NAHR AL-BARED - Nahr al-Bared outside Lebanon`s second city of Tripoli, where fighting raged for a second day Monday, is one of a dozen Palestinian refugee camps around the country that have become breeding grounds for extremism.
Home to nearly six decades of heartbreak and misery, the squalid camps, which house well over half of Lebanon`s nearly 400,000 Palestinian refugees, have seen ever more hardline groups win influence as their impoverished residents despair of ever seeing an end to their plight.
The UN Relief and Works Agency, which runs education, health and social services in the camps, says all 12 "suffer from serious problems -- no proper infrastructure, overcrowding, poverty and unemployment."
Lebanon`s camps also have the region`s "highest percentage of Palestine refugees who are living in abject poverty."
The refugees, who dreamt of a swift return to their homes suddenly located inside Israel following its creation in 1948, lived first in tents and other temporary shelters.
What they thought would be temporary soon turned into a permanent reality, with canvas tents replaced by breeze-block shacks, where families reminisced of their old towns and villages, many of them still owning the keys and title deeds to their homes in places like Haifa and Jaffa.
Disenchanted with the efforts of Arab governments to defeat Israel, the camps became a recruiting ground first for guerrillas of the mainstream Palestine Liberation Organization, then for rejectionist factions that opposed its peacemaking efforts, and eventually for Islamist militants.
The Lebanese government lost control of the camps as long ago as 1968, when PLO fighters evicted from Jordan following the crushing of the so-called Black September uprising, seized control and made Lebanon the main base for their operations against Israel.
Beirut formally ceded security control of the camps to the Palestinians under a convention signed in Cairo the following year and, despite its unilateral abrogation under Syrian influence in 1987, Lebanese troops do not enter the camps to this day.
With the start of Lebanon`s 1975-1990 civil war, some camps were targeted by Christian militias who opposed the Palestinians` influence in the country and their alliance with the rival Sunni Muslim community.
Encouraged by the Christian militias, Israel launched a full-scale assault on Beirut in 1982 to crush the PLO.
The invasion resulted in the banishment of then PLO leader Yasser Arafat with some 10,000 of his fighters, and the massacre of civilian refugees at Beirut`s Sabra and Shatila camps by pro-Israeli Christian militiamen.
Between 1985 and 1988, the Syrian-backed Shiite movement Amal waged war on the camps in Beirut and southern Lebanon in a bid to destroy Arafat`s power and promote pro-Syrian factions.
Only the camps in the south escaped the grip of Damascus, which cemented its power over its smaller neighbour after the civil war ended and maintained a large military and intelligence presence until just two years ago.
Even now, Palestinians find themselves eyed with suspicion by the country`s Christians, who fear the mainly Muslim community wishes to settle permanently in Lebanon and render them obsolete as a political force.
Again in the latest violence, the Islamist splinter group Fatah al-Islam which has fought ferocious battles with the Lebanese army resulting in 55 deaths, stands accused by some Lebanese at least of having acted at the behest of the Syrian intelligence services.
Poverty has been a major factor behind the militancy of the Palestinian refugees.
Despite some easing in recent years, the Palestinians remain barred by the Lebanese constitution from purchasing property or practising a string of professions, and unemployment is high.
05/21/2007 14:02 GMT