Читать книгу The Politics of Suffering - Nell Gabiam - Страница 13

My first encounter with a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria was Yarmouk in the summer of 2002, when I was still a graduate student and had traveled to Damascus to study Arabic. I followed a fellow student, an aspiring journalist, who wanted to visit the camp. I was struck by how seamlessly Yarmouk blended into the surrounding city. Without the giant arch featuring a portrait of former President Hafiz al-Asad that signals the entrance, it would have been impossible for a newcomer to know that she was crossing a boundary of sorts. With symmetrically arranged apartment buildings, Yarmouk had the appearance of a typical working/middle-class Syrian neighborhood. It was also a popular commercial area, attracting Syrians from other parts of Damascus. I became interested in examining what it meant for Palestinians living in Yarmouk to be refugees, given the extent of their socioeconomic and physical integration into its surroundings. Thus, when I began my fieldwork in spring 2004, I was based in Damascus and remained there for one year.

In addition to spending a significant amount of time in Yarmouk interviewing Palestinians of various generations and backgrounds, I followed the activities of the Yarmouk Youth Center, one of the camp’s many active grassroots organizations.⁷ I also worked as a volunteer at the UNRWA field office in Damascus. I wanted to examine the relationship between the agency and the refugees it has been assisting for over six decades.

In the second year of my volunteer work with UNRWA, I had the opportunity to participate in the Neirab Rehabilitation Project, which was taking place in the north of the country, outside Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city. One of the project assistants had become ill and had taken a leave of absence, so the project manager was looking for some extra help. The director of UNRWA in Syria at the time was very receptive to the idea of having an anthropologist participate in one of the agency’s projects.⁸ UNRWA was in the midst of reassessing its relationship with Palestinian refugees, and the director felt that an anthropologist’s skills would be useful to this effort. For this reason, I spent a large part of 2005 in Aleppo and its surroundings working as a Neirab Rehabilitation Project volunteer.

While working on the project, I was not allowed by Syrian authorities to live in either Ein el Tal or Neirab, so I commuted from Aleppo. Palestinian refugee camps are generally under heavy scrutiny by Syrian authorities, and foreigners are usually discouraged from visiting or spending time in them unless in an official capacity.⁹ It was not unusual for foreign researchers to live in Yarmouk, which was harder for Syrian authorities to police given its level of integration into Damascus. However, it would have been almost impossible for a foreign anthropologist to settle in or even have regular access to a smaller and more isolated camp like Ein el Tal or Neirab. Through my relationship with UNRWA, I had special permission to come and go, except for spending the night in Ein el Tal or Neirab or both depending on where the project needed me. Overall, I ended up spending most of my time in Ein el Tal, where the project office was located and where phase 1 of the project was still being implemented when I arrived.

With regard to the limitations I faced in conducting research in Syria (or the lack thereof), perhaps a few words need to be said about my own identity and positionality in relation to my object of study: I am the daughter of a Black Togolese father and a White American mother and I was raised in Togo. Most people in Syria, whether Syrian or Palestinian, did not immediately identify me as someone from the West. They usually guessed that I was East or North African or South Asian. I found out over the course of my fieldwork that I could sometimes “pass” for Palestinian. When I went shopping in Aleppo’s commercial district with my friend Muna from Neirab, she introduced me to vendors and store owners as her “cousin,” fearing that they would raise their prices if they found out I was American. These merchants usually accepted my undercover identity until they started a conversation with me in Arabic, forcing me to reveal my accent.

It is hard to know the extent to which the identities I was associated with, coupled with my not being readily recognizable as Western or American, affected my fieldwork or my rapport with the Syrians and Palestinians I encountered. I usually introduced myself to people as an American, although anyone who got to know me very quickly knew my entire background. I purposefully chose to emphasize my American identity when meeting people for the first time because I felt that if I did not disclose this information, and these people found out later, they might become suspicious. My fieldwork coincided with a period during which the US government was particularly unpopular in Syria and American foreign policy was a sensitive issue. When I arrived in April 2004, the atmosphere was tense: about a year before, the United States had invaded Iraq, a deeply unpopular action with both Syrians and Palestinians. To make matters worse, the US government, which at the time was still confident in its invasion of Iraq, was hinting that Syria might be next. Additionally, a few weeks before my arrival, angry Palestinian protesters from Yarmouk had marched to the American embassy in Damascus, scaled the walls, and taken down the US flag in the aftermath of Israel’s assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, Hamas’s spiritual leader. After the protest, the embassy issued a security briefing urging Americans in Syria to avoid Palestinian areas. As a result of the prevailing atmosphere, I was forbidden–not by Syrian authorities but by the Fulbright office in Damascus–from living in Yarmouk.¹⁰ The head of the Fulbright office at the time considered the area too dangerous for me as an American researcher.

