Driven by War to a No Man's Land in Jordan

By Anthony Shadid
The Washington Post

Monday 02 April 2007

Lives of Palestinian refugees from iraq reflect six decades of dispossession.

Ruweished, Jordan - It was 10 a.m. when the desert winds began blowing sand into the tent, one of a gaggle perched across a moonscape along Jordan's border with Iraq. Its rickety wooden frame creaked like a decrepit rocking chair, and Samir Abdel-Rahim, stranded for the past four years in a no man's land with other Palestinians fleeing carnage in Iraq, recounted his tale.

It began in 1948, before he was born, when Israel was created. It stretched through the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, when Saddam Hussein was toppled. Its denouement unfolds here, where Abdel-Rahim, 52, his wife and their four children simply wait.

"It's a long story," Abdel-Rahim said. "We're never a party to any of the wars, but we bear their consequences."

In this forlorn corner of Jordan, the border drawn as an arbitrary line in the sand, the remnants of six decades of conflict in the Middle East converge in the Ruweished camp and three others strewn along Iraq's western frontier. The camps are home to more than 1,300 Palestinians, dispossessed by conflict with Israel, driven from their homes by conflict in Iraq, and forced to wait by sometimes arbitrary politics barring their entry elsewhere. Many are the offspring of refugees from a war they are too young to know; their lives are now ordered by another that shows no sign of ending.

The magnitude of the Palestinians' plight in the camps along Iraq's borders with Syria and Jordan pales before the sheer scale of Iraqis' exodus from their country, where millions have been displaced or forced to flee to neighboring countries. But it is rare in the Arab world for the lives of a handful of people to so closely chart the generations of war, dictatorship, vengeance and dispossession. By the Palestinians' own admission, their lives offer a uniquely Middle Eastern lesson in the caprice of fate.

"This is the destiny God delivered," said Abdel-Rahim's sister-in-law, Ikhlas Aziz.

The camp unfurled beyond their flimsy door, held shut by a bent nail. Colored in shades of brown, tents housing the nearly 100 Palestinians here stretched along two ribbons of ruptured black asphalt. A chain-link fence snared water bottles and plastic bags swept by gusts of wind. On this day, as on others for four years, sand, the kind that grits between the teeth, hung in the air like a morning fog.

"We're just biding our time, biding our time for something," said Abdel-Rahim's wife, Aida Qadsiya, in a black veil.

Abdel-Rahim and his family were among an estimated 35,000 Palestinians in Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion. His parents had arrived in 1948, having followed the returning Iraqi army, which during that Arab-Israeli war fought in a swath of territory from the West Bank town of Jenin to Haifa on the coast.

Although Palestinians faced restrictions in Iraq that limited their access to land, cars and phone lines, they were perceived as a favored constituency under Hussein. Fashioning himself as a champion of their cause, he provided refugees free or subsidized housing and exempted them from military service. Many Iraqis resented Hussein's aid to families of suicide bombers and others killed in the Palestinian uprising that began in 2000. Weeks after his fall in April 2003, landlords set out to reclaim houses that the government had rented to Palestinians, sometimes for less than $1 a month.

"If you don't leave my house, I will burn it down - you and your family inside," Abdel-Rahim, bearded and balding, said he was told by his landlord in the Baghdad neighborhood of Hayy al-Salam.

On May 4, 2003, he left with his family and his brother's family, buying bus tickets for the equivalent of about $7.

"We didn't have a choice," he said.

For a brief time in 2003, Jordan allowed Palestinians, including Abdel-Rahim's family and a few hundred others, into the Ruweished camp, built about 40 miles from Iraq to house a feared influx of Iraqis fleeing the U.S.-led invasion. Jordan then closed the border. In summer 2006, Syria allowed more than 300 Palestinians into al-Hol camp, on its side of the frontier. Then, like Jordan, it sealed the border again.

Of Iraq's neighbors, Jordan and Syria have disproportionately shared the burden of hosting hundreds of thousands of Iraqi exiles. Despite the relatively small number of the Palestinians, U.N. officials say both countries fear the precedent that would be set by allowing in more Palestinian refugees.

"The line is drawn - that they're not going to admit them, that they're not going to absorb one more," said Robert Breen, the representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Jordan. "If you open up for some, the rest are going to come."

The Palestinian Authority has offered the refugees sanctuary, but Israel, which controls the borders of the West Bank and Gaza, has denied U.N. requests to resettle them in the Palestinian territories, he said.

"I can't recall ever having seen this kind of situation in such a bleak environment," Breen said. "They can't go backward, and they aren't moving forward. They're literally stuck in the desert - no way back, and nowhere to go."

