https://now.mmedia.me
January 19, 2013

No man’s land
By  Nadine Elali

Friday afternoon, residents of Lebanon’s Ain al-Helweh Palestinian refugee camp marched in a funeral procession for Syrian national Mohamad Melsi, who was estranged from his own country. People who knew very little of him but shared a common collective memory of fear, abuse and torture in Syria prepared his body to be buried. The Syrian refugee, who took his own life in despair over what has become of his living conditions, now rested in peace among many who have felt the same.

“Welcome to the camp of the homeless Palestinians” was not a mere welcoming sign for the 35-year-old who had fled the violence in his country but an insight into the detrimental effects homelessness was going to have on his life.

Melsi, a father of four girls all under the age of 13, worked in a textile factory at the Yarmuk Palestinian camp near Damascus but lived in a town nearby called Yalda. He and his family were forced to leave their home following fierce clashes between President Bashar al-Assad’s loyalists and the rebel Free Syrian Army.

After eight months of being displaced in Syria, they settled in the Yarmuk camp but had to yet again leave after clashes intensified. Melsi had no other choice but to leave the country.

“I left with my two youngest daughters first,” said 28-year-old Rima Bakari, Melsi’s widow. “I came to Ain al-Helweh because I have friends here, and as soon as I found a place where we can stay, Mohamad followed me with my older daughters.”

Melsi arrived to the refugee camp in Lebanon’s southern city of Sidon almost three weeks ago and immediately started looking for work to be able to provide for his family and cover their expenses, but it was all in despair.  After much effort, he finally found a job picking up garbage off the street.

“He was really upset when he heard that,” said Bakari. “He had worked really hard all his life. He was accomplished, he bought his own property, but then he lost it all. He had great pride.”

“He would leave the camp early morning and go as far as Beirut to find any job opportunities. But he would often come back home feeling distressed. ‘There were no opportunities for Syrians,’  he would say, and he was most often advised to return [to his home country].”

The day Melsi died, he had left the camp but returned hours later enraged. A Lebanese army soldier had “harassed and humiliated” him at the camp entrance for being Syrian, said Bakari.  

Um Rabih, a close family friend, told NOW she tried her best to calm him down but to no avail. Mohamad climbed to the second floor of the residence building, refusing to talk to anyone, said Um Rabih, who preferred to be mentioned by her nickname.

“He was used to smoking upstairs on the second floor because his daughters were suffering from respiratory elements due to the conditions they were living in,” said Um Rabih. “However, he would stay there for hours drifting into his own thoughts, which he did not share with anyone.”

“Mohamad was never mentally ill,” she also said. “Our families have been friends for years and not once did he talk of suicide no matter how harsh the circumstances were.  However, lately he sought solitude; and the night before he died, he slept alone in an abandoned room on the second floor away from everybody. ”

Melsi was experiencing the cruelest living conditions in his last days, using up his life savings and selling his computer to pay $165 he owed the landlord for rent. His youngest daughter, only eight months old, was ill and needed hospitalization, and he had just discovered that his home in Syria was completely demolished by the regime forces’ shelling. To make matters worse, his mother was on her deathbed.

“Before we found his body, my mother saw him climbing anxiously up and down the stairs looking for something,” said his widow. “But we didn’t know what and why. We later discovered he was looking for a rope [to hang himself].”

Mohamad Melsi committed suicide in Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp on Tuesday night. His eldest daughter, 13, found him hanging in an abandoned room on the second floor of the residence.

His death drew zero attention from international relief groups and organizations but only the sympathy of his Palestinian neighbors.

“Syrians here in the camp are not entitled to aid from UNRWA neither are we, Palestinian-Syrians, entitled to any aid from the UNHCR; not that either organization is doing anything,” said Um Rabih. “We are both stuck in no man’s land.”