UNRWA to cut Nahr al-Bared assistance as funding fails

IRIN News
November 5, 2008
www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=81306

By Hugh Macleod
Nahr al-Bared, north Lebanon

As he picked plastics and paper off the conveyor belt full with the rubble of his neighbours’ homes, Issam Sayyed indicated to a white house behind him, splattered with bullet holes and with its roof caved in.

“That’s my home,” said the father of nine, a Palestinian refugee displaced from the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in north Lebanon, which was ruined in a fifteen-week war last year between the army and Islamist insurgents.

Soon the bulldozers clearing the ruins would knock down the white house along with the others, and the remains of Sayyed’s home would be passing before his hands as he sorted through the rubble for $13 a day.

Across the camp in the temporary accommodation known as the “barracks” Sayyed’s wife was mourning the loss of their tenth child, a baby boy, whose father said had died for lack of medical care shortly after being born just four days earlier.

Yet even as he worked for the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA removing rubble last week, the failure of the international community, and Arab states in particular, to fund an emergency humanitarian appeal for Nahr al-Bared means life for refugees like Sayyed will this month get just a little harder.

UNRWA’s emergency appeal for $42m to meet the immediate humanitarian needs of the 30,000 Palestinians displaced from Nahr al-Bared remains almost entirely unfunded. Only the US and Norway have donated, meaning UNRWA will this month decrease rental subsidies for 3,200 displaced families from $200 to $150 a month as well as reducing items in the food basket each family receives.

In June, UNRWA said it needed about $445 million to rebuild the refugee camp - both the so-called New Camp, which sustained heavy damage, and the original, smaller Old Camp which was completely destroyed.

So far UNRWA says it has received just $70 million, 88 percent from Western donations. OPEC, the 13-member Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries which this year is forecast to make record breaking revenues of over $1 trillion, has donated just $5m to the reconstruction of Nahr al-Bared. Six OPEC members are from the Middle East.

The $20m cost of the projected 18-month rubble removal operation has been half met by the EU. In July 2007 Saudi Arabia donated $12m to UNRWA to help displaced families pay rent and buy food but as yet no Arab government has pledged to the long-term reconstruction of the camp.

“Buried under these thousands of tonnes of rubble are the dreams and achievements of a people who have waited sixty years for a just solution to their plight,” said UNRWA's Deputy Commissioner-General Filipo Grandi at a press conference in Nahr al-Bared to launch the rubble removal on 29 October.

“Money is the most difficult challenge we face [..] I am very confident donors from west and east will deliver much needed funds. What is at stake is the stability of the region and the well being and future of 30,000 people. That is too important to ignore or forget.”

As he spoke, a handful of Palestinians held a noisy protest outside the press conference, accusing the international community of failing them.

“For those who believe in human rights what UNRWA is doing is a crime against humanity,” shouted an irate Arkan Bader, a representative of the PFLP faction in Nahr al-Bared.

“They have decreased medical funding by 15%. Gulf countries promised in June to pay half their commitments [to Nahr al-Bared] but until now they have paid nothing.”

Palestinian frustration was also vented at their own leadership, most graphically so when a group of young boys inside Nahr al-Bared jeered at the car carrying Abbas Zaki, PLO Representative in Lebanon, singing a rhyme in Arabic: “Abbas! You are a pig and you deserve to be beaten with chains. Oh Abbas, the reckless boy! You are an old shoe.”

UNRWA also inaugurated a new Vocational Training Centre located near Nahr al-Bared which will offer courses in construction trade to around 500 young Palestinians. The centre was funded by the German government.

But the magnitude of the task facing UNRWA and other agencies working on reconstruction and recovery in Nahr al-Bared was underlined by the assessment of a deminer leading the removal of unexploded ordnance (UXO) from the ruins of the camp.

Paul Leader, Nahr al Bared task manager for Handicap International, which is contracted through UNRWA to clear UXO, said he expected the job could take two to three years to complete, despite an initial contract of just one year.

“Something of this magnitude and this level of contamination has never been done before,” said the veteran deminer, with experience in Iraq and the Balkans. “In any conventional war 10-15% explosives do not explode. And there were a lot thrown in here.”