'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Back to Shatila, part 2

I "knew" in some abstract sense that conditions in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon have become really terrible since 1982, and are now easily the worst of those in any Palestinian refugee camps anywhere. Worse, even, than most of the camps in Gaza, many Palestinian friends had told me.

But on this visit to Beirut I wanted to see the situation in Shatila camp, where I worked briefly as a volunteer English-language teacher back in 1974, for myself.

A woman called "Maha" who works with a camp-based NGO told me on the phone how to get to the NGO's office near the edge of the camp. "It's just near the UNRWA school," she said. I found a taxi-driver willing to take me there. As we approached the camp, he got help from a passing motorcyclist, who threaded his way ahead of us through some of the dirtiest, most run-down streets of the Shi-ite-dominated "Dohhiya" (suburb). We found the office in a trash-strewn alley tucked behind some workshops heaped with rusting car parts.

At the entrance of the four-story building, a dishevelled young man was cradling a Kalashnikov. I asked for the NGO. He pointed towards some dark stairs and told me to go up a floor. Upstairs, two or three rooms were just visible in the gloom. Another electricity cut. My eyes took time to adjust. I heard the voices of teenage girls talking and joking with each other inside a resonatingly bare-walled room. I turned into the room, still blind, and was given a friendly greeting by the girls. "Miss Maha?" I asked. One of the girls said she would shortly be there and gave me her chair..

The girls continued talking among themselves. There were maybe 16 of them crammed around two large tables pushed together. Two were veiled. The others wore some combination of tight jeans and tee-shirts that you could have seen in any poor area of the Mediterranean or Latin America. Some had workbooks open in front of them, but no-one was studying much. Just enough grey light filtered in from the single window to light up the broad smiles that the girls flashed occasionally as they talked and joked together.

Maha soon came up the stairs. She had a couple of quick, business-like conversations with staff members in other rooms, found the teacher for the room I'd been in... and then we were on our way. "You want to see the mass grave first?" she said, referring to the spot near the camp that has been preserved as a memorial to the 1982 massacre. I said yes-- "That, and whatever else you have time to show me of the organization's projects."

She was a friendly, capable woman in probably her early forties. She was simply dressed in pants and a knit top and was unveiled, her hair swinging loose in a long bob. She said she had grown up in Shatila but recently moved outside it with her husband and their three teenage sons. She explained that the "regular" electricity from the electric company was y frequently cut off from the camp, and though her NGO was planning to get a generator for the building here, they hadn't gotten it installed yet. Also, they had a lot more work to do refurbishing the building as a community center...

The girls I'd been with were, she explained, part of a class they had run for some time for camp girls who couldn't find a place in the UNRWA school. ""We used to have three UNRWA high schools in Beirut, but now there's only one," she said. "They take in all the pupils who want to start the first year there. But at the end of the first year they run a very tough exam, and say they only have room to give the next three years of schooling to the top 40% of the kids. The other 60% are sent home. UNRWA's services have deteriorated so badly! Anyway, we're teaching some of those 'drop-out' girls here."

We were walking along an alley that was 8-10 feet wide. There was no room in it for regular cars, but I saw a little motorized trash-hauling tractor. Mainly, it was foot traffic in the alley-- and not much of that in the morning, because of Ramadan.

We stopped outside a tiny storefront general-purpose store, where Maha introduced me to her mother and sister, both of them veiled, and both still living in the camp.

As we walked on, she kept asking, "You remember this? You remember that?" about various features of the camp's geography. But it had been such a long time since I used to come here... The only thing I really had any memory of was the camp's mosque. It used to stand near a T-junction where one broad roadway through the camp met another. Back then, in the 1970s, I remember a fairly broad plaza in front of it, or nearby, with vendors selling vegetables from big barrows, and share-taxis honking and grinding as they deposited their fares into the winter's mud...

"So here's the mosque!" Maha suddenly announced. It looked completely different. It was just one high building fronting onto a very narrow alley along with the many other high buildings that we walked past. All that distinguished the mosque from the other buildings was an 18-inch-high grill running along its whitewashed wall at eye level, through which you could look into an elevated concrete courtyard set out with a grid of little internal "walkways" and punctuated by concrete pillars that held up an entire, solid building above it. At one end of the low-ceilinged "courtyard" was a wall with names inscribed on it and a few plastic roses.

"Yes, that's the mosque courtyard," Maha said. "You see, during the 'War of the Camps' in 1985-88, no-one could get out of the camp to bury the dead. We had to bury them right here, inside the mosque. Yes, they were buried right here, all on top of each other, like a mass grave. Then afterwards, they rebuilt the whole mosque building up above them like that."

"How many?" I asked.

"I don't know exactly... Maybe 200? Maybe more."

I was in a degree of shock. I'd heard about the 'War of the Camps' that had befallen the people of Shatila just a few years after the 1982 massacre, but I guess I hadn't really focused beforehand on how ghastly it had all been for them...

