She infiltrated as an international employee after being refused entry as a journalist ... A Dutch writer's diary on the hell of Palestinians in Syria

“Are there children's clothes inside?” This was how the Syrian soldier surprised Amira, the Palestinian-Syrian, who had just left with her husband from one of the homes of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, which is located on the outskirts of the Syrian capital (Damascus).

The soldier did not know that the woman he asked was the owner of the house who left, and that she was inspecting her home for the first time, after the Syrian army regained control of the camp in 2018, after fierce battles that lasted for many months with ISIS.

"You are talking about my house .. This is not a store."

Amira responded angrily to the Syrian soldier, and almost slapped him, had it not been for the intervention of her husband, who took her aside for fear of the soldier's reaction.

"Go inside, and you might find something you like," the husband replied, surrendering to the soldier.

This is one of dozens of influential and brutal incidents that Dutch journalist Fernande Van Tates narrates in her huge book "4 Chapters in Damascus", which was recently published in Dutch, and records the diary of the year the journalist spent as an employee of the United Nations UNRWA (founded in 1949, specializing in To provide assistance to Palestinian refugees in the Middle East).

The Dutch journalist succeeded in entering Syria in 2018 as a UN employee, after her request to enter the country as a journalist was repeatedly denied, and the authorities in Syria did not notice that the new UNRWA employee is the same Dutch journalist, who has covered the armed conflict in Syria for years.

Van Tates worked during the Syrian war years mainly from Lebanon, and for a short period from Syria, before the authorities there refused to renew her residency.

The Dutch journalist also accompanied some Syrian refugees on their asylum trips to Europe.

Palestinians of Syria in wartime

Van Tates was close by virtue of her work at UNRWA to the Palestinians in Syria, and she witnessed important historical incidents, such as the return of some Palestinian camp residents to their destroyed homes, and the demographic changes that occurred in their neighborhoods.

The book also recorded the great collapse in the situation of the Palestinians of Syria after reducing the financial aid that the Palestinians were receiving from the United Nations, before the United States stopped paying its share of that aid.

Dutch writer Fernande Van Tates (Al Jazeera)

In this regard, the author is interested in the organized theft that the Palestinian camps have been subjected to from mafias in the Syrian army, which have shared between them those areas, and considered them war spoils.

The Dutch journalist visited the Yarmouk camp shortly after its liberation, as part of her work in UNRWA, and learned about the extent of the destruction in the camp due to the war, as well as the theft of buildings that did not reach them.

The book "4 Chapters from Damascus" describes the Yarmouk camp after its liberation as a center for organized crime. There are hundreds of unknown men and women who used to cover their faces in black, roaming the camp in search of anything that could be stolen.

Amira, who also works for UNRWA, told the Dutch writer that her first visit to her home in the camp revealed the theft of electrical appliances, and on the second visit, furniture, pictures and special items disappeared, and on subsequent visits, windows, doors and even electrical wires were taken off and stolen, and this It was the case with most of the homes in the Palestinian camp.

The journalist devotes a chapter to the dangerous developments related to the ownership of Syrian Palestinian homes in Syria, as in recent years the Syrian government issued a series of laws aimed at changing the demographic structure of the neighborhoods in which the Palestinians lived.

It is true that these laws recognize Palestinian ownership of their property before the war.

But it requires them, for example, to submit title papers within a few periods of time.

Otherwise, they lose their ownership, and this is impossible for most of them, due to the migration of a large part of them out of Syria or their move in Syria itself, and the loss and damage of many documents in the war.

This led to many of them losing their right to claim their properties, and transferring the rights of that property to the Syrian state, which converted many of them into luxury apartments for the wealthy in the war.

The author does not seem optimistic about the role of humanitarian organizations, as she believes that the Syrian government has drawn up the policies of these institutions through several means, including implicit threats to stop their activities, for example, or not to grant their foreign employees permanent residency in Syria, and that the Syrian government thus benefited from the international aid that it obtained Syria in the war years.

The book also calls on European governments to wait and not send any Syrian refugees to his country, as the situation in Syria is still very dangerous for Syrians.

Diary of 4 chapters in Syria

The journalist revealed to Al-Jazeera Net that she was recording her diary in Syria during the time she spent there, and that she wrote her book after returning to the Netherlands very quickly.

Because she wanted to write about Syria and the experiences are still fresh in her head, and she did an extensive search in order to put the experiences that she went through in the right context.

She explains her relationship with the war in Syria, saying, "I have been following the conflict in Syria since 2011, at the beginning from Lebanon as a correspondent in the Middle East for several Western newspapers including The Independent, and I still keep notes on the articles I was writing at that time; But the interest in the book will be on the period I spent in Damascus from 2018 to 2019.

The book was greatly concerned with Palestinian refugees in Syria, and the complexity of the situation they lived in compared to the Syrians, and Van Tates considers that the situation of Palestinian refugees in Syria was better than their peers in neighboring Arab countries.

However, their condition became more difficult than the Syrians after the beginning of the conflict there.

The author summarizes the immigration status of Palestinians in Syria accordingly, "More than 60% of the Palestinians were forced to reside in another place at least once due to the conflict, and more than 120 thousand Palestinians immigrated from the country of 550 thousand who lived in Syria before the crisis."

The author considers that the problems of Palestinian home ownership will be one of the major dilemmas in the future, as the Palestinian in Syria has the right to own only one apartment.

This led to informal agreements about ownership, such as if the name of the Syrian neighbor or friend was in the contract of ownership of an apartment owned by a Palestinian, for example, and because the Yarmouk camp, where most of the Palestinians live, was completely destroyed.

This will cause later ownership problems.

Satan's Dilemma

Regarding the complexity of the work of international humanitarian organizations in Syria, the author cautions that the provision of humanitarian aid in Syria cannot take place without cooperation with the Assad regime, "for example, to transport certain goods for humanitarian organizations that must deal with the elite in the Syrian regime. Likewise all phone companies are." "In the hands of the president's friends, and by placing bureaucratic obstacles, the regime controls who and where aid can be distributed, and any humanitarian project can be undertaken."

Van Tates stresses that the international community must confront the Syrian government's interference with the work of international organizations.

But she admits that this is difficult, because the United Nations workers who object or face this are withdrawn their residency, then they cannot do anything else and they have to leave.

As for whether the Dutch journalist plans to continue covering the Syrian issue, she reveals that she is still following the situation in Syria.

Because the fate of a person there is something very close to her heart, "Even if I will not get a visa for Syria again, I have friends that I hope to meet again in the future. Most likely the meeting will be in neighboring countries such as Lebanon and Jordan."

Away from Lebanon, where she has lived for years, the Dutch journalist today writes from the Netherlands about Syrians' issues in Europe, and follows the trials of Assad's followers there.

She says, "I was last week in the German city of Koblenz, where a member of the Syrian intelligence was sentenced to a prison sentence of 4 and a half years for his participation in crimes against humanity. I hope that similar cases will take place in other European countries."