Infrastructure and the Vulnerability of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon: The Story of Shatila Camp’s “Electricity Martyrs”

[This article is drawn from a paper presented by the author at the Vulnerability, Infrastructure, and Displacement Symposium held at University College London on 12-13 June 2019, as part of the panel on “Networks and Circulations: Waste, Water, and Power.” Click here, here, and here for other articles drawn from the same panel.]

Lebanon’s electricity provision is unreliable. This is despite the fact that significant investments in electricity have been ongoing since the civil war ended in 1991—a conflict which debilitated the country’s infrastructure. As such, scheduled power outages and frequent electricity cuts have become the norm.[1] The country’s residents do not suffer these outages equally—Beirut’s residents receive twenty-one hours of electricity compared to the twelve to sixteen hours a day that inhabitants outside the capital receive. The weakness of Lebanon’s power supply is also evident in the inability of the utility company, Électricité du Liban (EDL), to redeem payments from its customers. Furthermore, its dispersed legal agency results in inaction to address theft or achieve reform. As a result, informal electricity provision is prevalent across the country. Private providers offer costly monthly subscriptions, and mostly use diesel-based generators.[2] Co-owned or household-owned means of electricity generation are more common in higher-income apartment blocks and gated residences.[3]

The unreliability of electricity provision underscores the vulnerability of Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon’s overcrowded camps.[4] Planners did not design these camps for long-term settlement, nor with sufficient consideration for residential needs. Living conditions, as such, were precarious from the very beginning. The camps were entangled in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1991), further complicating their existence within the country’s political landscape.[5] Until today, the government has resisted any effort to address these issues, under the premise that any form of infrastructural investment could translate into Palestinians’ naturalisation.[6] This has exacerbated the situation for those living in the camps, insofar as basic services are concerned.

Understanding the vulnerabilities of Palestinian refugees in relation to electricity requires a better understanding of how electricity provision takes shape both inside and outside the camp. Across the country, one can easily observe the chaotic spread of wires that criss-cross the skylines of urban neighbourhoods, intermingling with telephone, internet, and cable television connections. The overcrowded Palestinian refugee camps contain an excessive number of hanging wires—suspended far lower than in other parts of the country. These dangling wires often become tangled, making their maintenance increasingly difficult.

In this paper, I highlight the story of the electricity martyrs in the Palestinian camps. As part of a larger film-making/research endeavour to understand electricity services through the lens of the conflicts in Lebanon,[7] I explore the experience of Palestinians with electricity. My interlocutor in Shatila camp was Hamid,[8] a young man in his early twenties. Hamid is part of an initiative led by the camp’s popular committee (from here on the “Group”), composed of young men with the responsibility of maintaining the electricity network in the camp, and who are often on-call to respond to problems that arise. Like many in the Group, Hamid has no formal training in electrical engineering, but shows us how the national grid connection to the camp works, how the Group constantly  clears out and organizes wires in different neighbourhoods, and how the wires mangle again when people reconnect them and bring in new connections themselves.

Banners of various political parties, and pictures of martyrs and leaders, decorate the alleys of Shatila. Among those, a picture confounds us: a young Palestinian boy, distinct from the mostly older martyrs. It is a picture of Karim, an energetic boy, and a volunteer in the Group, who responded to a call about a wire dangling on the ground one November morning. Heavy rain had strewn the ground with water puddles, and as pedestrians walked by, the exposed wires gave them electric shocks. The wires killed Karim as he was fixing them, making him an “electricity martyr” in the service of his people.

Karim was not alone in meeting this fate, and I present the story of the electricity martyrs here as a material expression of the vulnerability of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. As Ramadan points out, the camps are a “permanent-temporary reality” for Palestinians, that grew into “permanent-temporary landscapes of exile.”[9] They have become spaces where informality dominates service provision, which has striking implications for their inhabitants’ quality of life. Without the citizenship required to access services from formal institutions,[10] refugees rely mostly on informal services and non-governmental organisations.[11] Academic literature has highlighted the comparability of camp dwelling to the slums of the urban poor across the globe, and the similarity by which access to electricity services and maintenance relies on informal structures,[12] namely “do-it-yourself mechanisms”[13], of which the electricity provision and the work of the Group in Shatila are examples of. 

