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Groton Daily Independent
Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 190 ~ 29 of 40
UNRWA’s services are also vital in Lebanon, where Palestinians are prohibited from working in skilled professions and owning property.
Lebanon is the least-welcoming Arab country to Palestinian refugees, because it does not want Palestin- ians to settle and because it does not want the refugees to upset the country’s delicate sectarian balance. Camps in several cities are ringed by concrete barriers and Lebanese security forces use checkpoints to control who enters and leaves. A recent census found 175,000 Palestinian refugees or their descendants living in the country.
The civil war in Syria has made many Palestinians refugees twice over. Some 32,000 Palestinians who were living in Syria ed to Lebanon, according to UNRWA. In Syria, Palestinians enjoyed the right to own property and to work in all professions. They are not entitled to the same in Lebanon.
Balkees Hameed, 33, arrived in 2013 with her husband, two children and in-laws from Damascus, where their apartment was damaged by rocket re. The family depends on UNRWA assistance to rent a one- bedroom apartment in a ramshackle building in Bourj al-Barajneh, a Beirut camp. Her husband wipes tables at a restaurant outside the camp. Hameed, like all Palestinians, was painfully aware of the rumors coming out of Washington.
“We are already defeated and now they want to oppress us some more?” she asked.
While more than 5 million Syrian refugees worldwide are entitled to assistance from the U.N.’s general refugee relief agency, Palestinians are barred from it under the logic that UNRWA serves them. But UNRWA in Lebanon is chronically underfunded, and the wave of Palestinians arriving from Syria has strained its nances even further.
“What UNRWA provides is not even a quarter of what a Palestinian refugee needs,” said Ramy Mansour, 34, who ed to Lebanon from the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus in 2013. “Take everything and return us to our homes. We don’t want any assistance or anything, just return us to our country.”
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Associated Press writers Karin Laub in Amman and Philip Issa in Beirut contributed reporting.
King children criticize Trump, decry racism on MLK holiday By JONATHAN LANDRUM Jr., Associated Press
ATLANTA (AP) — Two of Martin Luther King Jr.’s children and the pastor of his historic Atlanta church marked the national King holiday Monday with sharp denunciations of President Donald Trump, focusing on disparaging remarks he is said to have made about African countries and Haitian immigrants. Angry pro-Haiti protesters and Trump supporters yelled at each other from opposite sides of a street near the president’s Florida resort.
At gatherings across the nation, activists, residents and teachers honored the late civil rights leader on what would have been his 89th birthday and ahead of the 50th anniversary of his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. But in the many speeches delivered from pulpits and podiums across the country, Trump’s name came up nearly as often as King’s, with speakers indicating that his turbulent presidency was undermining efforts to ease racial tensions in the U.S.
The president spent his rst Martin Luther King Jr. Day in of ce buffeted by claims that during a meeting with senators on immigration last week, he used a vulgarity to describe African countries and questioned the need to allow more Haitians into the U.S. He also is said to have asked why the country couldn’t have more immigrants from nations like Norway.
In Washington, King’s eldest son, Martin Luther King III, criticized Trump, saying, “When a president insists that our nation needs more citizens from white states like Norway, I don’t even think we need to spend any time even talking about what it says and what it is.”
He added, “We got to nd a way to work on this man’s heart.”
In Atlanta, King’s daughter, the Rev. Bernice King, told hundreds of people who packed the pews of the Ebenezer Baptist Church that they “cannot allow the nations of the world to embrace the words that come from our president as a re ection of the true spirit of America.”