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Driven by War to a No Man's Land in Jordan
Palestinians Ikhlas Aziz, left, and sister-in-law Aida Qadsiya are refugees in Jordan. In 2003, they fled Iraq, the family's refuge from Arab-Israeli war.
(By Anthony Shadid -- The Washington Post)
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"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 a hundred 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.
