Colonel with the Key

The U.N. truce of 1949 settled the Arab-Israeli fighting, but not the fate of the 880,000 Arab refugees who fled Palestine. They straggled into camps scattered all over the Middle East and settled down to a wretched life in crowded hovels, with bad food, no sanitation, little schooling for their children and increasingly less hope. Each year the U.N. has thrown an embarrassed money handout to the refugees. Last week the annual handout kicked up a brief but bitter fight.

Before the General Assembly's Special Political Committee, Arab delegates charged that "Zionist terrorism" had forced the refugees to flee their homes; the Israelis accused the Arab spokesman of being Nazi-minded. Then, everybody got down to talking figures. They settled finally on $23 million to sustain life in 880,000 people for one year--$5,000,000 more than last year, but $4,000,000 less than the Arabs asked.

Stopgap. The U.N.'s millions are a stopgap, not a solution. Four years of living on a dole has turned the Arab refugee camps into centers of Communism and extremist agitation. Even the unsavory Grand Mufti, who used to control the camps, has recently lost out to the more radical agitators. So long as the refugee camps exist, stability in the Middle East is impossible.

Last week there was one leader in the Arab world who seemed to know what to do and to be willing to do it. In a third-floor office in the Syrian general staff headquarters in Damascus, flanked by clanging phones and beset by sniffles and fatigue, Strongman Colonel Adib Shishekly held in his tough fists the key that might possibly unlock the refugee problem. He has just signed an agreement with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for a $30 million project to irrigate the potentially rich, unpopulated and undeveloped northern stretches of his country. On this reclaimed land he expects to settle every last one of the 80,000 refugees in Syria--each with work and housing.

Solution. The idea has to be sold skillfully. The refugees, or at least their leaders, regard any attempt to resettle them permanently in foreign lands as a betrayal of their dedication to Palestine. Yet the reality is that they cannot go home again: the Israelis have already given their land to Jews. Colonel Shishekly labeled his project simply "amelioration of the lot of refugees," and it was accepted. He impressed the need for caution on the U.N. Though the agreement is signed & sealed, U.N. headquarters in New York last week referred all inquiries to Damascus.

There Shishekly too was diplomatically vague about his refugee resettlement program, and preferred to talk about land reform and reclamation. Lighting a Pall Mall, he said: "We hope the democratic countries--first of which is the U.S.--will help us. With money we can raise the standards of our people and fight bad ideas which are coming from . . ." He paused, leaving the sentence incomplete. His secretary, a young, English-speaking lieutenant, smiled and said: "You know what country the colonel means."

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