Dreaming of Nahr al-Bared

Dr. Marcy Newman writing from Beirut, Lebanon, Live from Lebanon, 4 August 2007

"Last week a group of international activists, people from Shatila refugee camp, and a group of people from the Nahr al-Bared displaced committee held a meeting to discuss how to break the media blackout about the siege on Nahr al-Bared refugee camp. One of the men at the meeting asked us, "How do we get the story of our situation into the media on a daily basis so that people will go to sleep at night dreaming of people from Nahr al-Bared?"....

As I ate lunch at a friend's house last week in Baddawi refugee camp, approximately 10 kilometers from Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, I was struck by the intensity of the bombing down the road. Every minute I could feel the vibration of and hear the bombings -- several times each minute. With several thousand Palestinians from Nahr al-Bared living in Baddawi I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that these families who fled this military bombardment must be reliving the trauma of their flight with each bomb each day. Each minute. How does one get the average Lebanese person or the average person more generally to understand, to feel, to work to end this siege?......

One reason why the media is asleep at the wheel when it comes to reporting about Nahr al-Bared is because the army is controlling journalists. While they may not be shooting at journalists as they did the first week of the conflict, they continue to keep them at bay. They remain outside the camp and at the mercy of the army for any information about the conflict. Few if any journalists are challenging the army -- and those who have are reportedly being sued by the army for writing about the situation in a way that the army does not condone. Welcome to embedded journalism in Lebanon. Applying the US model of media coverage in Iraq, journalists must report from the Lebanese army's vantage point if they wish to cover the story at all. This form of censorship does not allow for any coverage of the human cost of this war -- of the people trapped inside or the people displaced from it......

.....Given that Palestinians in Lebanon are far too aware of promises made and broken in the past is it any wonder that they are skeptical of promises to have their camp rebuilt when they are absent from any discussion about it?

Palestinians desire, demand, and deserve their right of return to Nahr al-Bared and to Palestine. Palestinians from Nahr al-Bared witnessed the return of displaced people from South Lebanon to their destroyed villages last summer despite the unexploded cluster bombs...... "