Dispossession in Nahr el-Bared
- Photo Essay from Raed El Rafei, Lebanese reporter with the LA Times.
- Tadamon! presents photographs from Nahr el-Bared from Raed El Rafei.
Lebanon’s Nahr el-Bared refugee camp, once home to an estimated 30,000 Palestinian refugees, remains in ruins, almost completely destroyed. Reconstruction efforts of the camp have been slow in the past months. As the military battle between the Lebanese military and the shady armed organization Fatah al-Islam raged, news of Nahr el-Bared filled the pages of newspapers across the world. Now military combat has halted in September 2007, Nahr el-Bared lies in rubble as displaced Palestinian refugees in Lebanon slowly are returning to their former home destroyed by an often indiscriminate military campaign lead-by the Lebanese army.
Today, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon continue to live as second-class citizens, without basic legal rights, a symbol of the continued dispossession of the Palestinian people. 2008 marks the 60th year of the Palestinian Nakba (“catastrophe”)– 60 years of dispossession, ethnic cleansing and exile for Palestinians resulting from the creation of the state of Israel. The Palestinian refugees of Nahr el-Bared present one of the clearest symbols of the continued dispossession of the Palestinian people around the world, the largest documented refugee population on earth.
Many of the Graffiti left by Lebanese soldiers and Fatah al-Islam militants during the fights contained racist comments about Palestinians.
In the aftermath of the fights, children are digging through mountains of rubble for scarp metal to sell.
Palestinian families try to get by in the camp in the absence of electricity and water following the battles in Nahr Al Bared.
A Palestinian family carrying bottles of fresh water donated by NGOs.
Palestinian children playing in front of their two-room home destroyed during the Nahr Al-Bared fights.
Raed El Rafei is a Lebanese reporter and a blogger working for the Los Angeles Times in Beirut, you can read an article from Raed El Rafei from the LA Times.
This is an outstanding photo reportage. Thank you so much for sharing it. I wish I could read the writing on that wall, but that the soldiers could write nasty comments about refugees means that they haven’t been taught their history, and worse, that their own tragedies aren’t teaching them any lessons.
These people are victims so many times over, and the world loves to report the “inter Arab fighting” but does not lift a finger to see that these people have the basic life neccesities!
Comment by maryitalia — April 7th, 2008 @ 12:02 PMThank you Raed for sharing these pictures- however harsh they are-because the world needs to see them…
Comment by Rima Merhi — April 8th, 2008 @ 12:45 AM