Nir Rosen on the Nahr al-Bared events, etc

Just ten days or so ago I was sitting with Nir in the lobby of the Gefinor Rotana Hotel in Beirut– and here is the piece he was crashing on finishing at that point.
It is a great and detailed piece of reporting on the whole phenomenon of the emergence, after the Syrians’ 2005 withdrawal from Lebanon, of Sunni salafist extremist groups in some Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and some other parts of Lebanon, too. That phenomenon came to a crescendo with last summer’s fighting in the Nahr al-Bared camp in the north of the country.
Nir has some fascinating new details about the involvement of Hariri-owned banks in helping the salafists– who held a number of different nationalities– bring into the country the huge amounts of dosh they apparently had at their disposal while they were here.
This is an important piece of reporting. Nir should perhaps have spelled out that Bernard Rougier, whom he quotes, is probably the world’s greatest expert on the question of militant Islamism in Lebanon’s long horrendously oppressed and besieged refugee camps. Here is a link to the recent English version of Rougier’s book on the topic, Everyday Jihad.
I would add a couple more comments here:

1. The rise of extremist groups within Lebanon after the Syrians’ departure has many intriguing analogies to what happened here after Ariel Sharon’s shock troops succeeded in chasing the PLO forces out of West Beirut in summer 1982. It was after that point that the whole of the (non-Syrian-controlled) part of the country became a safe haven for all kinds of new extremist groups.
Between 1976 and 1982, western embassies in Beirut had solid agreements with the PLO’s security forces to provide protection for their diplomats and nationals. In 1978, when my then-employers at the Sunday Times felt that my life was under threat because of the recent killing of my colleague David Holden, they contacted the British Embassy (since I was a British national), who arranged with Abu Ja’afar in the PLO’s security force to provide me with a 24-hour bodyguard. Actually, the ST wanted me to leave Beirut, but I couldn’t because I was 8.7 months pregnant. So the bodyguards came with me to the maternity hospital. Joy, rapture. (Irony alert.) That was 30 years ago this February. That was just one tiny example of what all the western embassies were doing in those days. (I should write here about my former neighbor Abu Hassan Salameh some time; his role in negotiating those agreements, his relations with the CIA, and the CIA’s unwillingness to shield him from the Israeli assassination operation that ended his life. There’s gratitude for you…)
After the PLO’s departure in 1982, there was no body able to provide security to western diplomats and nationals. That’s when Malcolm Kerr got killed; when numerous westerners were taken hostage; and when western embassies started getting blown up.
I won’t say Lebanon is quite in that state of anarchy yet. But the analogy of booting a stabilization force out of this country and then finding there’s no-one capable of providing day-to-day security is an unsettling one.
2. The Palestinian refugees trapped in their dismal hovels in Lebanon got the short end of the stick in the whole “Fateh al-Islam” story as recounted by Nir…. just as they’ve gotten the short end of the stick– from the Israelis, from many Lebanese, from others– throughout much of their whole tragic history here in Lebanon. I’d like to note, since I’ve just returned to Lebanon from Syria, that the situation of the Palestinian refugees in Syria is exponentially better than that of the Palestinian refugees here. There, they have the same social and economic rights as any Syrian citizen, and many have risen to the top of their professions. Here, there is still a list of 74 professions from which Palestinians are proscribed; they can’t own real estate; they can’t even expand their own cramped shelters without getting approval from the authorities (rarely given); and many of them have direly curtailed freedom of movement.
There was something in the Daily Star recently about some 5,000 “unregistered” Palestinians here now being offered registration. I’m note sure how much good that will do them.
If the Palestinian “state” being discussed by Abu Mazen and Co is to have any value or meaning at all, it should surely be a state that can (a) provide safe haven for beleaguered Palestinians here and everywhere else, and (b) intercede with other governments on an equal basis to ensure that the rights of its nationals are not abused.
Statelessness– that is, being in the situation of being not just a refugee but a refugee without any recognized nationality or citizenship– is a very vulnerable situation to be in. Ask the Palestinians in Lebanon…

But first of all, go read Nir’s informative, if depressing, story.