No Man's Land

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon dream of their homeland while living a nightmare.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Fadi Mohammed moves like a cat amongst the narrow, maze-like passages that wind through the Burj al-Barajna refugee camp in the suburbs of west Beirut.

He knows every twist and turn, as well he should; he has spent the entire 18 years of his life here.

"I was born here. They seem very big to us," he says of the alleyways, as we walk and talk. "This is the place where we are happy together, and this is the place where we are sad together."

It's difficult to imagine too much happiness here. Fifty-seven years ago in this spot there were nothing but tents for Palestinians forced to leave their homes after the creation of

Israel in 1948.

Another influx came in 1967 during the Six Day War with Israel. Then, there were only a few thousand. Now there are an estimated 300,000 Palestinians in 12 camps like this throughout Lebanon.

Rickety buildings of cinder block and plaster have replaced the tents, but they seem to be only marginally more stable. With a rapidly expanding population and little room to grow, many residents here simply build upward, adding stories to buildings that already lack adequate foundations.

Muna Farid just added a third floor to her house to create more space for herself and her five children. With its gantlet-like system of wooden ladders hammered together from scrap wood, the structure looks more like a watchtower than a home. Outside, workers clear away cracked concrete to install a plastic water line amid an already tangled array of pipes.

"This is very bad, very bad. It is so dangerous," she says, shaking her head and pointing at the spider web of electrical lines overhead. The leads coming from each residence crisscross every which way, nearly obscuring the sky and emitting a loud and constant hum.

Muna, 48 years old, says she is a trained teacher. But since she's not a Lebanese citizen -- even though she's never lived anywhere else -- she can't legally work outside the camp.

"The Lebanese government doesn't treat us like human beings," she says. "I can't begin to describe how sad I am."

Along with employment restrictions, there are also legal codes that prevent Palestinian children from attending Lebanese schools. With their concentration in these refugee ghettos, most Palestinians here live in limbo, caught between the dream of returning to their Palestinian homeland and the nightmare of their current status as non-citizens.

Some Lebanese members of parliament agree something more has to be done for the Palestinians. But Amal party member of parliament Ali Bazzi says the problem is complex.

"I agree they live in a bad economic and social situation," says Bazzi, "but there are two aspects to the issue: one is humanitarian and one is political. The political issue is that the international community has a responsibility to carry out the

United Nations resolution which gives Palestinians the right of return [to their homeland]. And if you give them right of return all the parties concerned should enforce that."

Bazzi concedes that the political issue could take some time to be resolved, so he says Amal and its political ally, Hezbollah (Party of God), are working on new legislation to lift some of the employment and educational restrictions on the Palestinians in Lebanon.

Abu Omar, 78, feels that remedy is too late for him. He spent 33 years working at a bakery in the camp, as well as a guard for one of the UN offices here. They were low paying jobs, but the only ones he could get.

He says he first came to the Burj al-Barajna camp after being forced leave Kuwakat, a village on the Lebanese border, in 1950.

He has been here ever since, raising ten children. Now, a grandfather to 36, he sits in his living room in his robe, drinking Turkish coffee and sucking Marlboro Reds down to the filter. Even after all this time, there is still anger in his voice when he talks about leaving his home.

"I thought it was temporary," he says. "If I knew it was going to be permanent, I never would have left. I would have stayed and died in Palestine."

Still, he talks about the hope of returning. But his voice lacks the same conviction and passion he has when he speaks about what's been taken from him, as opposed to the prospect of getting it back.

"We suffer every day. We don't live a normal life," he says.

This lack of opportunity is one of the factors that has made the camps a prime recruiting ground for fighters for

Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which used Lebanon in the late '70s and early '80s as a base for launching attacks against Israel. The provocations led to Israeli retaliatory attacks and eventually invasions of Lebanon in both 1978 and 1982.

U.S. mediation prompted a withdrawal of the PLO from Lebanon and an eventual Israeli pullback. But Lebanon's conflict would continue to have deadly repercussions for the Palestinians.

After Lebanese Christian President Bashir Gemayel was assassinated shortly after being elected in 1983, Christian militias retaliated, murdering hundreds of Palestinian civilians in two different refugee camps.

Israel's current prime minister,

Ariel Sharon, was defense minister at the time. He was later forced to resign from the position after an investigation concluded that Israeli forces encircled the camps, doing nothing while the Christian militias went on their killing spree.

"This is the place where we are happy together, and this is the place where we are sad together."— Fadi Mohammed

The continuing squalid conditions here have some concerned that, just as the camps were once recruiting grounds for the PLO, disaffected youths now are being recruited to fight in the insurgency in

Iraq.

Despite growing up surrounded by such grim history and in such difficult circumstances, Fadi Mohammed remains hopeful and motivated. His parents divorced when he was young. His mother and grandmother raised him in the camp.

He says that while many of his friends don't even bother to go to school because they know they can't get good jobs, he has thrown himself into his studies and into extracurricular activities like his scouting troop.

"We try to do things to help the other people in the camp," he says of the scouts, showing me pictures of hikes and outings to some of Lebanon's more rugged and picturesque regions.

"Others ask me why I stay in school," he says. "I do it for me and my culture. It will be important one day for the future."

He's never been to Palestine; he's only heard stories of the region. But like so many young people with little else to dream about, he's convinced it is part of his destiny.

"I've seen it only from afar," he says.

But when I ask him why it is so important to him to go there after living in Lebanon all his life, he answers quickly, all the while pointing with his right hand to the south, past the walls of the camp.

"Because it's my country. When someone pushes you out of your house and you live in the streets and he lives in your house, what do you say? It's the same -- it's my house, it's my country, it's my people there."

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