Translated for Mangal Media by Ahmad ElGhamarawi

The phenomenon of refugee camps did not end with the Palestinian struggle but expanded to include other Arab countries, most prominently Syria. With a scenario that might escalate every passing day, leading to different causes and conditions. The experience of displacement and migration is as familiar as conflict itself. It does not end with temporary accommodation in tents but surpasses that to an attempt at stability and a search for an alternate homeland because of hopelessness in a near return. This attempt is visible with the experimental/ad-hoc conversion of refugee camps to permanent residences. The latest example of this has been built by displaced Syrians and is called “New Ratyan”, the old name of their village that was taken over by Assad forces on February of 2016.

On the walls of New Ratyan’s school - built in proximity to Deir Hassan refugee camps in the northern Idlib countryside - are children’s drawings with their bright colours. Squares with numbers and letters from the alphabet, a haphazardly written verse from a poem. We do not find anything else written on the walls of its homes except the name “New Ratyan”. Ingrained in Syrians’ collective memory of Palestinian camps are statements stressing Palestine’s pan-Arab identity, the right of return, and an occasional drawing of Hanzala. However, such graffiti has not yet popped up on new Ratyan’s walls, the residents might paint their walls in a later stage for the new village.

Not far away from “old Ratyan”, on a hilltop overlooking the road leading to it, the Handarat Palestinian refugee camp was built back in the fifties. “It was not tents in the beginning,” says Abu Mohamed, a camp resident who witnessed the Nakba 1948. The relation between camps, “mukhaymat”[1], and tents -perhaps originated from the very first tent pitched by displaced Palestinians in Ayn al-Ma` close to Nablus. The link between actual physical tents and the term mukhaymat is long gone since Palestinian camps were built-up and developed further. These camps later spread over other countries of refuge: Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. More than fifty-eight camps harboured the Palestinian diaspora, and the name mukhaymat became synonymous with the forced displacement operations that happened later on. The concept Palestinian Mukhayamat then gave birth to many other camps, for different Arab nationalities and for numerous and various reasons. It has not ended with Syrian refugees, and it will continue to apply to other camps, for refugees abroad or for internally displaced people within Syria.

There is almost no difference between refugees and the internally displaced, except that internally displaced people are the ones who were made to leave their homes and are still living in different areas of their own country for security or military reasons. Nevertheless, the feeling that they will never return is growing among them and is forcing them to look for an “alternative nation”, if one could call it that. And that is how temporary tents morph into permanent residences, or how the search for a new place to live, all the while holding on to the nostalgia. Melancholy and the desire to return [one day].

Should Syrians start demanding the right to return while knowing that it is a far-fetched dream - according to the current status quo at least? Will the experience of building “New Ratyan” give birth to a new Ghouta, new Daraa, new Daraya, etc in northern Syria? All the while keeping the right to their old name, memory, customs, traditions, demography and even keys for their old homes.

The analogy between Palestinians and Syrians is legitimate, in spite of the differing conditions. The former, struggled for the acknowledgement of their right to return with international resolutions still see it as “a far-fetched” dream”. They have been trying for many years to instil this right in international forums and in the spirits of their children through documentation in writing, films, and even their general conversations. This is then met with an international consensus on the legitimacy of that right, solely on paper, and with no binding procedures worth mentioning. What is being gambled, is time. Either to forget this right to return or realize it; and in the context of this betting over time was the change from “temporary” to “permanent”, with the transformation of tents first to caravans, then to cement houses - with the help of humanitarian organizations. The UNRWA had a pioneering role in creating this reality, and in the case of Handarat camp: it rented out a “public commons” land and distributed to Palestinians to build their homes on it, which hastily turned into a big village, divided to neighborhoods named after their respective inhabitants’ original villages in Palestine - to publicly signify the identity of the inhabitants’ and to preserve the local dialect, customs, and traditions for each village.

We find a similar situation with Syrian camps; 232 camps are distributed over the Syrian north, and all along the borderline with Turkey, that differ in form, but are composed of neighboring tents for inhabitants from the same region, some of which have been turned into caravans, and most of which remained as tents. Then tent dwellers started improving their living conditions in tents, by building cement bases for their tents or walls to resist weather conditions, while others started buying neighbouring tents to expand. A process of “grinding” between residents started over very small geographical areas over the land lots allocated in it.

If severe weather conditions are the main reason displaced people did these renovations. Gradually, a feeling started taking over inhabitants for realistic reasons. The receding hope in ever “returning” pushed them to a new attempt at “settling” and to search for “alternative nations”. Even defending such choices: in turning temporary tents to cement building with clear boundaries, that might be for a long time, a replacement for their old keys that still “burn their pockets and memories”.

