Life without hope in city of exiles

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33083, 25 November 1972, Page 12

Life without hope in city of exiles

(From T. S. MONKS, in Jordan) The brilliant hard Jordanian sunshine makes Baq’a glisten when seen from afar along the northern road out of Amman. It is shining on acres of corrugated iron roofing, on the biggest refugee camp of Palestinian refugees in Jordan. Beneath the iron there is little that is sunny. It is a refugee town, a huge compound within which live

50,000 people, just one group of the one and a half million Palestinians who are living out their lives in miserable conditions in camps across Lebanon, Syria, the East Bank of Jordan, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and Gaza. From some of the camps one reels back in horror. There is one just outside Beirut in the Lebanon which is truly appalling, providing the sharpest of all contrasts in the standards of human life, for just along the road are grand luxury apartments of the Lebanese. That one is a rusting shanty town of hovels which in the lashing rain had turned into a vast red mudhole. Figures of misery in ragged clothes looked at me blankly there. They had been there a long, long time. Life was a treadmill to get enough to eat, to get through * anomer day, another week, another year. ! The East Bank The clean Jordan lanscape gives a nicer setting to Baq’a camp, and it is relatively new. The notice board outside proclaims it to lie an “emergency camp.” The “emergency” was the most recent of the tidal movements of Palestinians, the one in 1967 when the Israeli forces swept across Jordan’s West Bank region and occupied it. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, many of them already refugees from Israel, were on the move again, fleeing to the safety of the East Bank of the Jordan. And so on the East Bank —the territory controlled by King Hussein and his Government—there are more than half a million registered Palestinian refugees. Some of the camps are clustered closely to the capital, Amman, barely distinguishable as refugee concentrations as Amman bulges outwards year by year. But Baq’a lies well beyond the city boundaries. Its inhabitants have a clear view of the hills to the west. Over the bil|s, only 20 miles away, is the River Jordan and across the river there are the places that were once their homes, Jericho, Jerusalem, Nablus, or more distant Haifa, Lydda or Ramallah. They dream of such places. They cannot, they will not, forget. For what is the present? Family home I walked along some of the miles of streets of Baq’a mostly narrow, all unpaved and all lined with small structures of corrugated iron or prefabricated board. I knocked politely on the side of one, for there was no door. The mother of the family,

appeared, nursing her youngest child. She smiled shyly in the way of all Arab women when I asked if I might peer inside to see how people lived in Baq’a. Her name was Rasmeye. She said I was welcome. It was the home of a family of five people. It was about ten feet by eight. There was no furniture whatsoever. There was just bedding piled in a comer. I stood in the doorway with my feet in glutinous mud, white hens clucking around. “No work” “We came from Hebron, south of Jerusalem,” Rasmeye told me. “It was not like this,” she added sadly. She and her family had flea when Israeli troops swept into Hebron. Further along the street was the home of Joseph Ali Abdullah, his wife and family. Their clothes were ragged. A few scraps of washing hung on a line. Some wind-tom sheets of polythene hung over sticks to make a sort of fence. “Please come in and have coffee with us,” pleaded Abdullah’s wife. She added the phrase one hears everywhere in this part of the world—“ You are welcome.” She proceeded to make coffee over a small kerosene stove. Never had I been welcomed into such a place that anyone could call “home.” The head of the family, Abdullah, seemed sunk in lethargy. What did he do, I asked. “There is no work,” he answered. And how did he feed himself, his wife, and the six children. They existed on relief food from the United Nations. Without that, they would starve. One wish What did he hope for? At that question Abdullah’s eyes lit briefly: “In all the world, there is nothing I want but to go back to my native land,” and he waved towards the hills to the west. “Over there is where I want to be. That is my home. It is paradise.” His eyes were moist with emotion. On through the streets of Baq’a to a bustling area of primitive shops, of stalls of fruit and cloth and meat, with donkey carts thrusting their way through the press of people. There are enough people with a little money to spend to keep the shops in business, but the faces of the shoppers are anxious. Every purchase must be carefully weighed in the balance. It was not a happy scene. But then I found myself in the school area. Hundreds of schoolchildren, almost all clean and neatly dressed, surrounded the stranger.

laughing and chanting: “What’s your name . . . where you from?” They were phrases, a teacher told me, from the last lesson he had been teaching in English. The schools at Baq’a are working two shifts. It is the only way. There is not enough accommodation. All the hours of daylight have to be used. Back in Amman, the director for Jordan of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, Mr John W. Tanner, who is chief administrator for all this refugee camp work, told me that this educational effort in the camps was the most heartening side of the enormous task. Vast problem I had been asking him if the over-all task was not, after the many years he had been involved in it, dismaying. For it was a task that had been continuing since 1948. The number of Palestine refugees was now larger than ever. Most of the countries in which they were lodged—though not Jordan—did not encourage assimilation or integration of the refugees. Lebanon and Syria, particularly, seemed intent on keeping the refugees in camps for ever if they could not return to "Palestine,” a prospect which seems ever more remote. Mr Tanner conceded there were frustrations. But it had to be looked at in this light —it was still a vast human problem. It was there and it had to be dealt with. There were a million and a half people needing help. That help had to be given. I Makeshift schools And in the camps, more than 60 of them, U.N.R.W.A. was running a whole educational system for the hundreds of thousands of children who were refugees and who had otherwise scant hope of any schooling. Nearly half the U.N.R.W.A. budget of $5O million was being spent on education. “That at least is constructive,” said Mr Tanner, “and it is for the future.” But those eager little figures who danced round in the yard of the makeshift school at Baq’a—one wondered sadly what their future would really be. What were they being educated for? Would the eagerness turn later into frustration and bitterness if there was to be nothing for them but life in a refugee camp into a limitless future?