Dbayeh R.C. (needs verification): Answer to Defining Dbayeh by Jim Quilty

Nice article, but it does not contain all the facts. Please note the corrections. By the way I am one of the Dbayeh Camp residents, who survived the massacre i 1976.

1. You wrote:"Coupled with exile, Dbayeh's residents were drawn into Lebanon's civil war (1975-90)"

According to facts Dbayeh Camp was forced to surrender to Bashir Gemayel´s militia in 1976, and therefore it has been under their control since that date. So there was never any participation in the Lebanese Civil war, especially because we had not any real militia forces or arms, we barely had some guns for show-off.

2. You wrote:"Bishops, priests and religious extended hospitality to Palestinian Christians, offering shelter in their churches and monasteries." "
The monks in Dbayeh set up a tent camp on a parcel of land near the monastery. "

The truth is that, when many Christian Palestinians had to flee in 1948, some took the route across the Palestinian Ras El Naqoura (renamed by israeli Rosh Hanikra)to the Lebanese village Al naqura, some went to the lebanese village Labbouneh/Labbouna. They were never welcomed with open arms. They were trearted badly, especially by the Lebanese army, who gathered them in Al Rashidiya and beat them as if they were animals. No Church or Monastry allowed them to take refuge in it, and instead they had to sleep on the roads. To escape such a bad welcome, therefor many of those who were in Labbouneh took the opportunity given to them to go to Syria. They were loaded like animals on trucks to Syria, where they were loaded on trains to Halab/Aleppo and then to Jarablis near the Syrian-Turkish boarder. Later it was decided to gather the Palestinian Chritians in one Camp. Dbayeh camp was originally a French Military Base built on land owned by St. Joseph´s Monastry. There were few and empty houses, which the french soldiers and their families built and used. When the waves of the Palestinian Christians arrived, they were denied access and use of those abandoned houses. They were gathered on a spot behind Al Bustan and the former bricks factory. They lived there for a while in tents and they also used some old French barracks. The refugees were not allowed to bury their dead in a Church graveyard but by the side of the road, which later led to the former Protestant School (where later in 1976 many Palestinian youngsters were slaughtered in cold blood by Bashir Gemayel´s militia). The graves are still there by the roadside as flat land marks, because they are just a shallow hole in the ground covered by cement and painted white. The smallest one of those graves belongs to my three year´s old brother Ibrahim, who got sick and died due to the lack of good shelter and treatment.
The new Dbayeh camp was built on the spot of the former French base. At that time no one was sheltered or allowed in or near st. Joseph´s Monastery. The later head Monk of st. Joseph´s Monastery called Father Nakkouzy was a symbol of disgrace, because he never let go any opportunity to beat and to spit on a Christian Palestinian child, including me. This is and was the hospitality of the Lebanese Maronite Churches and Monasteries. What a shame!

3. You wrote:"Tensions in the camps escalated in the years before the civil war, particularly as rival Palestinian groups sought to consolidate their grip. In 1969, a violent power struggle between the Lebanese secret police and the P.L.O. ended when Palestinian commandos expelled the Lebanese police from the camps."

The truth is that the tension arose due to the bad treatment of the Palestinian refugees by the Lebanese Police (Al Maktab Al Thani), which practiced martial law on the residents of the camp. One of the rules was that lights must be off at nine o´clock p.m, no gathering of residents was allowed privately or publicly after dark (six o´clock). For example, some residents gathered privately to play cards in the evening, later that evening they got arrested and beaten at the spot, and they were forced to carry on their heads the chairs and the table which they used across the camp. They were beaten and humiliated severely.

4. You wrote:"Hasan Ayoub, who heads UNRWA's Dbayeh operations, added that when the Phalangists entered the camp, they killed its leaders. Grisly acts, including rape and decapitation, also have been recorded in oral testimonies of survivors by a Lebanese scholar at the Coll ège de France in Paris, Dr. Jihane Sfeir."

I suggest that you read my living testimony on this same site (Palestine Remebered) "Massacre of Dbayeh camp".