Beirut
15 August, 2006
7:00 a.m.
This beautiful, quiet morning in Tyre fails to appropriately mourn the Lebanese lives that have been lost. The residual coolness of the night is too refreshing for the occasion, and the pilotless drones circling overhead sound more like large mosquitoes than spotters for the weapons of the fourth most powerful military force on earth.
The drones had plenty to observe yesterday. If the drive from Beirut is any indication, as many as 100,000 Lebanese may have tried to return to their homes in the south yesterday. It took us nine hours to travel what had been less than an hour away only five weeks earlier. As hawkers sold bottles of cold water to a captive market of passengers trapped in the traffic, residents of the coastal towns taunted us, “You will not return…” We laughed, which made the wait more bearable.
I soon tired of taking pictures of bombed-out bridges, overpasses and pedestrian walkovers. I had enough to show that Israel had been determined to cripple Lebanese life and livelihood.
The worst bottleneck was at the Litani, Lebanon’s only major river – three hours of waiting on multiple meandering paths through banana and orange groves converging on a single lane dirt embankment built over culverts barely big enough to allow the river’s flow during the dry season. It is the only way to cross without a long detour that itself faces the same problem farther upstream.
I decided not to wait in the car, and instead went down to the river to watch and take pictures. I got as far as a small undestroyed bridge over a tiny tributary of the river, and decided that it was as good a spot as any.
I was not mistaken. Young soldiers unfamiliar with their authority struggled to control frustrated drivers blocking traffic to gain a few precious feet of advantage. At one point an imam in black robes and turban emerged from his Mercedes to try to mediate a dispute, but even his authority made little difference. Most surreal was a young woman in a halter top walking her dog on a leash. Overlooking the chaos was a billboard for the Abou Dib Hotel, with an idyllic scene of resort luxury.
It was dark by the time we arrived in Tyre, where Ismail, a young Lebanese architect who was kind enough to take us in his car, suggested that we drop by the home of S, a dear friend of his. After some warm hospitality and conversation, partly to assess current conditions, we headed out again to the village of Siddiqine, which is the home of Maryam, a third member of our team. We had previously agreed to spend the night at her family home in the village.
The short drive into the low mountains took place in pitch blackness except for the headlights of the cars and the occasional generator-powered home. For all practical purposes, there was no electricity anywhere, which meant that the glow against the sky to the south could only have come from the bright lights of Israel, invisible in normal times.
The drive took us through Qana, site of the 1996 Israeli massacre of more than 100 civilians who had taken refuge in the UN compound, as well as the one less than two weeks ago that reportedly killed another 54. Soon we began to see destruction all around us within the short range of our headlights, and then the unmistakable stench of death permeated the air. At least two dead cows lay on the road, a small dehydrating calf next to one of them – a heartbreaking scene about which we could do nothing.
Unfortunately, Maryam’s house was only 200 meters away, down a road made impassable with rubble. If we decided to stay, we would have to walk it with a single flashlight (mine) among us. Maryam’s brother had negotiated the passage earlier in the day and determined that the house was relatively untouched. However, doing it at night was another matter, especially with the stench of the cows in our nostrils and earlier warnings of cluster bombs. We headed back to the house of S in Tyre, and accepted her hospitality for the night.
This morning we will head out to Siddiqine and some other villages to do a bit of factfinding so that we can report back to our group in Beirut what sort of civil resistance/solidarity project might be feasible to undertake. Who knows? Perhaps this will be the first day since my arrival without a single meeting to attend.
Paul Larudee
Dear Friends,
Below is a second update from Lebanon by Paul Larudee. Several of you have asked me if he is the 60 year old piano tuner who several months ago tried to come to Palestine to tune pianos (as well as to participate in certain other activities), but to whom the Israeli shabak (General Security Service) refused entry, despite his having been here four previous times, and not having had any run-ins with the GSS on those occasions. Yes, this is the same wonderful humane Paul. Now in Lebanon, he describes his experiences and the sights he sees there. He writes well. If what he depicts were fiction, I would say, “enjoy.” Unfortunately, it is not fiction.
I would only add that much of the devastation that Paul depicts seems to be an IOF trademark. It happened to Jenin in April 2002, and was occurring in Gaza in March 2003 when Rachel Corrie died trying to save a home from demolition, and is still occurring in Gaza till today.
