Tears for Tarshiha

by Olfat Mahmoud

  Racing towards my parents’ house, my mind went back to my childhood years and the anger I would feel when I had to endure yet another humiliation at the hands of soldiers at a military checkpoint. I used to come home and take my anger out on my grandmother and say, ‘Why did you leave Palestine. This is all your fault! It would have been better if you had stayed and died there than this life we have.’ My grandmother would take my anger and explain softly that they had fled to keep their children safe. It was that day, as I raced with my father, Chaker and Fayez, that I understood her at last. Like her I would have gone anywhere in that moment to keep my babies safe. So, when we arrived at our home, I walked up to my grandmother and simply said, ‘sorry’.

  After several days of heavy fighting, on October 13, 1990 Aoun agreed to a ceasefire. He eventually left Lebanon for exile in France. That was the end of 15 years of bloody civil war in Lebanon. East and West Beirut opened up, and soon after parliamentary elections were held. We all celebrated, of course. People went to see the Green Line that had divided the city for 15 long, bloody and senseless years. There had been so much destruction and so many deaths. And for what purpose? It was a question none of us could answer.

  15

  THE PROMISE OF OSLO

  Finally, peace bought freedom to travel throughout the country. We took advantage of this new-found liberty to visit the Beqaa and our friends and relatives in the south. Our journeys showed us a country disfigured by individual and collective scars. It was also a country still occupied by the Israelis in the south; and the Syrian army remained the major military force keeping the peace. And sadly, our place as Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, remained as tenuous as ever. We were still denied the right to Lebanese citizenship but could not return to our homes that were now part of Israel. So, we remained stateless, without passports, and denied basic civic rights such as the right to work or access to state-run health and education. We could of course go to private hospitals, universities and schools, but very few camp residents had the money to afford this. The UN through UNRWA provided medical services and education, but these were basic and in the case of schooling ended before the last year of high school. Sadly, this remains the status quo even today.

  Back then our lives, and the lives of most Lebanese people, continued to be dogged by material hardship. We faced multiple obstacles daily. We had only two or three hours of electricity a day and sometimes we would go for days without any at all. In the summer we could not store food, as it would perish, so I had to go shopping every day. We also had major water shortages. Inevitably I would be halfway through a machine-load of washing when the electricity would go off. On going to bed at night I would leave the bedroom light switch on so that when the electricity came on in the middle of the night I could wake up to do the washing. With two young boys, I needed to wash regularly. The ironing was done with a heavy old metal iron that I heated on the gas stove.

  Sometimes we would go to have a shower only to find the water was off because the electric pump that brought the underground water we use for washing only, into the roof tank, would have stopped. Even after all these years, our drinking water still came from the camp water point which we would carry to the house in a one-gallon can, that I kept under the kitchen sink. Often, I would go to get a drink only to find the can empty. So, off I would have to go to the water point and carry the heavy cans back to the house and up the stairs. UNRWA collected the rubbish and waste from the camp, but right near our house was a rubbish tip, which the rats loved. It was always smelly and a major health hazard. While I, like the majority of Palestinian women, worked hard to keep our homes and children spotless, are surroundings were appalling. One of the biggest dangers was the network of electricity wires that hung low over the narrow laneways and homes like a spiderweb. Dangling wires and water seeping from the broken and cracked pipes were a lethal combination and could mean sudden and unexpected death.

  Stuck in these miserable, unhealthy, unhygienic and poverty-ridden refugee camps, it was hard not to feel bitter about our daily struggle. Especially as we knew life in our home town of Tarshiha would not have been like this. This bitterness, anger, constant tension and fear took a great toll on the physical and psychological health of the people in camp.

  During this time, my mother’s arthritis became much worse, aggravated by her anxiety over my brother, Abu Khalil. In 1989 amid the siege, he had left the camps to try and catch a ferry to Cyprus. In undertaking this perilous journey, he’d been helped by Christian friends, but was captured by the Christian militia, the Phalange. When we heard this news, we were sure he would be killed. I spent six months searching for him, praying by some miracle he had been spared; going from place to place, looking for people we knew who had contact with the Phalange, trying to find out what had happened. My mother became extremely ill and depressed.

  By a strange twist of fate, a good turn my brother had rendered to a captured Phalangist in the early days of the civil war was repaid. This person, seeing my brother in prison and remembering his own rescue, in turned saved my brother. After six months, Abu Khalil was released and left for Cyprus, to live with my uncle there. My mother had been greatly relieved when she heard he was safe in Cyprus. But, unable to find work, my brother took up an offer of a job in Baghdad. The day after he arrived in August 1990, the first Gulf War started; and we had no news of him for another six months. My mother’s depression returned; she was always in tears, seeking comfort in prayers for her son’s safety. Her mobility, diminished by her swollen and painful joints, became so much worse, as if all the years of grief had accumulated in her body, making her ill.

