A Hopeless Life for Palestinians in Lebanon's Refugee Camps
SHATILA REFUGEE CAMP, Lebanon — The road to Mideast peace wends through this Palestinian shantytown, a warren of lost hopes and misplaced dreams where Amer Akar lights another cigarette, contemplates her life and asks: "What future? I am a daughter of war." Akar was born here, as were her children, and at 33 she already has aged beyond her years. Her mother was killed just around the corner when Christian militiamen massacred Palestinian civilians at the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps in 1982. Akar lost an eye and has bullet fragments in her back from an attack on Palestinians here by Shiite militiamen in 1985. Her daughter died of cancer. Her husband needs money for a heart operation.
"Look how we live," she said over the weekend, her hand sweeping toward a catacomb of refuge-strewn alleyways and bare cinder-block rooms stacked one atop another. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat "left us here to live in poverty and eat cat food. The Arabs forgot us. The Lebanese don't want us. Who could have hope when Palestine is so far?"
More than 360,000 Palestinians like Akar are packed into Lebanon's 12 refugee camps. Their future -- and that of several million other Palestinians throughout the world, many of them doctors, engineers, professors and businesspeople -- is a key question for negotiations that the United States hopes will lead to a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement. Do the Palestinians have the right of return to what once was, and one day may again be, Palestine?
That right -- which Palestinian Authority President Arafat, wants and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon does not -- was not addressed in the Oslo accords of 1993 and is not part of the "road map" to peace presented last week by the United States. In negotiations between the two sides in 2000, it was generally agreed that the right of return would be limited to a symbolic number, Israeli sources present at the talks said. Arafat wanted 300,000. Israel countered with 30,000.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell acknowledged at a news conference in Beirut on Saturday that the issue is one of many not in the road map's published text that negotiators will have to grapple with. He said a settlement "would reflect Lebanese concerns and their concerns about Palestinian refugees in Lebanon."
"As a Palestinian, I reject the question, 'Would I go back to Palestine if it was a state?' " said Mohammed Afifi, 34, who runs a small food shop in Shatila. "What I want is the right to go back. Then I'd decide. There would be many things to consider, including Lebanon's attitude to us."
- Arafat Base Seized Oct 25, 1991
- Arabs Protest Israeli Attack Mar 30, 2002
- Palestinians in Lebanon Lost Amid Peace Talks Jul 21, 1999