We walked on. Soon, we turned onto a busy and filthy street lined with one-story stores-- clothes, shoes, housewares. Many of the goods had been put out onto the street on racks. Cars maneuvered and honked around them. It looked pretty much like the Shatila camp I'd known 30 years before,.. But then I saw green Amal flags waving over all of the stores.

"Amal?" I asked, puzzled.

"Yes. That's what they achieved in the War of the Camps in the mid-1980s. They pushed us out of this whole area and the one beyond it, where the 1982 massacres happened. And they gave the stores here to their own supporters."

We walked along the shopping street for 200 yards. Behind the shops on the far side of the street was a little rise: sand-dunes topped by some sugar-cane-looking greenstuff and a few raggedy-looking houses. And over behind them to the right, the gleaming high scaffolds that support the lights and the superstructure for the city's big sports stadium, maybe a fourth of a mile away..

"That's where the Israeli soldiers were in 1982," Maha told me, pointing to the dunes. "The stadium was a big staging area for them, too, as you know."

She laid out a complex narrative of what had happened here in September 1982. The Israelis had brought the Falangists around to this side of the camp rather than the other side, where we had started from...

Our family was deep back in the other side of the camp and none of us had any idea that such butcheries were going on here. Israeli snipers were controlling this street that we're walking along, and they wouldn't let anyone cross it from one side to the other.

The killing went on all that Thursday night, there in the area on the other side of the street. But we thought it was just 'more fighting, as usual'. We could see the flares the Israelis were using to light up the area, and we could hear the shooting. Finally, a couple of young boys were able to cross the road and they brought us news of what was happening inside there. Then we knew! Oh, God, we knew...

We walked further along the street, then turned in to a roughly 70-by-70-foot, almost bare, yard to the left.

"This is it, the mass grave from 1982," Maha said.

It had some of the elements of a place of memorial. It was surrounded by a cinderblock wall, in some places painted white. Along one wall were some small trees, and in two or three places there was also a row of gangly white roses. The ground was ringed by tussocks of rain-sprouted grass but there were big areas of stony red earth across the whole center of it. Around the edge three or four large placards had been planted in the grass. Most of them were simply plastic-canvas sheets printed with large, grainy photos that had been stretched over bare metal frames, like advertising signs. A dusty hose snaked over the earth.

The only non-flimsy placard announces in English and Arabic that this is "Martyrs Square of Sabra and Shatila Massacres" It tells us that the memorial is supervised by the Municipality of Ghobeiri-- one of three municipalities around here that are under the elected leadership of Amal's main competitors in the Shi-ite community, Hizbollah. The placard is edged with modest-sized representations of the flags of Lebanon and Palestine, both on a background of Hizbullah's signature color, yellow. It has a Koranic invocation of blessing for the souls of the "martyrs".

And that was it. There was no-one tending the place... only a bare minimum of information... no place a person could sit in contemplation or prayer.

As we looked round, Maha said,"We used to have an okay memorial here, in the years right after the massacre. But when Amal came and started the War of the Camps, they over-ran this whole area. The merchants in those stores there would just dump their trash here. Boys played football here. The whole place stank... Things actually got much better here after Hizbullah took over."

We walked slowly back along the shopping street toward the main part of the camp. Hizbullah had also, Maha told me, erected big drinking-water cisterns in some parts of the camp. We passed a couple-- they actually seemed to bear the colors and insignias of the Islamic Republic of Iran, rather than of Hizbullah, but maybe the Hizbis had helped to install them? At other points inside the camp, blue EU flags fly above other drinking-water distribution points.

"Let's just walk along the camp's alleys a little," Maha suggested, taking me diving in between two of the stores on the busy street. Suddenly we were in a place like I've never been in before. In this part of the camp, the people were living in concrete buildings rising seven and eight stories high-- and separated from each other only by thread-like alleys just wide enough for two people to pass each other sideways. Almost zero sunlight reached down to street level. The buildings went on and on like that, crammed right up against each other, with only the tiny passageways twisting and snaking between them, for hundreds of yards without end. The small courtyards and sun-fed greenery that I remembered from 1974 were nowhere to be seen.

"My God, what happened here?"

"They just kept crowding us in," she said. "It got worse and worse. We couldn't build outwards because of the Amal siege, so people just had to continue building upwards. Also, you know Tel al-Zaatar?"

Know Tel al-Zaatar? Of course I did. Tel al-Zaatar (which means "Hill of Thyme") had been another large Palestinian refugee camp, located over in East Beirut, inside the area controlled by the Falangists. The Falangists, led by Bashir Gemayyel, had over-run the whole camp in August 1976, committing a hideous slaughter of the menfolk there as they did so. As a journo at the time, I covered many aspects of that slaughter... Yes, I knew Tel al-Zaatar...

