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Razed Palestinian camp in Lebanon awaits rebuild
Tue Mar 3, 2009 7:16pm EST
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By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent
NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon (Reuters) - Sadeq Sadeq gazed at bulldozers clearing rubble from the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared, pulverized in battles between the Lebanese army and Islamist militants in 2007.
"My house was there," said the 47-year-old construction foreman, pointing to heaps of concrete and twisted steel.
Reconstruction at Nahr al-Bared is finally due to begin on March 9, even though many of the 30,000 refugees who lost their homes remain skeptical the camp will indeed be resurrected.
"Maybe they will give me a house but I don't know when -- two years, six years?" said Sadeq, breaking off his work at a grimy building site in a less heavily damaged area nearby.
For years, he plied his trade from Germany to Kazakhstan, with spells in Yemen, Oman and Abu Dhabi, patiently sending his savings to his wife and brother to build a four-storey family home in the camp, adding floors whenever the money allowed.
Three months after he returned in 2007, a conflict in which he had no part reduced his life's work to ruins.
All 6,000 homes were destroyed in the shabby warren of alleys and two- to six-storey buildings crammed into a coastal pocket of two square km (less than a square mile).
The Lebanese government and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA), which cares for Palestinian refugees, have promised Nahr al-Bared will rise again -- unlike three refugee camps that were destroyed during Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war.
They say construction will now start on the first of eight areas to be rebuilt in a rolling program planned, but far from fully funded, over the next two to three years. The end-goal is a "model camp" with vastly improved living conditions.
Some Palestinians find it hard to square this promise with the army's pounding of Nahr al-Bared, after civilians had fled, to crush a few hundred Fatah al-Islam gunmen entrenched there.
BITTER FEELING
"If you find a snake in your house, do you demolish your house?" asked Samih Hajjo, 60, a doctor at an UNRWA clinic. "If they're going to rebuild the camp, why was it destroyed?"
Hajjo's own house was shelled and burned in the conflict, which engulfed but did not totally destroy the "new camp," a spillover area for refugees keen to escape the confines of the original camp set up after Israel's creation in 1948.
His doubts reflect the vulnerability felt by displaced residents forced to live in temporary shelter since mid-2007.
The army denies them access to the old camp, still riddled with unexploded munitions, and imposes strict exit and entry controls on all four roads into the new camp, hamstringing efforts to revive its once-vibrant trade with Lebanese environs. Continued...
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