I decided it was preferable for people to find out my American identity sooner rather than later, and overall I did not find this disclosure to be a significant hindrance. I made one exception, however, and that was with cabdrivers, to whom I introduced myself as being from Africa (min afrīqia). I had noticed that when I identified myself as an American to Syrian cabbies, most of whom are rumored to be government informants, I was inevitably bombarded with questions during the entire trip. When I identified as an African, I stirred no curiosity and could enjoy a peaceful ride. I did once elicit the pity of a cabdriver who refused to let me pay my fare once he found out I was from Africa.

While working as an UNRWA volunteer on the Neirab Rehabilitation Project from the spring of 2005 to the spring of 2006, I assisted as an Arabic-to-English translator during informal meetings with Palestinian refugees in Ein el Tal and Neirab, and served as a note taker during UNRWA-organized community meetings and focus group discussions (these involved groups of Palestinian men, women, boys, and girls). In the fall of 2005, I participated in an UNRWA-sponsored study of living conditions in Neirab’s barracks which consisted of a questionnaire and formal interviews with twenty-four families. Aside from the participant observation I engaged in through my UNRWA activities in the Damascus and Aleppo areas, I conducted about thirty formal interviews with Palestinians of varying ages, occupations, and genders living in Ein el Tal, Neirab, and Yarmouk.¹¹ I also conducted about a dozen formal interviews with UNRWA staff (both foreign and Palestinian) directly involved in the Neirab Rehabilitation Project and interviewed the project’s two main Syrian government representatives (who were themselves Palestinian refugees). I carried out brief follow-up research in the summer of 2009 and the fall of 2010 in Ein el Tal and Neirab. In 2015, as part of an effort to document what had happened to Ein el Tal, Neirab, and Yarmouk and their inhabitants as a result of the war in Syria, I carried out additional research in several Middle Eastern countries and in Europe. In the spring of 2015, I spent one month interviewing UNRWA employees at the agency’s headquarters in Amman, Jordan as well as Palestinians from Ein el Tal, Neirab, and Yarmouk living in Lebanon, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.¹² Most of these had fled the war in Syria, and six of them were Palestinians I had known during my 2004–2006 fieldwork. In the summer of 2015, I spent a month interviewing Palestinians from Ein el Tal, Neirab, and Yarmouk who had fled to Europe and sought asylum in France and Sweden.¹³ Four of them were Palestinians I had known during my 2004–2006 fieldwork.

Like other anthropologists who have written about development, I was both an investigator and a participant in the Neirab Rehabilitation Project (Bornstein 2005; Li 2007; Mosse 2005). As David Mosse argues, it is almost impossible to sustain long-term participant observation in a development agency without making a practical contribution to its functioning (2005). However, he also states that “the impression that development agencies (donors, field agencies or others) always feel they have something to hide, or that confidentiality and proprietary claims over knowledge inevitably characterize the relationship between agencies and their contracted consultants or researchers [here citing Panayiotopoulos 2002] is wrong” (2005:12).

UNRWA employees were generally comfortable with having an anthropologist in their midst. With regard to my participation in the Neirab Rehabilitation Project, UNRWA’s director in Syria (at the time) was not just accommodating; he was excited about having an anthropologist on board. He was especially interested in my involvement because UNRWA was in the process of reforming its operations and part of this process was to critically evaluate the agency’s role in Palestinian refugee camps.

The “independent” team set up by UNRWA to lead the Neirab Rehabilitation Project was also receptive to my presence. Because of UNRWA’s insistence that the project be a participatory one in which the agency and community members would interact as partners, project leaders felt that an anthropologist’s perspective would be useful in making sure that local realities, opinions, and sentiments were taken into account in planning and implementation. A critical evaluation of the project had actually been incorporated into the project design, and consultants had been hired for this job. In such a context, I did not have to go undercover to try to assess the relationship between UNRWA and Palestinian refugees. I was one more person who could help the agency determine what it was doing right and what it was doing wrong in terms of its assistance to the refugees.

I realized over the course of my fieldwork that Palestinian refugees generally value the opportunity to tell their stories to foreigners as a way to balance out Western bias against them. Some Palestinians saw their relationship with UNRWA as a means through which they could meet and interact with foreigners and share their experiences with them in the hope that these experiences would reach a larger (usually Western) public. I therefore did not have much trouble meeting Palestinians in Neirab and Ein el Tal who were willing to talk. It also helped that, in addition to the handful of foreign volunteers assisting UNRWA, the agency had recruited local volunteers from the camps to help with the Neirab Rehabilitation Project. I was thus part of a larger group of volunteers, a majority of whom were Palestinian. The Palestinian volunteers, whom I got to know through my work with UNRWA, played a crucial role in my gaining acceptance and trust in Neirab and Ein el Tal.