"So you know that the women and kids who survived Tel al-Zaatar went to live for some years in Damour..." Yes, I remembered that, too. Damour had been a Christan town south of Beirut. It was sacked by the Muslim/leftist forces later in 1976 (I think). There had been some wanton killing there, but not nearly as much as in the fall of Tel al-Zaatar. But there had, certainly, been a total "ethnic cleansing" of the Chrstians out of the town at the time. The Tel al-Zaatar survivors were trucked down to the bombed-out houses of Damour and installed there. It was a huge project to try to make them weatherproof again before the next winter...

(The Christians of Damour found refuge in East Beirut, in housing that had been "ethnically cleansed" of Shi-ites in an earlier round of fighting.... The Shi-ites had gone mainly to the southwest Beirut "Dohhiya", where they were an important base for Amal... And so it all went on, in those ghastly years of war, killing, and social upheaval.)

After 1982, the Israelis were in charge in Damour and the region around it. They tossed the Tel al-Zaatar people out of Damur and brought the town's original Christian residents back in. The Zaataris went and mass-squatted in a few of the big hotels on West Beirut's beach-front, as I recall.

Then in 1989, the Lebanese parties made a big effort to end their civil war, with a Saudi-sponsored pact caled the Taef Agreement. One thing that nearly all the participants there were agreed on was--sadly--their hatred of the Palestinians. The government that then took over immediately said it wanted the Zaataris out of the hotels so they could be rehabilitated. It didn't give them any new place to go... Nearly all Lebanese people except the Hizbullah people just wanted (and still want) the Palestinian refugees to go away, already.

But the government did give each of the Zaatari families $5,000, and "graciously" said they could go relocate in Shatila.

That was the origin of the incredible--and totally vertical--building boom whose results I saw in Shatila. Because of the influx of Zaataris into the camp, it was the only one in the whole country where the Lebanese government would allow any significant new construction. And to fit the Zaataris in, that construction could only go upward. Most of the $5,000 grants went to pay for the building materials. The Zaataris built, effectively, an entire additional refugee camp right on top of the one that had been there before...

Maha led me expertly through the dim alleys. The lack of any means of ventilation meant that the air felt damp and clammy. God knows how it felt inside the massive concrete cages that crowded in all round us.

"How many people live here?" I asked.

"No-one knows exactly. UNRWA says there are 12,000 registered refugees here. But there are also Palestinians here who are not registered refugees, and there are people who not Paestinians at all. Also, some people who are refugees registered here are now living outside. It's complicated. Probably somewhere between 17,000 and 20,000?"

This towering warren of refugee shelters covers just under one square kilometre, and is described by some European specialists as the most crowded spot anywhere on the earth.

We turned into an alley where childrens voices rang out of an open window. "Our kindergarten," Maha announced proudly, turning in. At the ground-floor level there were two rooms. One was an office, where the kindergarten director sat trying to balance the project's accounts. The other was the 3-year-olds' classroom.

Eighteen tots in pink smocks were sitting around little tables having a mid-morning meal of manaqeesh (toasted, thyme-covered pita). Their behavior seemed preternaturally orderly, and they all seemed skinny and under-sized. But the room--indeed, most of the whole school--was painted in a lively pink, and on shelves on the wall were many developmentally appropriate, brightly-colored toys.

I went up the winding stairs to the three eqally pink classrooms on the second floor where four- and five-year-olds were also having their meal-break. The five-year-olds seemed more lively and boisterous, and eagerly introduced themselves to me. Their teacher showed me samples of their workbooks: nice, colorful books that the kids could actually write in as they practiced some easy arithmetic, and writing in Arabic and English.

The classrooms were painfully small. Each had three low round tables with girls and boys squeezed around them on tiny, kid-sized chairs: some 18-22 pink-smocked kids in each room, with just enough space left in one corner for a mat where maybe half the class could sit together for story-time. I didn't have time to ask if they had any provision for PE. I saw no plants, no baby animals, no sunlight at all... Well, the kindergarten did at least have electricity--from their own generator. And it had water for the kids that had been purchased and was stored in a big cistern under the stairs.

So the kids end up living most of their childhoods locked up in that vast concrete warren without seeing much sunshine or ever feeling much open air? (Though I am sure that coming to the gaily painted, orderly fun of the kindergarten is a real benefit for them.)

... I found the whole visit to the camp quite upsetting, I have to say. For lots of reasons. The depressing sight of how the camp residents have been forced to live... And knowing that these circumstances are completely the result of decisions made by political leaders-- with most of that responsibility lying with non-Palestinians, but some with Palestinian political leaders, too.

I was upset for other reasons, too. Partly, some guilt at the sense of my own inattention to what had been going on in the camp after I turned my back on the girls I taught there back in 1974.

When I asked Maha about them, she stood in the alley and thought carefully for a while. She seemed to have an amazing memory for everything to do with the history of the camp. "Khadija... Najat... Ruqaya?" she said. "H'mmm. I think maybe all three of them ended up in America."

If any of you JWN readers knows anyone who might fit this description-- one of those three names; born around 1960; grew up in Shatila camp-- please, please could you have them get in touch with me? Thanks!