Untold Stories

Lebanon: A Moment's Peace

    As I hunched over a borrowed desk in the sixth floor office of Beirut's Daily Star yesterday afternoon, it may have been the computer's pale glow that warmed my face, but the joyful, smoldering embers of my heart came from a warmth only a reporter knows: I had a front page scoop.
    It was a small story by world standards, affecting only about 3,000 Palestinian refugees. But it had regional implications and I was proud at having wrested it from the pressed lips of PLO officials and the leaden silence of the country's bureaucats.
    I hardly noticed the muffled, distant boom outside. But soon the first wisp of smoke appeared in the orange sky, rising slowly and flickering like a black tongue against the backdrop of apartment buildings and shopping centers in Beirut's hushed northern suburbs. The office was still. Televisions came on. Everyone stood in silence as they waited for a newscaster to break into the cartoons, for a flood of calls to jam the phone lines, for the wail of approaching sirens. My editor looked at me as if to apologize: my story would be bumped to page two. "Welcome to the Middle East," he said.

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Lebanon: Old Home/New Home

I thought it was time for some video around here!

Here are glimpses of two kinds of living spaces the Nahr al Bared refugees are and will inhabit.

Nahr al Bared has two parts to it. The Old Camp, to the west, was the original land the refugees arrived to in the late forties/early fifties was the worst hit and still remains closed off to. (In the sat image, the old camp is on the left, where the yellow traces are concentrated.)

The New Camp was the adjacent land, on the eastern side that was slowly annexed by overspill as the camp’s population grew and its commerce developed. (In the sat image, it the grid-like area where there are traces of red). It is private property which does not fall under UNRWA’s jurisdiction. It has been reopened and those who live there who still have apartments to return to have done so.

Lebanon: Attack on UNIFIL ahead of presidential election

I took a break from Nahr al Bared to report this.

Of course, it is not completely unrelated to the camp.

Lebanon: One story of many

I spent almost all day among the Nahr al Bared refugees who are staying in temporary shelter in schools and community buildings at Baddawi camp in Tripoli.

Beddawi is the closest Palestinian camp to Nahr al Bared and so received many of the refugees fleeing the conflict when it broke out in May.

Most are still there. Original Beddawi residents are angry because their children can no longer be schooled as before and the Nahr al Bared displaced are desperate, as the winter cold sets in, to return to the ruins of their old camp and resettle.

Lebanon: Nahr al Bared, Tabula Rasa

I had been a little worried about getting inside Nahr al Bared and the camp. Since the conflict ended and it had been partially reopened for some of the camp's residents to return, it had 'shown' just once - for a few hours - to the press in a sort of horse and pony show of destruction. Since then, journalists have been barred and all volunters are strictly forbidden to take photos.

Today, through a mixture of good luck and playing dumb, I managed to get through the stiff army controls (with two cameras in my bag) and into Nahr al Bared. Only a part of Nahr al Bared has been reinhabited, the rest is sealed off, deemed too dangerous to enter right now. The buildings are also said to be "completely destroyed."  Driving through the streets that have been returned to, it seemed hard to imagine degrees of destruction more than this.

Lebanon: Is Annapolis casting a shadow on exiled Palestinian refugees?

The international press made big bones of the fact that the world’s powers, gathered in Paris yesterday, pledged almost $2bn more for the creation of a Palestinian state than the Palestinians had requested or indeed expected.

But here in Lebanon, the news may not bode as well for the country’s estimated 400,000 Palestinian refugees. On the surface, the dream of Annapolis may fall – but only in a large sense – under most of their collective political aspirations: full recognition as a people and the establishment of a sovereign homeland. It will not, of course, bring most of them home because for the majority of them, home is Galilee in Northern Israel.

In the short term, Annapolis has shifted the focus towards the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and amid the diplomatic backslapping and nay saying, the over four million Palestinian refugees exiled in neighboring countries had been moved to the shadows.

Lebanon: Nahr al Bared military mastermind laid to rest

All summer, the conflict at Nahr al Bared between the Lebanese Army and the Islamic militants Fatah al Islam raged on. And while reminders of the ongoing fight showed up across the country on roadside banners of support for the Army and in the almost daily press updates and soldier body counts, in Beirut – where I was based – the trouble felt very remote – it was happening “up there,” meaning the city of Tripoli 85km north.

The fighting was reaching its final stages when I left in early August and the Nahr al Bared conflict had lost its sense of urgency in the Lebanese public consciousness. People were beginning to worry about the presidential election scheduled for September. The question on everyone’s lips was would the government, which has been in stalemate crisis for over a year, manage to agree on and elect a new president?