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Sidon, Lebanon
The forgotten refugees


Hussein Saleh Miaari feels like a refugee forgotten by the world.

In 1948, in the midst of the conflict that produced the state of Israel, Saleh Miaari left his village in northern Palestine, expecting to return a few weeks later when the fighting ended. Fifty-two years later he’s still waiting.

He left as a young man, with a new wife and a young child. The child, their first, died on the journey to Lebanon. Now he is an old man, still grasping the keys to his former home. “I depend on God,” says the 73-year-old through an interpreter. He speaks with some resignation about his hope of returning home to Akbara – just 55 km away.

Saleh Miaari is far from alone in Lebanon. An estimated 200,000 to 400,000 Palestinians live here, adding significantly to the small country’s population of three million.

The largest camp, Ain El-Helwe, within the city of Sidon, holds 75,000 people. Begun as a temporary holding place, it has slowly become a concrete camp, teeming with people and surrounded by Lebanese guards.

A narrow, graffiti-covered alley leads to Saleh Miaari’s rented home in Ain El-Helwe, which he shares with 20 family members. “I don’t own anything here. This is what I own,” Saleh Miaari says with passion, pointing to some limp, yellowing documents. These are the deeds to his land in what is now Israel – about 175 acres in total. He farmed the land, raised sheep and goats and maintained an olive orchard.

In the early years, Saleh Miaari worked as a farm labourer and then in construction. For the last 18 years, he hasn’t worked at all. He has always faced restrictions in Lebanon.

There are 72 kinds of jobs Palestinians can’t hold here. What’s left, typically, are low-paying manual labour jobs. Unemployment is endemic among Palestinian refugees. Health care and education are restricted to what the United Nations Relief and Work Agency, which runs the refugee camps, provides. Palestinian refugees can’t become Lebanese citizens.

Mennonite Central Committee supports a Palestinian community health group based at a refugee camp in Beirut. It also provides financial and moral support to Salaam School, where refugees are trained in vocational skills.

Khalid Miaari, director of the 110-student school, says with all the focus on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks regarding the West Bank and Gaza, little attention is given to Palestinians living outside those areas.

“Camping! Fifty-two years! Imagine,” he says with frustration. He says many youth would like to leave Lebanon, although they don’t all see a future for themselves in a Palestinian state where they’ve never lived.

“Palestinians have no place to go. And they are not wanted,” insists Sylvia Haddad, who directs a Beirut school that integrates Palestinian and Lebanese children. “This is the crux of the whole problem.

“Children are being born with a grudge. There’s a lot of despondency, hopelessness among the youth,” she continues.

Miaari, who is related to the older Saleh Miaari, says he continues to hope. And he dreams of basic dignity. “What I look for is to live as a human being – to be respected, to have all the rights of a human being.”

 – Carol Thiessen, MCC

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Last modified September 15, 2000.

© 2000 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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