It is spring in Ruweished, the season belied by the desolate environs but still weeks before the heat that residents call unbearable. Respiratory problems are rife because of the sandstorms, and on this day, nearly everyone was huddled inside their tents.

"Take a chair!" shouted Qadsiya, Abdel-Rahim's wife, as'she brought out unsweetened coffee on a tray dusted with sand.

She offered a pillow to a guest seated on dirt packed as hard as concrete. Wind ruffled the tent's canvas roof and pelted the woolen blankets sewn with thick thread that served as a wall. A Koranic verse was on one flap, next to a prayer rug. A Lebanese variety show appeared on the couple's television; the satellite hookup was purchased from a Kurdish family that had been resettled. Three of their four children sat on cheap plastic mats, a single bulb overhead. Their oldest daughter, Saja, got married in the camp five months ago.

They spoke Palestinian dialect, sprinkled with Iraqi colloquialisms.

"If there were a one in 100 chance that we could have lived safely in Baghdad, we would have never left," Abdel-Rahim said.

The New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch has said that Shiite militias have murdered dozens of Palestinians in Baghdad and that Interior Ministry forces have arbitrarily arrested, beaten and tortured others. The group said entire communities of the 15,000 Palestinians still there have received threats of eviction. Rumors abound that Palestinians, as Sunni Muslims, have served as suicide bombers and supporters of the insurgency.

"They have been systematically brutalized," said Anita Raman, a reporting officer with UNHCR in Amman.

"You kill a Palestinian, and what is the consequence?" she added.

Virtually everyone in the Ruweished camp knows someone who was killed in Baghdad. Essam Eissa, a 49-year-old veterinarian, sat in his tent underneath a poster for Royal Jordanian Airlines. "Change is in the air," it read. He remembered when Mahmoud Bakiza left the camp and returned to Baghdad in 2004. The 24-year-old was killed 10 days later in the Baghdad neighborhood of Baya. Mohammed Ziab, sitting in his tent and wheezing in the sandstorm, remembered another camp resident who returned to Iraq in 2003.

"I heard he was killed two days later," Ziab said.

In Abdel-Rahim's tent, his wife recalled the fate of her brother, Marwan Lutfi. Members of a Shiite militia, wearing police uniforms, entered his tailor shop on Baghdad's storied Rashid Street in April 2006, she said. His co-workers told her that the militiamen asked him to come with them for 15 minutes. "He walked with them," she said. For a moment, she was silent, tears welling in her eyes. "He never returned."

Four days later, her brother's body was found in the street, covered in acid burns, she said. He had been shot 21 times.

"My mother couldn't look at the body," she said. "Only the gravediggers did."

"I have to endure the circumstances here, but at least it's not Baghdad," Abdel-Rahim said, nodding.

As he spoke, his brother, Khalid, turned angry. It was the bravado of desperation. "I'd forget anything that's called Arab, anything that's called Islam, if I could find a place, anyplace in the world, for my children, with a safe future!" he shouted.

The others were taken aback by what they considered his blasphemy.

His brother wagged his finger.

"There is no god but God," his wife yelled.

Camp residents navigate the monotony with conversation, backgammon and cards. Routine is supplied by the United Nations, which delivers water daily, bread and vegetables every other day and rice, sugar, canned food, cooking oil and toiletries twice a week. Rumors swirl. "Every day there's a new one," said Abdel-Rahim's sister-in-law, Aziz.

This week, it was that American officials planned to visit and offer asylum. Before that, it was that the Canadian government, which had accepted 53 of the Palestinian refugees last year, planned to return. Abdel-Rahim had applied to go to Canada. He pulled out the letter he had received from the Canadian Embassy.

"You have not provided sufficient evidence that you have a well-founded fear of persecution nor that you have been and continue to be seriously and personally affected by civil war, armed conflict or massive violation of human rights," it read in part.

The last line concluded: "I am therefore refu'ing your application."

"I would have to die, my husband would have to be killed, or my children would have to be slaughtered in front of my eyes, so that I'd have the right to leave this place," his sister-in-law said. "Is that logical?"

By afternoon, the winds had subsided, and the family ventured outside, walking a little gingerly past some of the 10 cats that share their tent. A few other people were also tentatively opening their doors.

"If you look at the records, I've been here four years, but to be honest, it feels like 400 years," Abdel-Rahim said.

"We're here in a prison without committing a crime," his sister-in-law said.

Everyone shook their heads in agreement.

"But even a criminal knows the length of his sentence," his brother Khalid added.

Abdel-Rahim looked at him. He spoke without pity, almost clinically. "Our crime is that we're Palestinian," he said.