’82 massacre survivors still live in despair
The people live under restrictions on their work, education and travel.
BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) — Mahmoud Khalifa has tried five times to sneak into Europe. Each time, he was caught and sent back to Lebanon, the country where he was born but is denied some of the most basic rights because he is a Palestinian refugee.
“The most important thing for me is to leave this country. Ask any Palestinian youth in Lebanon and that’s what they will say,” the 24-year-old Khalifa said.
Khalifa works as a barber, but only occasionally. He quit school in the eighth grade, deciding education would have no benefit when there’s little chance of a promising career.
Extreme poverty and despair grip Lebanon’s 12 crowded Palestinian camps, home to 400,000 refugees. Crammed into a country half the size of New Jersey or Belgium, they live under severe restrictions on work, travel and education — a marked difference from their fellow refugees in Syria and Jordan, who have been largely integrated into society.
60th anniversary soon
Next year Palestinians mark the 60th anniversary of the war that drove hundreds of thousands of them into exile when Israel became a state. And this month Palestinians in Lebanon observed the 25th anniversary of one of their darkest episodes — the massacre in the Beirut camps of Sabra and Shatila by Israeli-backed Christian militiamen in which between 1,200 and 1,400 people died, by Lebanese Red Cross count.
And the tragedy goes on. Four months ago, thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes in the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon as the army fought al-Qaida-inspired Islamic militants of various nationalities. Officials say at least 20 civilians died in the three months of fighting.
Previous generations of Palestinians in Lebanon had it a little better. In the 1970s, Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization was here, providing refugees with protection, employment and elaborate social and health institutions. But the PLO’s virtual state-within-a-state did not sit well with their Lebanese hosts.
In 1982, Israel invaded to drive out the PLO, and since then it has been a long, slow decline for the refugees.
For them, nothing marks the start of that decline as starkly as Sabra and Shatila — a horror that still echoes to Khalifa’s generation.
It came two weeks after Arafat and his guerrillas left. For three days — from Sept. 16-18, 1982, the Christian militiamen, sworn enemies of the PLO, rampaged through the two camps, slaughtering men, women and children. An Israeli commission of inquiry later found Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible. Sharon had to resign as defense minister.
Telling his story
At his home in Shatila recently, Khalifa stared at the floor, head bowed as he listened once again to his grandmother, Eftekar Shallah, and mother, Jamila Shallah, tell the story of how his grandfather was killed in the massacre, a year before he was born.
On the evening of Sept. 16, the family emerged from an underground shelter. The grandfather, Mohammed, gave his radio to his 10-year-old daughter Ikhlas to hold, then headed back to their house to lock it up.
There were gunmen on the roofs. The militiamen had ordered people to surrender, promising they would be spared — a promise often broken. Jamila grabbed her father’s hand as he headed back to the house and begged him to surrender. He left her and kept going.
As his wife, Eftekar, waited across the road, Mohammed headed back to her, only to fall to the ground, shot in the head by a single bullet.
“He died in front of our house, in front of me,” Eftekar, 71, said quietly.
Their story, told and retold over the years to keep the memory alive — has knitted together the lives of the grandmother, mother and son through the 25 years of despair that followed.