Nahr el Bared, Tripoli: The After-Image of War Monika Halkort
Conflict in Cities: Europe and the Middle East
This photo-essay shows impressions from Nahr el Bared between October 2009 and the summer of 2010. Nahr el Bared is a refugee camp 15 kilometres outside Tripoli. The camp was completely destroyed in the course of a fierce battle between a small group of militant Islamists and the Lebanese army in 2007. More than 400 people died and 30,000 had to flee during the course of this three month confrontation. One of the biggest obstacles in the task of rebuilding the refugee camp is the shortage of funding. But there are also political constraints. The sectarian logic of the Lebanese political system makes it extremely hard for Palestinians to obtain citizenship rights, as Lebanese fear that this might push the fragile architecture of power out of balance. As a result, refugee ownership of property is not officially registered or recognised; this heavily hampers rebuilding efforts. The slow pace of the physical reconstruction of the camp provides vivid testimony to the many political obstacles Palestinians face on their paths to justice and recognition as a political community.
The 2007 war in Nahr el Bared was not the first time that Palestinian refugees lost their homes and all their belongings. Yet what they bemoan most are the visual traces of their memories, the images, artefacts and material traces they accumulated over the years that are testament to their history and identity as Palestinians in Lebanon.
Winter 2009. Three years into the reconstruction process the work is far from finished and suffers from severe time delays. The leading figures of the 2007 insurgence were either killed or managed to escape, while the refugee population is still waiting for their homes to be rebuilt. The war left two thirds of the camp residents without work, and incomes fell by 39 percent.
Temporary housing facilities outside the old camp. Entire families have been living here for three years now, cramped into just one room. The average family size here is five people.
Laying the foundation for a new beginning. Construction work for rebuilding the camp started in late 2008. Yet lack of funding and legal complications have slowed down the reconstruction process tremendously.
Tr i p o l i , s u m m e r 2 0 1 0 . Palestinians have become a key bargaining chip in the sectarian rivalry of Lebanese political factions. Deals struck between the elites in Beirut tend to come at the expense of Palestinian rights. A change in the property law in 2001 that excluded Palestinians from property ownership now poses serious challenges to the reconstruction of Nahr el Bared.
Those who were lucky enough in the past to build their own home right next to the official camp as constructed by UNRWA, the main UN body in charge of Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, are now left without any support. The change in property law makes it impossible to recognise them as legal owners of their land and property. This severely restricts the possibility of finding funding for the cost of housing repairs.
Work in progress, May 2010. The funding s e c u r e d f o r reconstruction only allows for the rebuilding of three out of eight sectors of the original camp. What will happen once that money is spent remains unknown.
Image 8 Posters and Derelict. Belfast. 2010
The original size of the camp was 200,000 square metres. The shortfall in the budget has left the population deeply worried that only a fraction of the camp will be rebuilt. One indicator that supports their suspicion is the fact that the infrastructure networks for water, sewage and electricity are currently developed only for those areas where UNRWA is certain that there will be housing facilities in the near future.
Routine nowadays means improvisation in Nahr el Bared. Making something out of nothing has always been an art in itself in the camp. Nearly 5,000 jobs or three quarters of all a v a i l a b l e w o r k opportunities in Nahr el Bared have been destroyed according to government figures.
Traditional crafts have long been a vital part of r e c o r d i n g a n d transmitting historical knowledge and a sense of belonging. The threat of total extinction in Nahr el Bared revived this old resistance strategy of the refugee community.
Conflict in Cities and the Contested State research project, supported by the ESRC (grant number RES-060-25-0015)
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