannot make any compromise.'
So far, renewed Palestinian attacks on Israel have been limited mostly to the new intifadeh that erupted in the West Bank and Gaza last September. But in the present vacuum, there is talk about Lebanon once again becoming a battlefield. A Western diplomat believes 10,000 Palestinian guerrillas are under arms inside the country. Camps like Ein al-Helweh in southern Lebanon, virtually off limits to the Lebanese army, are awash with AK-47s. With school children raised on militant nationalism and playing war in the streets, Lebanese regard the refugee camps as ticking time bombs. The fear is that Palestinian guerrillas in Lebanon, on orders from Arafat, the Syrians, the Iranians or out of their own desperation, roll join the intiftideh by staging operations into northern Israel. That could provoke Sharon into a new military blitz, jeopardising Lebanon's reconstruction efforts and throwing the entire region into crisis.
It didn't have to be that way. In negotiations that broke off just before Sharon's election last month, the two sides discussed various compromises to solve the refugee problem once and for all. The Israelis considered allowing some refugees into Israel on humanitarian grounds and contributing to an International aid package. The Palestinians, for their part, seemed to understand that the return of millions- of refugees would be demographic suicide for the Jewish state. Talks on the issue finally stalemated, largely over Palestinian demands that Israel formally recognise a `right of return' for the refugees.
It can hardly he called a brighter side, but for now, at least, the Palestinians in Lebanon have stopped dreaming of going home. `With Sharon, we can never hope for anything good,' says Mohammed Safad, 59, working a cigarette cart at the entrance to Sabra. `He will never let us return. He only says no, no, no. 'That seems to be the kind of realism lsrael's new Prime Minister is aiming to instil in Israel's stand-off with the Palestinians. But as the uncertainties in Lebanon suggest, it may not be enough to bring peace to the Middle East. -With reporting by Scott MacLeod Cairo