BEIRUT, 7 July 2007 — Lebanese rights activists yesterday rose to the defense of Palestinians from a besieged refugee camp in northern Lebanon at the center of alleged “racism” and cases of abuse at the hands of the army.
“We do not want the army to respond like this. We are not against the army and we recognize their sacrifices, but this does not give them impunity for aggression against civilians,” said university assistant professor Rania Masri.
Masri, who has been interviewing the displaced from Nahr Al-Bared camp, said small groups of Lebanese right activists were organizing a memorial in Beirut later in the evening for two Palestinians shot dead by the army a week ago.
The two were killed when soldiers opened fire during a demonstration to demand the right to return to Nahr Al-Bared, the seafront camp turned into a war zone between Arab Islamist militants and the Lebanese Army which has had 85 troops killed.
“This will be a show of solidarity” with the tens of thousands of Palestinians evicted from the camp by the almost seven-week-old battle, many of whose modest homes have been shelled, she told AFP. She warned of a trend toward an “institutionalized racism,” often tolerated at street level, against the Palestinians, who number about 400,000, half of whom live in Lebanon’s 12 refugee camps across the country.
The refugees, whose families fled Palestine after Israel was established in 1948, are denied a string of civic rights and access to a long list of professions in Lebanon on the logic they will return one day to their homes. Masri, 35, reported dozens of cases of Palestinian men from Nahr Al-Bared, mostly young, being detained by the army as they emerged from the camp that used to be home to about 31,000 people.
“The detentions have usually lasted two days but are getting longer, up to nine days” in a latest case, she said. Beatings and insults figure prominently in such detentions, said Masri, as the security services try to garner more information on its Fatah Al-Islam enemy. She said the reasons that hundreds of Palestinians, mostly men, were believed to have stayed put in the camp, ranged from fear of detention and humiliation to a lack of official papers, disability, sickness or old age.
