Al-Buss camp () – also transliterated Bass, Al-Bass, or El-Buss with the definite article spelled either al or el – is one of the twelve Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, located in the Southern Lebanese city of Tyre. It had been a refuge for survivors of the Armenian genocide from the 1930s until the 1950s, built in a swamp area which during ancient times had for at least one and a half millennia been a necropolis (see article here). In recent decades it has been "at the center of Tyre’s experience with precarity" and "a space that feels permanent yet unfinished, suspended in time."
Territory
Al-Buss is located in the north-eastern part of the Sour municipality. While Tyre as a whole is commonly known as Sour in Arabic, its urban area comprises parts of four municipalities: Sour, Ain Baal, Al-Aabbassiyah and Burj ash-Shamali. The two latter ones are close to Al-Buss. Burj ash-Shamali, about 2 km to the east of Al-Buss, also hosts a Palestinian refugee camp, while the gathering of Jal al-Baher to the north and the neighbourhood of Maashouq 1 km to the east are informal settlements for Palestinian refugees. To the south of Al-Buss camp – separated through a wall and the remaining water pools of the original marshland – is the vast archaeological site of Al-Buss, which is popular with tourists.
The camp covers a total area of approximately 1 square kilometer. At its northern side the camp borders the main roads at the entry to the Tyre peninsula and to its eastern side the north-south Beirut-Naqoura Sea Road. Hence, it is severely affected by heavy traffic jams at the crossroads, especially during peak hours at the Al-Buss roundabout. The camp has a number of entrances for pedestrians, but only one – on the south-eastern side – for vehicles. Entry and exit there is controlled at a checkpoint by the Lebanese Armed Forces. Foreign visitors have to present permits from Military Intelligence."although it is a labyrinth of tiny alleys crisscrossing each other haphazardly, it is much less crowded and daunting than some of the other camps across the country."
A 2017 census counted 687 buildings with 1,356 households in Al-Buss. Most of the buildings are concrete block shelters, considered to be of poor quality. While the building situation in the eastern part around the former Armenian camp is dense, the western part of the camp has developed in a more informal manner. The many businesses, especially mechanical workshops for cars, on the northern side along the main road integrate the outer fringe of the camp into the townscape. However,"Though very much a part of the city’s urban fabric, Al-Buss remains a peripheral space".And as Tyre like all of Southern Lebanon has been marginalised throughout modern history, Al-Buss camp is actually even"peripheral within the periphery".
History For the period before the 20th century, see Al-Bass (archaeological site).
French Mandate (1920–1943)
On the first of September 1920, the French colonial rulers proclaimed the new State of Greater Lebanon under the guardianship of the League of Nations represented by France. Tyre and the Jabal Amel were attached as the Southern part of the Mandate. The French High Commissioner in Syria and Lebanon became General Henri Gouraud.
Armenian refugee camp (1930s) In 1932, the French colonial authorities offered a piece of land of some 30,000 square meters in Al-Buss to the Jabal Amel Ulama Society of Shia clerics and feudal landlords to construct a school there. However, such plans were not realised due to internal divisions of the local power players and a few years later the French rulers attributed the swampy area to survivors of the Armenian Genocide, who had started arriving in Tyre already in the early 1920s, mostly by boat. A branch of the Armenian General Benevolent Union had been founded there in 1928.
It is unclear when exactly the camp for Armenian refugees was set up. According to some sources it was in 1935–36, when also another camp was built in Rashidieh on the coast, five kilometres south of Tyre city. However, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) states that Al-Buss camp was constructed in 1937, whereas the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN HABITAT) dates it to 1939.
During the following years – neither the exact dates are known nor the Christian denominations – an Armenian chapel and a church were constructed in Al-Buss camp. The defunct chapel is nowadays part of an UNRWA school building, while the church of Saint Paul belongs to the Maronite Catholic Archeparchy of Tyre and is still in service.
On 8 June 1941, a joint British-Free French Syria–Lebanon campaign liberated Tyre from the Nazi collaborators of Marshal Pétain's Vichy regime.
Lebanese independence (1943) Lebanon gained independence from French colonial rule on 22 November 1943. The Maronite political leader Émile Eddé – a former Prime Minister and President – reportedly suggested to the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann that a Christian Lebanon"should relinquish some portions of the no longer wanted territory, but to the Jewish state-in-the-making. It could have Tyre and Sidon and the 100,000 Muslims living there, but when he put the matter to Weizmann, even he balked at what he called a gift which bites
1948/9 Palestinian exodus
When the state of Israel was declared in May 1948, Tyre was immediately affected: with the Palestinian exodus – also known as the Nakba' – thousands of Palestinian refugees fled to the city, often by boat. Al-Buss was one of the first sites which was assigned to the Palestinian refugees as a transit camp. The majority of the first wave of Palestinians who arrived in Al-Buss were Palestinian Christians from Haifa and Akka. Most of them only found shelter in tents there.
