Letter

I read with interest the article “The Road to Nahr al-Barid: Lebanese Political Discourse and Palestinian Civil Rights” (by Muhammad Ali Khalidi and Diane Riskedahl, MER 244).

While the article correctly highlights the plight of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, it does a disservice to the position of the current Lebanese government, which has broken with more than half a century of Lebanese government policy in an effort to improve the living conditions of Palestinian refugees. This policy -- endorsed by Hizballah and Amal, too, when these parties were still in government -- has led to some modest reforms to date. Other reforms have been hindered by the summer 2006 war, the political crisis in the country, the inability to introduce legislative changes (because Parliament cannot meet) and the fighting in Nahr al-Barid.

I was particularly dismayed at the rather conspiratorial interpretation given to reconstruction efforts. Having participated in planning meetings for these over the summer, I can assure you that neither “converting the camp into a Potemkin village, housing cheap Palestinian labor” to replace Syrian manual labor nor “transforming Nahr al-Barid and other camps into ghettos” was ever discussed. Instead, the focus was on rebuilding refugees’ homes -- preferably, better than before. Had the authors bothered to ask any of the UNRWA, UNDP, Red Cross, Palestinian or other representatives at the official reconstruction committee meetings, they would have said the same.

Oddly, the article makes no mention of the (official) Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee (http://www.lpdc.gov.lb), which has been the primary Lebanese government policy focal point for both relief and reconstruction efforts. Similarly, they appear to have made no attempt to interview the head of the LPDC, Ambassador Khalil Makkawi. While the article correctly notes abuses by the Lebanese security forces, it fails to note that LPDC -- in a case of transparency probably unique in the region -- features the Human Rights Watch reports on this issue on its own (official, Lebanese government) website.

As for this:

“Within a couple of weeks of the beginning of the violence, local television stations showed Prime Minister Fuad Siniora poring over maps of the camp with engineers and architects from the engineering consulting firm Khatib and Alami. A move to rebuild Nahr al-Barid according to the dictates of the Lebanese government had begun almost as soon as the conflict began, as though the government knew that the army would embark on a systematic destruction of the camp.”

I was in meetings with Siniora and the (partly Palestinian) engineering firm of Khatib and Alami, and no such dastardly secret plots were evident. Puh-leeze, let’s leave the FOX News-type sensationalism to, well, FOX News.

Rex Brynen

McGill University

Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet (http://www.prrn.org) 

Muhammad Ali Khalidi replies:

Rex Brynen’s main complaint against our article seems to be that it is too critical of the current Lebanese government. Long-time
advocates of Palestinian refugee rights like Professor Brynen cannot afford to be complacent about the Lebanese government’s past record or future intentions, however. This government commands an army that has just demolished an entire Palestinian refugee camp (previously, only the Israeli army could boast such a distinction), in the process killing at least 47 innocent civilians, injuring 310 and rendering 35,000 homeless, all for the sake of apprehending some 300 militants (whose top leadership managed somehow to escape in the final assault). In so doing, the government did not even give the refugees advance warning so that they could evacuate the camp.

Brynen makes a number of specific criticisms that need to be addressed in some detail:

First, he seems to think that it is highly implausible that the Lebanese government would rebuild the refugee camp to suit its own economic and political interests, with little or no input from the refugees. On June 8, 2007, just two weeks after the fighting started, I attended a meeting called to discuss the rebuilding of the refugee camp at the prime minister’s headquarters. A dozen or more NGOs were represented there, but no Palestinian NGOs were invited apart from the Palestine Red Crescent Society. Immediately prior to meeting with the NGOs, Prime Minister Siniora had had a private meeting to discuss reconstruction plans with members of the engineering firm Khatib and
Alami, with no other parties in attendance. The pattern of not consulting with the refugees themselves has persisted since the end of the conflict at Nahr al-Barid. On September 9, the Lebanese government convened a donor conference for the reconstruction of the camp. The Lebanese press reported that only two Palestinian NGOs were invited to attend (out of several dozen that operate in the camps). To date, there is no evidence that the refugees themselves are being given a significant role in the reconstruction plans, nor does Brynen present any such evidence.

Second, Brynen dismisses the possibility that the rebuilt refugee camp might be subject to a tight security regime enforced by the Lebanese authorities. During the reconstruction meeting I attended on June 8, Siniora began the proceedings by emphasizing that the Lebanese government did not want the camp to return to the situation that prevailed before the outbreak of violence. When I raised the concern that it was also important not to go back to the situation that prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s, when Lebanese military intelligence was in control of the camps, the prime minister pointedly refrained from saying that that would not happen. Treatment of Palestinian civilians by the army and police during the assault on Nahr al-Barid, which we tried to document in our article, as well as events since the end of the conflict, strongly suggest that a Lebanese security clampdown on Palestinian refugees is underway.

Third, Brynen states that we made no mention of the Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee (a misnomer, by the way, since it consists exclusively of Lebanese officials). We did not, simply because we do not think it is making a significant difference in the lives of Palestinian refugees. Brynen gives the LPDC high praise for posting press releases from Human Rights Watch on its website. That is small consolation to the Palestinians who are rounded up and tortured by the security services of the government that the LPDC represents.

Fourth, Brynen assumes that we made no effort to interview Ambassador Makkawi. In fact, in the course of researching our article, I met with him once in his office, spoke to him twice by telephone and exchanged some e-mails with him.

I would not presume to say who Brynen did or did not meet with during his trip to Lebanon. Even a few casual conversations with former Nahr al-Barid residents in the Baddawi refugee camp, however, would reveal that the concerns we voiced concerning camp reconstruction are widely shared among Palestinian refugees.