Montrealer Ehab Lotayef looks at what has happened to the Palestinian minority in Iraq since the "liberation" of the country. It seems they've become refugees ...

Baghdad, December 17, 2003 (MMN). It was a football field. Now it's a refugee camp. The UNHCR and Iraqi Red Cross provided the tents and Palestinians moved in after the fall of the previous Iraqi regime, providing the refugees.

There are 25,000 Palestinians living in Iraq. In different times they enjoyed different degrees of accommodation by the regime. During the last 2 years before the war some of them lived in fully subsidized houses. Others were employees of the government, e.g. teachers. After the war the housing subsidies sized to exist and the new government wouldn't renew the contracts of its Palestinian employees.

Thus, many ended up having nowhere to live and the -Palestinian community decided to support them by setting up temporary living quarters for them in the football field at Haifa club.

The old women living in tents for the last eight months told me, today, that the summer months were too hot and the winter months are too cold. The kids who came back from school at noon complained of being harassed when they praised the Saddam days when they used to live in houses.

Of course the Palestinians could not follow the examples of the other poor Iraqis who, when they lost their living space, occupied abandoned army buildings. Only God knows what would have happened to them if they had tried. The number of Palestinians living in Iraq never reached a critical mass, so they had no weight demographically or politically. They were not even considered refugees by the UN till April 2003, over 55 years after the fact!

I was exposed today to another group of people the US invasion liberated. They were liberated from being second-class citizens to becoming refugees, at last.

Just before we left the camp a minister of the interim Iraqi government arrived to the camp. Till I know more I will just have to keep wondering what he will offer them. I hope that it won't be further liberation.

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Ehab Lotayef, a Montreal poet and a computer engineer at McGill University was in Iraq with the Iraq Solidarity Project during the month of December. The Iraq Solidarity Project (ISP) is a Montreal-based grassroots initiative to help provide international monitoring of occupation forces and the corporate reconstruction of Iraq and protective accompaniment to Iraqis under the occupation. To join ISP listserv, send a blank email to psi-...@lists.riseup.net. For more about ISP, p...@riseup.net.