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Refugees Magazine Issue 146 ("Iraq Bleeds: Millions displaced by conflict, persecution and violence") - Shame
Refugees Magazine, 1 April 2007
How the world has turned its back on the Palestinian refugees in Iraq.
By Rupert Colville
Al Tanf camp is not a place you want to be. Heading east out of Damascus, you enter an endless flat, bleak, desert landscape that continues to the Iraqi frontier. Between the two countries' border posts lie about five kilometres of no-man's land – also flat and bleak. A third of the way in sprawls a scrappy, shabby settlement of 100 tents: Al Tanf.
Large piles of tomatoes sit rotting next to the camp, dumped by a truck that had to wait too many days at the border. Scraps of cloth flicker all along the barbed wire that runs behind the camp. Shredded plastic bags bowl along in the wind.
There are snakes, and two types of scorpion – which between them have stung the camp's 350 residents 70 times.
It is not a place for families, not a place to bring up 81 children between the ages of 3 and 15. There used to be 82, but one was run over by a truck a few months back.
They have five big school tents now. This development – schooling for the kids – has done wonders for morale (for a while, anyway). The adults smile as they describe the effect on the kids. The kids look rather proud as they answer a question posed by one of the eight teachers who were allowed by the Syrian authorities to go to Damascus for training in a joint initiative by UNHCR and the Palestinians' own refugee agency UNRWA.
UNRWA has a mandate for all the Palestinian refugees in the Occupied Territories and the next-door countries, including Syria. UNHCR has a mandate to protect Palestinian refugees elsewhere, including Iraq. But these Palestinians are in no-man's land. The UN agencies are cooperating well, trying their best to win a concession here, get a sick person to hospital there. In mid-February, as part of another joint initiative, they were going to fully wire the camp, with UNHCR paying, and UNRWA providing the electrical engineers.
One member of the refugee committee is an electrician, so he'll be in charge of maintaining this project. Another was a real estate agent. Then there is a clothes designer, the owner of small sweet factory, a jeweller and a former executive of one of Iraq's biggest telecommunications companies.
Most of the other people living in this hell-hole, where temperatures can rise to 50 degrees in the summer and fall below zero in winter, were urban professionals or traders.
UNHCR staff visit three or four times a week. They are greeted with smiles and warm handshakes – though it hasn't always been like that. For a while, the refugees were angry. Why wasn't UNHCR getting them out of Al Tanf? In the autumn, they went on hunger strike for 15 days. But now they realize the agencies are doing their best.
It is the states they blame – both those in the region, and those beyond: as of early March there were few indications of any states being prepared to help out through resettlement.
By mid-March more than 800 Palestinians were trapped in three desert camps, including Al Tanf and its much worse neighbour, Al Walid camp (situated on the Iraqi side of the border).
The twice-displaced Palestinian refugees are one of the worst-off groups in a country full of desperate people. Some 15,000 of them remain trapped inside Iraq, in increasingly dire straits. As of mid-March 2007, at least 186 were known to have been murdered, and many others have been chased from their homes, kidnapped, arrested or tortured.
They have no country to go to, no valid travel documents, no protectors inside Iraq, and hardly anyone prepared to support them outside either. Only a few dozen have been resettled (by Canada from Ruweished camp in Jordan), and a group of 287 were taken in by Syria in May 2006. UNHCR has stressed that resettlement should be seen as a temporary solution for Palestinians, and should in no way jeopardize their 'right to return.'
"My son was born in Ruweished," said one 60-year-old man, who like many of Iraq's Palestinians originated from Haifa. "Now, he's in Al Tanf camp and he doesn't know where he'll end up. I was born in a tent myself – in a camp in Gaza."
"There's heaven and there's hell," commented another resident of Al Tanf. "And we're worried we won't get in there either."
If ever resettlement or relocation of some sort was needed for a particular endangered group, it is needed for the Palestinians of Iraq.
It is to everyone's dishonour that these human beings are still rotting in Al Tanf, in Al Walid, in Ruweished and – worst of all – in Baghdad where one or more is being murdered virtually every day.
Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 146: "Iraq Bleeds: Millions displaced by conflict, persecution and violence" (April 2007).
Bookmark this page with:
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