Time for camps

“If I want to go to prison I will go back to Bashar al-Assad. He is pretty good at it,” Abou Ibrahim jokes when asked about whether he would move to a refugee camp. The father of six fled Syria two years ago and has made the town of Saadnayel in Lebanon’s western Bekaa his temporary home. He rents the land on which his homemade wooden flat is built for $200 a month, which he pays for through sporadic manual work and, in bad months, selling his family’s United Nations food vouchers for cash. But he says he would rather continue to do so than move to a refugee camp, particularly if he were not allowed free movement in and out. Since the Syrian crisis began in early 2011, policy makers, politicians and UN representatives in Lebanon have tried to avoid talking about camps. The term conjures up imagery of