IMEMC & Agencies – Sunday, 20 August 2006, 03:36
friends,
for those of you that don’t know i’ve been in lebanon for the past three weeks, trying to provide a biased alternative to the bullshit that the corporate media puts out, help as much as possible with grassroots relief projects and sample the air around the middle east for my gig at berkeley.
sorry that i have been out of touch while i’ve been here. now the war is over supposedly and things appear normal again. how weird. Beirut is once again crowded with yuppies. they had fled to their gated communities in the mountains with the start of the war. far away from the bombs and destruction, with unlimited supply of food for their bellies and pets, water for their throats and their swimming pools. as old rusty cars and packed busses with mattresses on top were going back south after the ceasefire, ferraris and SUVs were making their way back down the mountain towards beirut.
beirut during the war was punctured daily by missile strikes deep into the southern suburbs. now this area, Dahye, is transformed to a city of rubble with people walking amongst massive heaps of what once was. it is impossible to describe the sound of a missile hitting concrete. the explosion reverberates through the air fading out with the screams of the lives it has taken. you jump with the first one, then you wait for the others since they always come in sets of 2,3,4 or 5. comrade and partner-in-crime calamity had a close call when a missile hit 2 blocks away. i was on the beach! not sunbathing but walking through the oil slick that has polluted most of the lebanese coastline after isreal took out the main powerplant on july 14th.
i ran into robert fisk 15 minutes after that strike and he commented “This is the great thing about wars. I was sitting at a cafe and everybody ran out in panic without paying their bill! Isn’t it great they didn’t pay their bill? Hah! Me? I sat there and finished my tea and payed my bill and left.” ok robert, i don’t know what to say. i guess that’s what happens when you cover war zones for 20 years. you are able to function logically and not on panic, since the saying about airstrikes goes: “If you hear it, it wasn’t meant for you.”
We got hooked up with an amazingly generous and helpful man who had been schoolmates with our producer at WPFW (DC-Pacifica). He gave us contacts for his friends in the south (all of who would later refer to him as the kindest man they knew). a day before the ceasefire we travelled south to saida to visit the refugee centers where most of southern lebanon has fled to. the war appears as thousands of little children running through the corridors of schools. mothers with pain in their eyes and fingers. anxiety everywhere, most of the men were still south fighting israel on the ground. would they still be there when they returned? would their homes still be standing?
We travelled to a village named Habbush, near Nabatiye, with a family going back after the ceasefire, to see if their house was still standing. we wanted to write about the thin line between infinite relief and instantaneous doom, and that even with a ceasefire the anguish still persists. We witnessed the infinite relief and their house was still standing. Some of the families we would meet later were not so fortunate. We continued on southward to Tyre. As you get closer to the israeli border the destruction becomes more frequent and increases in intensity. the roads are bombed out, gas stations charred. Crossing the litani river where israel had taken out the bridges meant waiting in a 10 lane line for hours underneath the 40 degree sun with dust and sand blowing through our hair and into our eyes. It was quite the sentiment to be on the road with thousands of families returning. Nasrallah posters were on the windows of cars and Hizbullah flags were flying high. We met a family who had a ten day old baby with them. He had been born during the war as a refugee in beirut. He was given the name Raad after the long range rockets that Hizbullah possesses.
The southern villages were hit mercilessly by Israel. People were going through the ruins trying to salvage whatever they could find. Their testimonies portrayed the horror they lived through underneath bombardment. Days without food or water, surviving out of mere luck in the last standing room of destroyed homes. Now they are under the threat of unexploded artillery and clusterbombs. here is an interview conducted with the UN mine cleaning team in Tyre:
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/08/18/18298458.php
Occasionally we catch the anglo corporate media on television. It is unbelievable what they say. That the real challenge is how hizbullah will be disarmed. This is utter bullshit. Hizbullah is stronger than ever in lebanon. even those who were for them being disarmed are now behind them after their successful victory over israel. Whether it is the NBC reporter sitting in his airconditioned SUV listening to his ipod amongst the thousands suffering form the sweltering heat while trying to get home, or the BBC in their resort hotel in bombed out Tyre or the indy journalists of self-righteous self-importance, once again i’ve realized that most journalists are scumbags.
i concentrated on getting information out to the turkish media, doing radio interviews, writing for a daily newspaper and website. calamity has been writing in english and we have occasionally been producing some things together. you can find most of the english language stuff here
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/08/12/18296509.php
For those of you who can read turkish here is my writing so far:
http://www.bianet.org/php/yazarlistex.php?yazar=Ali%20BEKTA%DE
Please read, listen, look, post, distribute, forward use whatever you want from these two links.
I have been collecting air samples from around lebanon and will collect more on my way out. can’t wait to look at them underneath a microscope to see what i got. I collected from a huge variety of environments from all over the middle east; citys, agricultural communities, beach towns, warzones etc. etc. i wonder how many of them actually have pollen.
love and see you soon,
ali