Shatila

I had to do a story in Shatila today.

Going to the camps is always a tremendously humbling experience. For those not familiar with the Palestinian camps; Shatila is a camp which is situated right in between other West-Beirut neighborhoods. Shatila is also well-known for a 1982 massacre.

Shatila was never intended to be a camp, and it was never intended to house over 10,000 people. But there they live, and they do not have any other place to go to, so they really live on top of each other. There is no sign that says “Welcome to Shatila’, there is no fence or gate to indicate you have entered. It is one very poor neighborhood blending into another. One is filled with poor Lebanese, the next one with poor Palestinians. And even those blend.

Bourj Barajneh, 1983

There are some differences. Lebanese police and army do not enter the camps. I’m not sure whether they do not have the right, or whether they have come to an understanding with the Palestinian authorities not do so. But whatever is the case, they do not enter. Another difference is that their Lebanese counterparts are free to go and work wherever they want, whereas the Palestinians are prohibited, in order to protect the Lebanese job market, from a large number of employment. This result in half of the Palestinians having no work whereas the other half does menial and/or cheap labor.

They have little hope for a different future, as the majority of them possess Palestinian papers which cannot function as travel documents. Most of them have lived in squalor like this since 1948. As said before, this creates a situation that is less than desirable.

The vegetable market right outside the camp.

There are some roads in Shatila that will allow cars to pass through, but the majority of the infrastructure consists of narrow alleyways, crooked, like a labyrinth. It is dim, because sunlight does not reach that deep, and the wind does not blow here either. There is a stale smell of humans, refuse and food. Most of the alleyways are less than a meter wide. On both sides iron doors in the wall give access to dark rooms, where people sit on white plastic garden chairs and sleep on mattresses on the floor. I am not making this up, I’ve just come from there. You feel like in a time machine; like you are walking through a medieval town. The Middle Ages revisited. They wouldn’t be able to produce a more authentic set in Hollywood than this one.

I cannot understand how people can live like this; year in and year out. I sometimes wonder how I would feel and think and reason about the world, and this region in particular, if I were to live there for a year, in between the inhabitants of the camp. Would I become a suicide bomber? I think I could be. There really isn’t much else to do with your life anyway.

And while I sit here on my balcony, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in my two-hundred something square meter apartment, I realize that every time I come out of the camps, I am a little different.

Story can be read here here (in Dutch).

In the meantime, there is an interesting web site on the Palestinian exodus.

Update: The two bottom Pictures of Shatila were posted by Reuters yesterday(scroll to the bottom)