The Burj al Barajneh refugee camp in Beirut is home to 18,000 Palestinians and 40,000 Syrians. It was originally established, in 1948, for 500 families. It’s estimated that there are some 250,000 Palestinian refugees across Lebanon, though this isn’t an exact figure. Many Palestinians, including many who came from Syria since the war began in 2011 are neither registered with The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNWRA) or the Lebanese state. Others have left the country because Palestinians in Lebanon cannot work in key professions, cannot own property and can only own a business in partnership with Lebanese citizens.
Every month young, college-educated Palestinians use “these illegal boats” and travel to Europe, says Nazih Yaacoub, chief of the Palestinian Programme in Unicef Lebanon. He is, himself, a Palestinian refugee. “They will not find job in Lebanon.”
Young people who can’t leave and can’t work, he says, frequently join drug gangs or extremist groups. Burj al Barajneh camp is administered by the Palestinian Authority. Lebanese authorities do not enter. Consequently, the Palestinian population has been joined by Syrian refugees fearful of deportation and poor Lebanese people who can’t afford to live elsewhere due to country’s financial crisis. Security here is run by the different paramilitary factions working together. One of the security men escorting us has a handgun tucked into his waistband.
We start our visit on the edge of the camp at an early childhood education centre run by Fraternity, a Unicef partner organisation. Small children are graduating wearing little mortar boards and others, in classrooms upstairs, are taking a dance class. The centre provides educational, hygiene and mental health supports to children in the face of increasing funding problems. “The genocide that’s happening in Gaza, we can link to what happened in 1948,” says Fraternity director Hassan Al Moustapha. “It’s the same catastrophe, the same crisis ... You can’t imagine the impact these scenes from this horrible war are having on children.”
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[ ‘Our mental health is completely destroyed. We are living in constant sadness’ ]
We emerge into the camp, a warren of dark passageways along which children play and people drive on scooters. It’s too narrow for cars. There’s a knot of dangerous looking electrical wires overhead and a burst pipe pours little tributaries beneath our feet (these routes have been nicknamed the “ways of death”). Buildings are built here without regulation or planning. Floors are added as needed, despite a ban on building materials (“In Lebanon you can do anything if you pay,” says Yaacoub). Many of the apartment doors have little wooden guards that have to be stepped over. These are designed to keep out mice and rats.
We climb concrete stairs to the apartment of Mukaram Al-Awiti. She was eight years old when her family came to the El Buss camp south of Tyre in 1948. They moved to Burj Al Barajneh seven years later. They thought it would only be for a while, she says. “We never went back.”
Mukaram ran a clothes shop in the camp and bought and sold gold to fund the educations and ultimately the migration of some of her children who have good jobs in Sweden and Denmark. One of her sons is a dentist. Another is a pharmacist. “We don’t have property or land so we have to work hard,” she says.
Her daughter-in-law and her granddaughter drop in to check on her while we are there. “I am lucky to have a daughter-in-law,” says Mukaram.
She wants to talk about Gaza. She has a granddaughter, great-grandchildren and friends living there. “They couldn’t get out,” she says. She keeps in touch with them but she worries the calls are bugged. She shows us a video a friend in Gaza just sent of the seashore. She says: “Good morning and we are safe.”
She is overwhelmed by what’s happening and can’t stop watching the news. She sees reflections of the past in all of this. When her family came here in 1948, they lived in tents and now the people from Gaza are doing the same, she says. “They call 1948 a catastrophe but what is going on now in Gaza is a catastrophe. They are slaughtering children.”
She went back to her family home once many decades ago. They had to go through Egypt and stayed overnight at the Egyptian border. In her family’s village there were no people. The houses were empty. She could see places where she used to play and fetch water. She can’t describe the feeling she had, she says. “You feel your heart stop beating.”
She is given to expressions of defiance. Before we leave, she says: “God bless us and help us for what we have experienced in the Nakba. We are still surviving. We are still here.”
The Israeli assault on Gaza is very present in the camp. On one wall there is a poster featuring all the international brands to be boycotted due to their connections to Israel. Though Fatah are the dominant faction – their yellow flags surround the entrance – but the walls of the alleyways are also painted with the stencilled symbols of other groups including that of the Al Quds Brigades (the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad) and the red triangle of Hamas. The latter have multiplied since the bombardment of Gaza commenced. There are also posters featuring political figures from across the spectrum. One building has hung images of Fatah leader Yasser Arafat and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar despite their very different ideologies.
A parakeet is chirping in a cage on the balcony of 58-year-old Khadija Ahmed Azimeh. Some time ago it flew in there and her 16-year-old grandson caught it. He’s always catching birds, she says.
Khadija’s family left Palestine in 1948 and went to live in the Al Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria. She came to Lebanon in 2012 after her husband and her son were killed in the Syrian war. Fifteen members of her family left the country “with only their souls”. (Mukaram also used this expression.)
Khadija has no secure income. She hasn’t been able to pay her rent in six months and is in debt. She survives with help from organisations like Unicef. She has sent any money she could afford to her daughter who lives in Gaza and her granddaughter, who recently gave birth in a tent there. It costs $10,000 to leave Gaza via Egypt and the family can’t afford that. Not knowing what else to do, her teenaged grandson, the one who caught the bird, went to the medical centre and tried to sell them a kidney.
As a Syrian-born Palestinian, Khadija has fewer rights than other Palestinians in the camp and those Palestinians have fewer rights than Palestinians living in Syria before the war. Her grandchildren are terrified at the idea of returning. Khadija talks about relatives and friends who have died in Syria and Gaza. She cries and her 15-year-old granddaughter Shiraz comforts her. Shiraz was two and a half when she came to Lebanon and doesn’t remember Syria at all. She’s in an UNWRA school and wants to be a fashion designer when she’s older. She also likes to read stories, says her grandmother, “about Sherlock Holmes.”
Khadija suffers from heart disease and says she want to see her Gazan loved ones before she dies. Before we leave, she considers her family’s forced movements from Palestine to Syria to Beirut and Gaza today. “It’s a continuous tragedy.”