It is impossible for me to completely separate my role as an anthropologist from my role as an UNRWA volunteer and participant in the Neirab Rehabilitation Project. I cannot pretend, as I write this analysis, to have been an outsider peering at the stage where development was supposed to be taking place and taking notes from a distance. “Development” was my primary field site and the focus of my participant observation as an anthropologist. Conducting participant observation at this site, as an anthropologist whose services were deemed valuable by UNRWA, allowed me to interact with the different actors who, in the name of improving the lives of Palestinians refugees, had converged on Neirab and Ein el Tal. It allowed me to investigate the logics and justifications behind the actions not only of the Palestinian refugees who were the target of development (see Fassin 2012) but also of UNRWA officials, Syrian government employees, and the project’s initial donors: the American, Canadian, and Swiss governments. I was able to meet and interact with representatives of these governments during their visits to the camps to evaluate progress. I was also able to attend UNRWA-organized meetings held in the camps that featured donor representatives.

This book explores the intersection of humanitarianism, development, and citizenship in the Palestinian refugee camp. It focuses on the shift from a relief-centered discourse to a development-centered discourse on the part of UNRWA and on the ways in which Palestinian refugees engaged with this shift in discourse. By drawing on examples from Ein el Tal, Neirab, and Yarmouk, I show that Palestinian refugee camps are not static spaces to be acted on; they are themselves productive of particular ideologies–ideologies not necessarily synchronic with the discourse of development being promoted by UNRWA and its underlying assumptions about citizenship.

Chapter 1 focuses on the relationship between Palestinian refugees and the Syrian government, a major participant in the Neirab Rehabilitation Project. Understanding Syro–Palestinian relations requires an examination of Syria’s Ottoman past, the European colonization of the Middle East, and the pan-Arabism that characterized the Middle East from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. I show how this larger historical context came to inform the rhetoric of Syrian government representatives, who were themselves Palestinians, to justify Syrian participation in the Neirab Rehabilitation Project and to galvanize refugee support for it.

In chapter 2, I examine UNRWA and the role it has played over the past six decades in Palestinian refugee communities in Middle Eastern host countries. I analyze the contradictions and tensions that characterize UNRWA’s overall relationship with Palestinian refugees living in camps which stem from the fact that UNRWA is a humanitarian organization that has become the primary means of addressing an essentially political problem. I show that the key to understanding the ambivalent relationship between UNRWA and the refugees is recognizing that the agency is not monolithic or neatly bounded. It is a hybrid resulting from the overlap of the Western-dominated political order that oversaw its creation and the very Palestinian refugees it was created to assist.

In chapter 3, I analyze conflicting interpretations of the Neirab Rehabilitation Project. UNRWA framed development through a neoliberal narrative that focused on overcoming material hardship and emphasized self-reliance and individual empowerment through capacity building. Such a framing elided empowerment understood as the result of a collective political struggle focused on the right of return, which has traction in Palestinian refugee camps. While some refugees in Neirab and Ein el Tal resisted UNRWA’s neoliberal narrative, others embraced it, albeit as a process whose end point was political–that is, one that could actually facilitate return. According to this narrative, poverty is debilitating and needs to be overcome so that Palestinian refugees can focus more on their political goals. Another argument put forth by this narrative is that the acquisition of globally recognized and marketable skills will facilitate successful resettlement in the Palestinian homeland once return becomes a possibility.

Chapter 4 examines the significance of the built environment to Palestinian refugee identity. Virtually all of those involved in the Neirab Rehabilitation Project agreed that something had to be done about Neirab’s crumbling World War II–era barracks, which had initially served as shelter for allied troops and their horses. At the same time, a significant number of the camp’s inhabitants saw the barracks as a “witness” to their traumatic experience of forced displacement and dispossession and thus as an ally in seeking redress. I show that, while these contradictory feelings were never really resolved, what was ultimately important for the inhabitants of Neirab was not that the landscape of the camp remain unchanged but that the camp continue to exist as a space of difference that emphasizes its inhabitants’ specific Palestinian identity, history, and political claims.

In chapter 5, I focus on Yarmouk, which before the war in Syria had been touted by some as an example of successful refugee integration into a host country. Despite this integration, Yarmouk did not lose its identity as a Palestinian refugee camp. Using it as an example, I reflect on what was at stake in Neirab’s and Ein el Tal’s continued existence as camps despite the changes effected by development. I argue that the Palestinian refugee camp is not just a physical architectural space but a mental, affective, and embodied one as well.

In the conclusion, I focus on expressions of Palestinian refugee identity that transcend the tension between the politics of suffering and the politics of citizenship. These examples force us to rethink the role of the camp as a space of particular relevance to Palestinian refugee identity and rights as well as some of the dominant assumptions that underlie the concept of citizenship.

By the time Syria descended into full-fledged war in July 2012, the Neirab Rehabilitation Project was close to completion. In the epilogue, I discuss how the war has affected Palestinian refugees. I focus more specifically on the repercussions that it has had on the three camps that are the focus of this book: Ein el Tal, Neirab, and Yarmouk.