  Not a single refugee family in the Middle East was unaffected by the Gulf War, and the situation in the camps became even more precarious. As a result of Arafat’s support for Iraq, some 350,000 Palestinian refugees were ordered out of Kuwait and other Gulf States, where they had been working on temporary work visas, many for several decades. Those who had left Lebanon as refugees had to return as there was nowhere else for them to go. But in the post-civil war situation, there were few jobs and even fewer places to live. In addition, hundreds of families had relied entirely on the financial remittances of their relatives working in the Gulf, among them were my Uncle Bashir and his family who had to return to Beirut, and my Aunt Khadija and her family, who had to go back to Allepo in Syria. Dependent families were plunged deeper into poverty.

  In 1992 our third son, Hadi, arrived—another fourth-generation Palestinian refugee, born in a country that wanted him gone. Our hopes of fulfilling Lebanon’s wish to see us leave, were further dashed in 1993, in what I, and many refugees in the camps, saw as a betrayal by our own people. In the early 1990s secret discussions had begun between the PLO and members of Israel’s ‘peace camp’, which eventually led to the Madrid Conference, convened in October 1991. These talks centred on UN Security Resolutions 242 and 338, which dealt with the results of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 as well as the issue of the Right of Return of all Palestinian refugees. But there were major differences in interpretation. Israel saw these resolutions as referring only to the 1967 ‘displaced’, while the Palestinians understood them to refer to both the 1967 and 1948 refugees. We were pleased when Palestine’s chief negotiator Haider Abdul-Shafi, and others at the conference acknowledged there would be no lasting peace without a resolution of the refugee situation.

  But during this conference PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, without consulting key players in his delegation, undertook secret discussions, hosted by Norway, with the Israelis. The result of these discussions became known as the Oslo Accords.24 So, on September 9, 1993, Arafat and Israeli President Yitzhak Rabin signed letters of mutual recognition and later in an historic moment shook hands on the lawns of the US White House, with President Bill Clinton looking on. In these documents the PLO accepted, as it had done earlier, that the state of Israel had the right to live in peace and security. This written assurance gave Israe
l its long-sought recognition of legitimacy. But these letters did not mention the Palestinian right to self-determination nor the Right of Return of all Palestinian refugees. Those letters, signed by both parties, addressed the refugees of 1967 only, leaving the issue of the 1948 refugees, the majority of us in Lebanon, for the so-called ‘final status’ talks.

  In reaching this agreement, both parties chose to ignore the UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (1948), which explicitly states the right (as granted to all refugees under international law) of Palestinians to return to their homeland. Needless to say, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, and throughout the Middle East, saw the Oslo Accords as an outright betrayal by our leaders. We were devastated.25

  In Burj Barajneh, as in all the other camps in Lebanon, the residents, even Arafat supporters, were furious. What had all our sacrifice been about? Why had so many of our people died in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine, for our right to return home, only to be ignored at a critical moment? Our future looked bleak indeed. Many people were saying in disgust and anger, ‘They have eaten our meat and thrown our bones to the dogs’. We saw clearly what our leaders had done. We knew why Israel was happy. The Oslo Accords allowed Israel to keep 73 per cent of the land, to be responsible for 97 per cent of the security, and to control 80 per cent of the water of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But though our leaders betrayed us, we knew this agreement would not work because the key element—justice for the Palestinian people—had not been addressed. We knew, too, that eventually our people in Palestine, hundreds of thousands of refugees like us, would resist this agreement and fight again for our rights. When Palestinians, and our supporters among the Lebanese, demonstrated against the Oslo Accords in the streets of Beirut later in 1993, the Lebanese army attacked the demonstrators, killing 40 people and wounding many others.

  Soon after the signing of the accords, Arafat and his supporters were allowed to return to Gaza where the Palestinians began working to develop a new constitution and a democratically elected Palestinian National Authority (PNA). When the elections for the PNA were held, some five million Palestinians in exile and in refugee camps throughout the Middle East were not permitted to vote. Only Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank could exercise this democratic right. Again, we felt abandoned and were furious.

  The Oslo Accords also directly affected economic and social life in the camps. Until then we had had support from UNRWA, the PLO and, increasingly, support from the international community through non-government aid organisations. But, afterwards much of this support dwindled with the international aid community shifting its financial resources to the West Bank and Gaza. UNRWA cut back its much-needed services, the PLO greatly reduced its support to welfare services, and the response from the governments of Australia and Norway was much the same. We had to struggle to keep our projects afloat.

  We had become the forgotten people of Palestine.

  During this time Helen and APHEDA remained staunch supporters of our projects and helped to keep the issue of the 1948 Palestinian refugees in the news. In 1992, Helen convinced the then Australian Foreign Minister, Gareth Evans, to visit the camps—the first government minister from any country to visit the camps since 1948. I imagine it must have been quite a shock for Mr Evans to see first-hand the alleyways and war-ravaged buildings; and a nightmare for his security to allow him to wander through our streets and houses. The visit was an extraordinary moment for camp residents and is still remembered today. At that time, Lebanon was a mess. No Arab politicians had ever visited us, and even officials from the Palestinian Authority would come to Beirut and not enter the camps. When Mr Evans walked along our laneways people just couldn’t believe he was there—it was an amazing morale boost for us and gave Australia an abiding place in our hearts.