Best, Dorothy
16 August, 2006
By the time we returned to Siddiqine yesterday morning, someone had cleared the dead cows and hopefully adopted the new calf barely standing the night before. Other than that, there is little in the way of good news.
Large areas of Siddiqine, Bint Jbeil and many other villages and towns are completely devastated. We spoke to one driver whose car was piled high with foam mattresses. He said he was from the local village but couldn’t figure out where his house had been. I filled my camera with frame after frame of destruction, but soon realized the futility of it all, and limited myself to shots that had a unique and often ironic twist to them, such as the suggestion box framed with destruction in a recently beautiful new school where our team member Maryam had taught. I asked her a few questions while the camera was running, but the references to details of life before the invasion brought tears to her eyes where there had only been surprise. Why hit the schools?
Huge craters cut many of the roads and pulverized some areas of the towns. At least half the houses were uninhabitable, but many did not exist at all. There was talk of a special type of bomb or artillery shell that made a strange crater that was deep but not wide. Were these “bunker busters?” I took some pictures of unexploded ordnance on the ground, including a huge shell with the number 500 on it and some Hebrew writing. I’m hoping Huwaida will be able to translate it. Thankfully, I found no signs of cluster bombs, but brought back some shrapnel that is as heavy as lead but not as soft. Is it depleted uranium? I hope to find out. That is associated with “bunker busters”, and it’s my understanding that while the shrapnel is not particularly dangerous to handle, it turns to dust and burns when it strikes hardened steel, creating a cancerous long term environmental disaster. I hope my worst fears are unfounded.
In the village of Aita al-Shaab we found a family sifting by hand through the remains of their house. They found what they were looking for: the bodies of the grandparents, several weeks old and not all in one piece. They were no longer human beings, but rather masses of putrid, rotting flesh falling off the bones, leaving an unmistakable stench that was only partially mitigated by some coverings that the family had placed to try to preserve a shred of dignity.
In her grief, the daughter of the elderly couple launched into an indictment of George Bush and the U.S. relationship with Israel, which I was fortunate enough to capture on film:
“Let the people of America see our children. Let all Americans know what Mr. Bush has done to us, that this is his democracy, his “New Middle East”. We don’t blame Israelis. We have always known what they are. I have a two-year-old baby who can’t stop saying, ‘They broke my house. I want my house.’ Can the American president answer this child? Have the American people no reaction to the gifts of Mr. Bush to the people of Lebanon? He cares more about a dog than for the killing of an entire nation. Does he want to kill the people of the Middle East to create a ‘land without people’? We are the Middle East, and without us there is none. Heaven without angels is not heaven. I do not blame the Israelis. I blame Bush, who proclaims democracy and humanity and freedom and dignity, to be imposed upon the entire world with steel and fire, while he professes to believe in God. That’s what I want to tell Mr. Bush. I’m looking for my Mom and Dad underneath these ruins. To me they are everything, and even a grain of the soil of this land is more honorable than Mr.Bush. He cannot rule our country even under fire. Even if we are dead, we will be free. His great technology is useless. Is this the way to use technology? Let him learn how to use technology for good. He cannot rule us this way. We are honored to give our blood for our country, even our souls and our houses. We live under the sun of freedom, while he [Bush] has no honor. We’ve been looking for my parents for 22 days, but of course this is of no interest to Mr. Bush. Let Americans know that the hunger that they suffer is so that Israel can have the weapons to destroy Arab countries. I hope that Americans learn the reality of what is going on. We will stay here. This is our land. We are not afraid of them and their weapons.”
As we continued to survey the region, I had expected to see some of the 30,000 Israeli soldiers that were supposedly deployed there. My experience in Palestine made me think that there would be checkpoints and controls everywhere and that I would find myself face to face with Israeli troops throughout the trip. I was therefore surprised to see only three soldiers atop a tank on a hill above the road during the entire day. Even when we drove right next to the border, there was no evidence of troops on either side. This is occupation? What controls are the multinational force going to take over?
Of course there was plenty of evidence that they had been there recently. They had painted graffiti, broken into some of the homes, put their cigarettes out on the furniture, eaten the food, smashed nearly everything that could be smashed and vandalized wedding pictures and pictures of the Virgin Mary. (Just to show you the misconceptions westerners hold about religious attitudes here, the house belonged to a Muslim man who simply liked to venerate this Christian icon of his fellow Lebanese.)