During the last meeting that happened in December between the residents of Tal-Rifaat, controlled now by the SDF, and the Turkish government. The only demand was to return back to their village. The residents of Tal-Rifaat and neighbouring villages regularly remind of this demand, which is practically the collective demand of displaced people in all different areas of Syria, regardless of differing conditions and locations. However, there are dreams that are close to happening and others that are postponed or hard to achieve, and that is what pushed the residents of Ratyan to build their new village.

Old Ratyan has given the highest number of martyrs among all the villages of Aleppo’s northern countryside, either because of the severe shelling that it was subjected to since the years of the revolution, or the ground invasion attempts that led to numerous civilian massacres by the Assad regime and its allied militias. Many recent reports confirm that the village is now occupied by the Iranian Republican Guard and the Lebanese Hizballah, or at least they maintain a heavy presence in the village since February 2016. Ratyan is situated on the road between Aleppo city and the Shia villages of Nubl and Zahra’. This geostrategic deadlock drove all residents of the village to flee in fear of detention or death, similar to the events of February 2015 when the regime and its allies attempted to take control of it: residents of Ratyan were subjected to extra-judicial executions and sniping without distinction between civilian or armed, child or woman. The village was then taken back by opposition groups.

Four thousand residents from Ratyan left their homes for almost three years, and headed to different areas controlled by the opposition, living in rented homes or taking refuge in camps. Considering the extreme economic conditions, the roughness of life in camps and deteriorating services in most of them, some of the residents found their resolve by discussing among each other, and with the help of the local village council and some “do-gooders”, as they said. The solution was to buy a land lot - around 2,000 square meters near the village of Deir-Hassan in Idlib’s northern countryside - to build their new village.

Hastily built cement homes, totalling around 50 now accommodate 80 families, approximately 500 residents. These houses ate up the savings of the families, along with resources and assistance from the Ratyan local council, making it a place “to realize the desire for reuniting the sons and daughters of the village”, according to Ahmed Tahan, the local council’s head. And regardless of the “dis-contrast between the two villages”, in terms of services and structure, it remains in “better conditions than camps they lived in before”, especially with the attempts of the local council cooperating with the residents to extend a sewage network to homes, building a village mosque, as well as the school in the centre.

Humanitarian organizations did not participate in building the village, it still requires a lot of services most pressing of which is “a clinic to serve the residents, expenses and care for the school to sustain its needs to operate”.

Two thousand square meters is exactly the same size as the [Palestinian] Yarmouk camp in Damascus during its birth, which morphed over time into multi-floor buildings housing more than 70 thousand and a mall. It is approximately the same size as the Handarat camp in Aleppo too, that later expanded to neighbouring lands to reach three times the size it started out. And in similar conditions of cooperation and affinity between dwellers, who worked collectively to build their first homes, the numbers of new Ratyan dwellers is increasing every day, there are now people who are waiting their turn to enter the village, waiting to secure necessary material costs. According to activist Mahmoud al-Qasim: “People have lost the hope of returning to their old village, we hear the same promises from the international community every day, with no implementation and no clear visions.” This is why it became necessary to “look for a place to settle elsewhere, here!” gesturing with his hand to where the new village is.

“Residents here experience the feeling of being content, psychological stability”, according to Mohamed Issa, a resident of the village that assisted in building most of its homes. He believes the reason for that is “preserving the social fabric among residents of the village”, it is more important for him to “keep my friends and neighbours around me, after years of [collective] exhaustion”. It was confirmed that everyone participated for free to build and equip homes, and it proves that what Issa says is a shared aspect among a large portion of Ratyan’s population. The material obstacle is the only reason preventing the remaining Ratyanites from moving to the new village from camps, as the cost for building one housing unit - two rooms - is the equivalent of 2,000 USD.

We cannot underestimate the value of such experiments. Notwithstanding positive and negative perspectives, if we are to compare the similarities of the reality imposed on Palestinian refugee camps and what is happening now in Syrian camps - in their experimentation with their current fate while betting on solutions handed down by foreign players/actors. The situation forces us to deeply contemplate the fear of a future in which one of the imposed solutions might be a change of demographic makeup of regions and dissociate it from the will of life and what it produces - new Ratyan. The search then is for solutions that might look temporary at first, but are permanent in their essence. This does not negate the necessity and persistence to work on rejecting solutions which involve demographic change, making the practice of handing down inherited house keys obsolete.

[1] Mukhaymat is the Arabic word used for refugee camps, even with the absence of actual tents. It is derived from the plural of tent, khayma, in Arabic.

Ratyan between the past and the future: Alternate City and The Right of Return

Mustafa Abu-Shams and Mohamed al-Asmar

Originally published by Al Jumhuriya on 4 December 2018

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