  In the wake of the Oslo agreement, I realised the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon would have to now rely more on our own resources. I decided that, as women, we had to do what we could for ourselves—we could not rely on our political leadership. I wanted to start to work more effectively with the international community, too, and knew that I had to seek their support if we were ever to return to our homeland. By then I had been working with my community in Burj Barajneh for 18 years. I was well known and respected, and had a position of leadership within the camp. My initial focus was the creation of employment opportunities for the many women who were widowed or caring for physically or mentally disabled/war-damaged husbands or sons. In 1993, to address these concerns a group of us established the Palestinian Women’s Humanitarian Organisation (PWHO)—the management board consisting of highly regarded women representatives of the local community.

  Through my connections with Helen, I contacted APHEDA and with its help we were able to develop this organisation and get some important projects off the ground, including job training in the new information technology industry, and in more traditional areas, such as dressmaking and hairdressing. We also initiated much-needed childcare projects, after-school tutoring and summer school programs for children, and importantly for me, we aimed to keep our culture alive through a program that taught our young about Palestine and customs such as our traditional dance, Debkeh. We also sought to empower women in the camps with workshops on their rights under Islamic law, and health and literacy education that gave them insights into how they could obey religious laws but still have planned pregnancies.

  Critically we also sought to look after our elderly – knowing the Lebanese Government would not. From my own family experience I saw how hard it was for my grandparents to remain mobile and healthy after so many years of deprivation and war. I felt we owed it to our elders to do whatever we could to make them comfortable. Using my community nursing experiences in Australia, our organisation trained nurses in home care — delivering the treatment our aged residents required to their door.

  We also developed our own skills and became adept at lobbying international agencies for their support – within a few years we had projects sponsored by NGOs such as UNIPAL in the UK, PALCOM in Norway, and volunteers working in our camps from Canada, Australia and Scandinavia. These connections gave us valuable links with which to educate people in the wider world about our lives, as these mostly young volunteers went back to their countries and talked about what they had seen and experienced, raising their voices in support of our rights as refugees.

  Over the years my work with the Palestinian Women’s Health Organisation has defined me and remains one of my proudest achievements. It was the launch pad for my work internationally as an advocate for my people and gave me the platform on which to take our story into the world. The fact that we have been able to keep the organisation running through funding cuts, war and threats from extremists belies how important it is to civil society within the camp, and for me it has been the source of great friendships and support.

  As if I didn’t have enough on my plate at this time, I began a sociology degree at the Arabic University in Beirut that year as well. We didn’t have much of a social life in the camps—we couldn’t go to movies or restaurants—so at night, we would often just sit in front of the television. At the time, Mahmoud was working nights, so I thought I should benefit from my free time rather than waste it. Although I did have a young family, I had a lot of help from my sisters and parents, so I knew I could juggle everything. That did not stop me feeling nervous at the idea, as I had never been to university and had not studied since 1984. I was also conscious of my age, but the younger students were very welcoming and helpful. I studied sociology, psychology and philosophy and found it a great opportunity to explore Arab and Islamic philosophy. That first degree was the start of a love affair with academic life.

  My ongoing relationship and friendship with Helen brought me to Australia many times. In March 1996 I came as a guest of Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA. It was a timely invitation as the Australian Government was now directing its aid to the Occupied Territories, and PWHO’s financial si
tuation was precarious. I travelled across Australia holding meetings every day. It was a month of solid work, but it was a valuable opportunity to speak publicly about our plight and raise much-needed funds. But there were some difficult moments. I recall meeting officers from AusAid, the Australian government agency responsible for overseas aid, whose decisions made the difference between whether or not a woman in our camp could feed her children. Yet they had no idea about our situation. I made sure that was rectified and I like to think I had some impact as we secured ongoing government aid for our work. But it certainly brought home to me the importance of face-to-face contact with donors.

  Back in Lebanon, facing increasing Hezbollah-led Shi’a resistance to their occupation of the south of the country, in April 1996 the Israelis launched yet another massive ground assault in southern Lebanon, bombing Haret Hreik, a Shi’a area bordering Burj Barajneh camp, and attacking Hezbollah offices, causing extensive damage. These offices were in a high-density civilian inner suburb of Beirut so this attack killed many Lebanese civilians and wounded more in the flats close by. Nearly 500,000 people, Palestinian and Lebanese, were displaced from south Lebanon; and, of course, many came for shelter and support to Haret Hreik. These people stayed for a month until the attack in the south abated. PWHO and many of the camp children, including my own, worked day and night to get mattresses and blankets and food for them, with the support of some international aid agencies.