The Ruins of Nahr al-Bared

Nahr al-Bared/ Photos by ALB

Nahr al-Bared was once one of the most pleasant Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, located where a cold mountains stream meets the sea, and surrounded by orange orchards and banana plantations. It was also one of the largest marketplaces in north Lebanon, thanks to a brisk business in maritime smuggling.

Now it is a miniature Stalingrad on the Mediterranean. The uprising last summer by an insurgent jihadist group -- Fatah al Islam -- reduced Nahr al-Bared to rubble and made its 31,000 residents homeless. The incident was an warning of how, sixty years after the founding of Israel, the unsolved Palestinian issue still has the potential to wreak havoc in the region.

Though most Fatah al Islam members were foreign Arabs not Palestinians, the fractured politics and the lack of security in Palestinian camps (which lie outside the authority of the Lebanese state) make them excellent incubators for extremists groups. Inside the concrete jungle of a Nahr al-Bared (the perfect urban warfare environment) perhaps 300 well-armed jihadiis of Fatah al Islam almost proved a match for the inexperienced and poorly-equipped Lebanese army, which eventually bombarded the group -- and the camp -- into submission.

Mohammed Ali Hamid, a camp resident, shows shrapnel wounds from a Lebanese army rocket /

But the extent of the destruction at Nahr al-Bared is also evidence of the emnity that still exists between Lebanese and Palestinians. On a recent visit to the camp, almost all the buildings showed signs of systematic looting and burning, which the residents of the camp blame on the Lebanese army. Indeed, Palestinians accuse the Lebanese army of taking revenge against Palestinian civilians for the 160 Lebanese soldiers who died in the battle. "The war with Israel was much easier than this," said Mohammed Ali Hamid, a 76 year-old veteran from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, whose home in Nahr al-Bared was hit by some twenty rockets and artillery shells last summer. "At least, the Israeli jets just went after military zones." All of this has historical echos of the civil war era (1975 to 1990), when Palestinian militants turned Lebanon into a base for attacks against Israel, and sparked 15 years of internal conflict.

Meanwhile, the children of Nahr al-Bared, inheritors of the trauma of '48, have acquired new traumas of their own. The children at one kindergarten act out the searing memories of being refugees from a refugee camp. They shout at each other "Where is you ID?" and "You don't have permission!" and form little checkpoints in the playground. In class, they draw pictures of burned houses, dead bodies, and Lebanese soldiers locked up in jail. Their teachers suspect that they punch and kick each other because they are being punched and kicked at home by parents on the brink of collapse themselves. "The fingerprints of the army are everywhere in the lives of the kids in the camp," said Josephine Rabih, a teacher and resident.

/

During the battle last summer, more than one Nahr al-Bared resident told me that the bombardment of the camp was part of a secret plan to clear the space for an American air force base. However, the Lebanese government has publicly committed itself to rebuilding Nahr al-Bared. But you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder how that's going to be accomplished.

The Lebanese government is already struggling under one of the world's largest per capita public debts (about $60 billion in a country of four million people) spent on reconstruction after the civil war and the war with Israel in 2006. Now the Lebanese and the UN have asked for an additional $300 million in aid for the reconstruction of Nahr al Bared. But the Lebanese political system lacks transparency and has a reputation for corruption that has helped fuel an internal political crisis. And in the advent of another war with Israel, or civil strife in Lebanon, the Palestinians of Nahr al Bared could easily be forgotten again.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut