Daniel Akill-Attieh's Blog | 366: NAHR-AL-BARED CAMP – When and How and Why, Etc, and so forth and so on

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366: NAHR-AL-BARED CAMP – When and How and Why, Etc, and so forth and so on

06 September, 2008

NAHR-AL-BARED CAMP – When and How and Why, Etc, and so forth and so on

Nahr al-Bared Arabic: نهر البارد Cold River is a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon, 16 km from the city of Tripoli. Some 30,000 displaced Palestinians and their descendents live in and around the camp, which was named after the river that runs south of the camp. The Lebanese Army and Police are banned from entering any Palestinian camps under the 1969 Cairo Agreement – the result of Black September

September 1970 is known as the Black September Arabic: أيلول الأسود in Arab history and sometimes is referred to as the era of regrettable events. It was the month when the late Hashemite King Hussein of Jordan moved to quash the autonomy of Palestinian organisations and restore the prestige of his monarchy. The violence resulted in the deaths of 7,000 to 8,000 Palestinians. Armed conflict lasted until July 1971 with the expulsion of the PLO and thousands of Palestinians to Lebanon.

King Hussein clearly massacred the Palestinians without holding back at all and this is the reason why there is no terrorism in Jordan…as there is in Lebanon and elsewhere.

The description of those events as a massacre is analogous to what occurred in Hama during Hafez al-Assad's reign and the actions that King Hussein and the Jordanian Army pursued were absolutely right, in hindsight – as history has proven. There is no terrorism in Syria, either.

True, it was a massacre, but those Palestinian civilians or refugees engaged in acts of war against the monarchy and Jordanian soldiers and civilians – an attempted coup. They were part of the PLO's unorganised or unofficial army, so that was a massacre of soldiers and civilians by the Palestinians that resulted in the massacre and forced exodus of the Palestinians. The trick in staging or attempting a coup is in not losing or failing – if you win or succeed you’ve arrived; if you lose or fail, you’re finished

The Cairo Agreement or Cairo Accord was an agreement reached on 2^nd November 1969 during talks between Yasser Arafat and the Lebanese army commander General Emile Bustani – another General, like General Emile Lahhoud and especially General Michael Aoun – Egyptian president (the late) Gamal Abdel Nasser helped to broker the deal. Although the actual text of the agreement was never published, an unofficial but probably accurate text appeared in the Lebanese daily newspaper An-Nahar on 20^th April 1970. The agreement established principles under which the presence and activities of Palestinian guerrillas in south-east Lebanon would be tolerated and regulated by the Lebanese authorities.

Under the Agreement, the 16 official UNWRA camps in Lebanon – home to 300,000 Palestinian refugees – were removed from the jurisdiction of the Maronite-dominated Lebanese Army's Deuxième Bureau and placed under the authority of the Palestinian Armed Struggle Command. Although the camps remained under Lebanese sovereignty the new arrangements meant that, after 1969, they became a key popular base for the guerrilla movement.

The agreement also established the right of the Palestinian residents of Lebanon to join the Palestinian revolution through armed struggle. Subsequently, the Palestine Liberation Organisation effectively established a state within a state in Lebanon.

Daniel: All I have to say is the Cairo-Ayro Accord reminds me of the Doha-Hoo-hah Accord. That’s all.

The Lebanese army being incapable of limiting the areas of PLO activity, Palestinian involvement increased in Lebanon in the early 1970s, especially after the failed coup in Jordan in September 1970 – Black September – which began on 16^th September 1970, when King Hussein of Jordan declared military rule in response to an attempt by the fedayeen to seize his kingdom. In April 1975, civil war broke out in Lebanon and several months later the PLO entered the conflict on the side of the leftist Lebanese National Movement. Following the military successes of this alliance the right-wing Maronite president Suleiman Franjiyeh called upon Syria to intervene. The PLO subsequently retreated to the south, but continued guerrilla operations across the Lebanon-Israel border, resulting in the Israeli invasion of March, 1978.

Escalations in the conflict led ultimately to the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in the 1982 Lebanon War.

The Nahr-al-Bared Camp was established in December 1949 by the League of Red Cross Societies in order to help and accommodate the Palestinian refugees suffering from difficult winter conditions in the Beqaa Valley, and the suburbs of Tripoli. The camp was established outside any major Lebanese towns or settlements which made the NBC more isolated from Lebanese society than most of the other camps in Lebanon.

Despite that, due to its position on the main road to Syria and its proximity to the Syrian border, NBC grew to be a central commercial hub for the local Lebanese of the Akkar region.

After nearly 60 years of living side by side, the people of NBC and the local Lebanese inter-married, built social and economic relations, and visited each other regularly. However, there were some problems among the Palestinian refugees and the Lebanese. The Palestinian refugees were frustrated because of restrictions imposed on them, and the Lebanese were suspicious and fearful of the unstable conditions in the camp.

Late on the night of Saturday 19^th May, 2007, a building in which a group of Fatah al-Islam militants accused of taking part in a bank robbery earlier that day were hiding was surrounded by Lebanese Internal Security Forces (ISF). The ISF attacked the building early on Sunday 20^th May 2007, unleashing a day long battle between the ISF and Fatah al-Islam militants on 200 Street, Tripoli. As a response, members of Fatah al-Islam in the Nahr al-Bared Camp attacked an army checkpoint, killing several soldiers in their sleep. The army immediately responded by shelling the camp.

The conflict between the Lebanese Army and Fatah al-Islam ended on Sunday 2^nd September, 2007 with the Lebanese Army taking full control of the camp after eliminating the remaining terrorist pockets

Nahr al-Bared was also home to the largest market in northern Lebanon. Many Lebanese relied on the tax-free goods and black market prices to keep the cost of living down in a country with the current inflation at 5.6%. The demise of Nahr al-Bared was a devastating blow to the local economy.

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