Northern Lebanon

I had a very interesting day yesterday. I'm visiting Lebanon with my good friend Anand, who is getting started as a freelance journalist. We met up with Bassem, a Lebanese friend of mine who is now working on humanitarian aid for people displaced from the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp by the fighting there over the last few months.

Seen from abroad, the Nahr el-Bared crisis has an almost comic quality. It's now pretty clear that Fateh al-Islam (FI) was set up with money from people close to the pro-western Lebanese government (Seymour Hersh reported this months before the fighting broke out, and recently a prominent member of Lebanon's most important political family admitted to funding to a similar group, Jund ash-Sham). The most plausible story is that these groups were built up in the hopes that they would attack Hezbullah and provoke them into doing something stupid, but when FI's backers realized they were dealing with a bunch of loose cannons (imagine that!) they cut off their money, and FI tried to take it by force. The Lebanese army has taken quite a beating (I just read that near the beginning of the fighting a group of Lebanese soldiers was ambushed and had to be rescued by armed civilians) in spite of a massive firepower superiority which they haven't been shy about using.

There is a sinister side to this, though. The frame for mainstream discussion here is the war on terror and the heroic army standing together in spite of adversity to defeat another foreign threat, but a few things creep through.

One thing which is entirely unsurprising but almost unremarked on is the army's hostility towards Nahr el-Bared and its' inhabitants, not just FI. Some of this comes through in a video Bassem showed me, recently posted on YouTube, of a group of Lebanese soldiers relaxing in the rubble (by the way, if you want to help improve the sound, transcribe it, or translate it into english please let me know). There are a lot of stories around of the army mistreating civilians while they were trying to get out of the camp.

No doubt part of this is a result of the xenophobic climate encouraged by the government here (which has also led to attacks on Syrian migrant workers), but there are signs that there is more to it than just bullying. Yesterday the Daily Star ran an article which talked about government's plans to make the rebuilt Nahr el-Bared the first Palestinian camp in Lebanon under complete Lebanese control, beginning the process of stripping the Palestinians of the last compensation they have for their pariah status. To drive the point home one frequently sees images (I particularly noticed posters put up along Lebanon's main highway by the municipality of Jounieh) showing soldiers raising the Lebanese flag over the conquered rubble of the camp.

Unfortunately virtually all political forces here are going along with the program. The PLO seems more concerned with diplomatic support for the coup in the West Bank than the future of the Palestinians in Lebanon; Hezbollah is keeping quiet, as it has been on most other issues recently; the Lebanese Communist Party sees this as part of Lebanon's still unfinished bourgeois revolution and supports the Army reflexively as a force for national unity, as do the soft left and some others; I hear that even some autonomists have been swept along. The only organized exception I can attest to personally is TYMAT, a small group informally associated with the International Socialist Tendency, although I have heard of others.

We drove through Jounieh and the other beach towns, past Tripoli and Nahr el-Bared -- you can see it from the highway, a pile of concrete rubble with a Lebanese flag stuck on top and surrounded by soldiers. We went back to Baddawi for several hours. Although Baddawi is not as densely built up as Shatila, which I visited a couple of years ago, with the extra 30,000 people who have come over from Nahr el-Bared it is quite crowded, on top of being incredibly hot and humid (refugee camps are seldom set up in the locations most blessed by nature). We spent a few hours in the camp; Anand set up some meetings while I sat around and talked to the kids loitering around the UNRWA school.

After a while Ashraf, who runs a computer store and community center in the camp, invited some aid workers and us to an early dinner "someplace cooler". This turned out to be a 40 minute drive away on the side of a mountain, which seemed to be floating in the layer of haze covering Lebanon's coastal plain and all of the commotion down there. As when I was in Lebanon last summer, I'm surprised by how close you can be to such momentous events and still feel like they are happening in another world.