Soon the camp was overcrowded and more camps were set up in other parts of the country. Initially, Armenians and Palestinians cohabited in the camp. In the course of the 1950s, the Armenian refugees from Al-Buss were resettled to the Anjar area, while Palestinians from the Acre area in Galilee moved into the camp. Many of them were apparently agriculturalists. Before UNRWA opened its first school in Al-Buss, children received education under the roof of the church or chapel.
In 1957, large-scale excavations of the Roman-Byzantine necropolis in Al-Buss started under the leadership of Emir Maurice Chéhab (1904–1994), "the father of modern Lebanese archaeology" who for decades headed the Antiquities Service in Lebanon and was the curator of the National Museum of Beirut. The works stopped in 1967 and because of the political turmoil that followed Chehab could not take them up again. Publication of his research materials was never completed either. The whereabouts of most of the finds and the excavation documentation are unknown.
In 1965, residents of Al-Buss gained access to electricity.
After the Six-Day War of June 1967 another wave of displaced Palestinians sought refuge in South Lebanon. In the following year, Al-Buss camp had 3,911 registered inhabitants. As Tyre greatly expanded during the 1960s due to an increasing a rural-to-urban movement and many new buildings were constructed on the isthmus of the peninsula, Al-Buss became physically more integrated into the city. The solidarity of the Lebanese Tyrians with the Palestinians was especially demonstrated in January 1969 through a general strike to demand the repulsion of Israeli attacks on Palestinian targets in Beirut.
At the same time though, the arrival of civilian refugees went along with an increasingly strong presence of Palestinian Militants. Thus, clashes between Palestinians and Israel increased dramatically: On 12 May 1970, the IDF launched a number of attacks in South Lebanon, including Tyre. The Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon escalated further after the conflict of Black September 1970 between the Jordanian Armed Forces (JAF) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO leadership under Yasir Arafat relocated to Lebanon, where it essentially created a state within a state and recruited young fighters – known as fedayeen – in the refugee camps.
The 1973 October Yom Kippur War signalled even more Palestinian military operations from Southern Lebanese territory, including Tyre, which in turn increasingly sparked Israeli retaliation.
In the following year, the Iran-born Shiite cleric Sayed Musa Sadr who had become the Shia Imam of Tyre in 1959, founded Harakat al-Mahroumin ("Movement of the Deprived") and one year later – shortly before the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War – its de facto military wing: Afwaj al-Muqawama al-Lubnaniyya (Amal). Military training and weaponry for its fighters was initially provided by Arafat's PLO-faction Fatah, but Sadr increasingly distanced himself from them as the situation escalated into a civil war:
Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) In January 1975, a unit of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) attacked the Tyre barracks of the Lebanese Army. The assault was denounced by the PLO as "a premeditated and reckless act". However, two months later, a PLO commando of eight militants sailed from the coast of Tyre to Tel Aviv to mount the Savoy Hotel attack, during which eight civilian Hostages and three Israeli soldiers were killed as well as seven of the attackers. Israel retaliated by launching a string of attacks on Tyre "from land, sea and air" in August and September 1975.
Then, in 1976, local commanders of the PLO took over the municipal government of Tyre with support from their allies of the Lebanese Arab Army. They occupied the army barracks, set up roadblocks and started collecting customs at the port. However, the new rulers quickly lost support from the Lebanese-Tyrian population because of their "arbitrary and often brutal behavior".
By 1977, the UNRWA census put the population of El Buss camp at 4,643. As their situation deteriorated, emigration to Europe increased. At first, a group of graduates went to what was then West-Berlin, because entry via East-Berlin did not require travel visa. Many settled there or in West Germany:"They concentrated on working in the catering and the construction sectors. They still, however, maintained close connections with their country of departure by sending money to their families remaining in Lebanon. When they acquired German citizenship or valid residence permits they were able to visit their families in Lebanon. Afterwards, as their savings grew, they were able to facilitate the arrival of close relatives (e.g., brother, parent, sister). In many cases, their integration into German society was further enhanced by marriage with Germans."At the same time, most of the Christian population gradually moved out of the camp. Allegedly, many of them were granted Lebanese citizenship by the Maronite ruling class in a demographic attempt to compensate for the many Lebanese Christians who emigrated.
In 1977, three Lebanese fishermen in Tyre lost their lives in an Israeli attack. Palestinian militants retaliated with rocket fire on the Israeli town of Nahariya, leaving three civilians dead. Israel in turn retaliated by killing "over a hundred" mainly Lebanese Shiite civilians in the Southern Lebanese countryside. Some sources reported that these lethal events took place in July, whereas others dated them to November. According to the latter, the IDF also conducted heavy airstrikes as well as artillery and gunboat shelling on Tyre and surrounding villages, but especially on the Palestinian refugee camps in Rashidieh, Burj El Shimali and El Bass.
1978 South Lebanon conflict with Israel