Road Map to nowhere

By SARAH SMILES

Darweesh Fatayar, 64, sits downcast on a fraying sofa outside his new family home, a tent, in a Palestinian refugee camp in Baghdad.

"My whole life has been a struggle," says the gaunt man woefully, brushing flies away from his sun-blackened face. "I always felt I was worth nothing because I wasn't in my country, Palestine.

"Now I live in this castle," he says, gesturing to the tent that he shares with his wife and six teenage children, who spend the blazing hot nights together sleeping on the floor.

Fatayar is one of hundreds of Palestinian refugees who have been made homeless since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. Only days after the war ended, their Iraqi landlords ordered them off the properties, some brandishing weapons.

In recent decades, the Iraqi landlords had been forced by Saddam's government to rent their properties cheaply to Palestinian refugees, often for less than $2 a month. When the war ended many saw an opportunity to seize them back.

For many of the Palestinians, the Haifa Sports Club, a Palestinian cultural centre in Baghdad, was the only place they could go. The soccer pitch of the club has been turned into a bustling tent city, accommodating some 250 evicted Palestinian families.

Fatayar's eviction is not his first. In 1948 he fled Palestine with his parents to Iraq, after "the Zionists started attacking houses" in his city of Jaffa.

The 9-year-old Fatayar remembers travelling for a week through the desert to Baghdad on a bus with his parents - he was one of thousands of Palestinian refugees who sought sanctuary in Iraq.

The then Iraqi government treated their Palestinian "guests" well, eventually giving them free government housing or cheap apartments that they rented from Iraqi landlords.

Many Iraqis, especially those who did not own homes themselves, saw this as preferential treatment.

"We don't like the Palestinians because they are living off the backs of others," says Hussein, 28, from Baghdad, expressing a commonly held sentiment. Saddam's oft-trumpeted pro-Palestinian rhetoric, in which he used to champion himself as an Arab leader while mistreating his own population, did nothing to alleviate this animosity.

While many Iraqis rejoiced in Saddam's demise, for the evicted Palestinian refugees it was a disaster.

"To us, the most important thing is to live in security. Saddam Hussein gave us security," says Rifaat Al-Madhi, the director of the Haifa Sports Club. While Madhi acknowledges that the regime committed many crimes, he says Saddam's vocal support for the Palestinian cause bought him undying loyalty.

"We loved Saddam Hussein. Maybe these words will anger Iraqis, but we must be faithful. Saddam Hussein called many times to liberate Palestine, and this suits our political dream to return to our country," says Madhi.

The future is unclear for these Palestinians living in the tent-city. While the Haifa Sports Club is receiving aid and medicine from the International Red Cross and various non government organisations, there is no United Nations Works and Relief Agency for Palestinian refugees in Iraq to oversee their situation.

While there are no figures available, estimates of the Palestinian population in Iraq range between 35,000 and 90,000. Of those who came to Iraq in 1948, none was registered as a Palestinian refugee with UNRWA.

On top of this, the new "road map to peace" proposal does not address the fate of Palestinian refugees, says Mahdi.

"We have a lot of fears. We do not have any other place to live. Our future is so unclear," he says.

Ultimately, he hopes the post-war administration will allow them to reclaim their old houses, yet this is unlikely to be accepted by Iraqi landlords.

Karim Qadom, 44, waited decades to reclaim a family property his dead father rented to a Palestinian family in 1972. At the time it was rented for approximately 18 dinars a month, a figure then worth more than $90. When the dinar depreciated, Saddam's government refused to allow Qadom's father to increase the rent, which today is worth less than $2.

"For 20 years we have wanted to get the Palestinians out," says Qadom, who was forced to live in his father's cramped house with his wife and family and six brothers and sisters. While he is happy to have "liberated his property" after evicting the tenants earlier this month, the house will need many repairs.

There were more than five Palestinian families living in the house, and when they moved out they ripped wires from the walls, doors from hinges and broke several water and sewerage pipes, in what Qadom describes as an act of malice.

Although the house was bought new in 1972, it is in a state of disrepair. The walls are covered in graffiti, etchings and chipped paint. "I feel sorry for them," says Qadom of his tenants who are now living in the refugee camp. "But what can I do?" he says, surrounded by his five small children.

Aida Ahmed Mahmoud, 40, a Palestinian woman who used to live in a room in Qadom's house, also has five children. She is now living with them in a tent at the Haifa Sports Club, without her husband who is stranded in Greece after trying to emigrate illegally to Sweden last year.

"Please find a solution for us," begs the tired, sallow-faced woman.

"Life is so difficult here. It's so hot, there's no place to cook, there is no security. We feel so depressed," she says, her wide-eyed 4-year-old lying prostrate in the heat on the floor.

The situation in the camp will only deteriorate in coming months, says Anwar Salam Al-Awawdeh, the chief of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society mission in Iraq. July and August are the hottest months and will affect the health of the refugees, he says.

Two pregnant women have already miscarried their babies in the heat, and Awawdeh expects typhoid and cholera will soon be prevalent in the camp.

"It's a new catastrophe for the Palestinian people," he says. "There are dark days ahead."

For Fatayar, sitting on his sofa on a soccer pitch, things can't get much darker. He has diseased kidneys and wishes only to die now, but prays that it will be in his homeland.

"I have only one request from God now, that I die in Palestine," says Fatayar, who wears a trinket of the Al-Quds Mosque of Jerusalem around his bony neck.

"I am an old man now, I have to die in Palestine. I'm an optimistic person."