To understand the flow of infrastructure services in the camps, this contribution adopts the concept of space as relational, where the space of the camp is a product of interrelations.[14] The concept of relational ontologies informs this thinking; [15] the notion of assemblage emphasizes the socio-materiality of services and infrastructures like electricity. Assemblages are “not simply a spatial category, output or resultant formation, but signify performance and events.”[16] We should not simply understand the Palestinian camps as spaces of exception,[17] devoid of law and order, but rather as the result of the interrelations and interactions within them, and the practices of individuals, households, and organisations.[18] Seen this way, processes of exclusion from public services, and practices of provision prevalent in the camp, reproduce precarity for displaced Palestinians in relation to electricity.

The organisation of Palestinian camps in Lebanon relies on a committee structure, as per the Cairo Agreement of 1969.[19] These are semi-formal structures that enjoy some level of legitimacy, and organize services for Palestinians in the camps. They serve as coordination points with different non-governmental organisations that provide services and aid. The camps exist beyond the sovereignty of the Lebanese state,[20] as does the provision of electricity in the country. We should understand the management of electricity in Lebanon as a form of hybrid sovereignty of the state over its infrastructures,[21] and the resulting informality of electricity provision across different junctions of everyday life[22] in this context. Whilst insights into urban informality can shed light on how these services flow into people’s homes,[23] questions remain as to how we account for the vulnerability of the displaced, and how inadequate infrastructures subject them to institutional violence.

Falling under the jurisdiction of the Mount Lebanon governorate, the EDL’s Mount Lebanon distribution network intermittently serves Shatila camp. The EDL sometimes provides maintenance, but the service does not extend beyond fixing the main lines. This leaves the popular committee to manage and maintain distribution to homes, while the role of the Group is to ensure homes are safely connected. Additionally, camp residents rely heavily on informal sources of electricity from private generators. However, whilst outside the camp such provision is subject to legal protections and control, inside the camp, vulnerabilities are compounded. Overcrowding and the enclosure of homes and buildings within the confined grounds of Shatila, as well as the inability (or unwillingness) of the EDL to organise connections, means that most of the wiring has become increasingly unsafe, hanging too close to the ground and always external to buildings. The semi-legality of many practices in the camp results in theft from the formal and informal electricity networks, leading to loose and exposed wiring. For that reason, the Group intervenes regularly to “clean up” the wires. However, resource limitations and internal political strife curtail their efforts.

By interrupting descriptions of electricity provision in the camps with the story of Karim in Shatila, I intend to render the former as a process and a continuing dynamic that shifts the landscape from that of hybridity and local control (the functional), to moments fraught with death and danger (the dysfunctional). Seen this way, infrastructure expands to constitute the supply and network, the wire connections and disconnections, the comings and goings of the Group, the authority of the committee, and electricity martyrdom. This lens underscores the vulnerability of the camp’s residents, and prevents us from dismissing these tragedies as isolated incidents. Instead, it makes us see them as co-constitutive of the vulnerabilities and violence that the condition of hybrid sovereignty entails. The notion of assemblage should also preclude us from isolating the camps from their surroundings, and instead consider the vulnerabilities inherent in the supply of electricity on a continuum with the precarity of everyday life in Lebanon. This also points to the politics of service provision in a country where the role of the state in infrastructure prevails in everyday politics.[24]

To conclude, understanding the spaces and services of the camp from an assemblage perspective expands the view of what gets enacted on electricity infrastructure, how, and by whom. Whilst conceptualisations of informality accurately describe what takes place with regards to the supply of electricity, they are not always helpful in explaining the vulnerabilities that these systems of provision produce. The hybridity of the electricity infrastructure in Lebanon, and the various socio-material interrelations that it constitutes inside and outside the camp, are important junctions that should be further understood in order to inform strategies for overcoming them, and to avoid further tragedies.