One of the most surreal parts of the trip was when we passed through the town of Ein Ebel. It was untouched, not a single bullet, shell or tank track. Not a crack in the road nor a wall overturned. It was as if the war had never happened here, and indeed in some ways it had not. This was the village of Christian allies of Israel who had served as proxy forces and torturers of their fellow citizens during Israel’s invasion from 1982 to 2000. Although there are no longer any direct confrontations between them and their Hezbollah neighbors, it pays not to stir things up. On the other hand, I ventured to the rest of our team (Ismail, who had used his car for the trip, Maryam, whose home is Siddiqine, Shirine, at whose place we had spent the night in Tyre and Aisha, an American filmmaker), that this might be the ideal place to buy gasoline; if any place might have a protected supply, this would be it.
We agreed and found the station. It was decided that as the oldest, I would do the negotiating, and that Ismail would be my “driver”. I got out of the car and asked if they had gas. They said they did and asked where I was from. I said I was American and they asked how I spoke such good Arabic. I said I was married to a Lebanese. From where? Rashmaya, in the northern Shouf mountains, from the El-Khoury family, related to the first (Christian) president of Lebanon and to the head of one of the important Christian clans of Lebanon.
Having thus shamelessly used my wife’s “royalty” and played upon the Lebanese sectarianism, I found all doors open to us. We filled with gas and one of their number guided us in his car along a special route that went near his house, where he invited us to return. Although we declined, it again confirmed that if we perceive a stranger as a friend, the causes of mistrust and hatred, of Christian and Muslim, Jew and Arab, “them” and “us” turn to dust. It seems so simple.
The blurring of borders occurred on our last stop, as well, in the village of Dhe’ira, on the way to the coast. The people of this village are part of a larger tribe, similar to Bedouin, whose community straddles the border with Israel. More than half live on the Israeli side, with families split down the middle. In many cases, the parents or grandparents live on one side of the border and the children on the other. However, no Lebanese are permitted to go to Israel and no Israeli citizens may come to Lebanon. There, in a bucolic setting of tobacco fields, a taxi driver, Bilal, invited us to his home after showing us some of the damage done by the Israeli invasion in his community. His own home had been untouched, and his hospitality was a welcome respite from the horrors we had witnessed during the day. Even the physical act of washing hands and face from the dust and the smells seemed like an act of purification. We thanked Bilal and made our way back through more destroyed villages to the coast and then north to Tyre.
Although the sun was almost setting in Tyre, Ismail was determined to make it back to Beirut. I was equally determined to send out yesterday’s report and download the pictures from my camera. We compromised. We found a Turkish journalist at the Tyre Rest House who helped me download my pictures and then we left. However the traffic jam was so great that the Lebanese soldiers advised us to turn back and try again in a couple of hours. That gave me the chance to send yesterday’s report and everyone else a chance to snooze on the beach while I toiled over a hot computer. I was seriously skeptical about reaching Beirut before morning, but Ismail’s optimism turned out to be justified. The Lebanese army had worked a few miracles with the road (though not the bridge over the Litani river), and we made it back in three hours.
I have already learned that some of our colleagues who took different routes had more direct and disturbing contacts with Israeli troops. We will meet late this afternoon to make some plans based on our factfinding and decide what actions we want to take. There is plenty of work left to do and we will have to find our role in doing it.
Paul Larudee
Deir Kifa, Lebanon
19 August, 2006
A few days make all the difference. The Lebanese army laid a temporary bridge across the Litany river, which cut our wait time to less than five minutes. The total time from Beirut to Tyre was less than a third of what it had been only three days earlier.
My companions were fellow ISM volunteer Alberto Cruz from ISM-Spain and Mohamad Safieddine, a 20-year-old agriculture student at the American University of Beirut, in whose car we were traveling. Mohamad is from the coastal city of al-Naqqoura, just north of the Israeli border, but it was his first time back since the start of the Israeli invasion of his homeland. In a somewhat strange role reversal, therefore, Alberto and I became his guides. We took him along the roads we had traveled in previous days, where he saw the devastation that I have described in previous reports.
There were, however, already several differences. First, the Lebanese army had started to deploy in some places, and a few UN troops were also in place. The ones that I asked said they were from Ghana, which means that they were part of the UNIFIL forces, probably trying to be an advance presence for the French-led forces due to arrive soon as part of the multinational peacekeepers recently authorized by UN resolution .
The task of cleaning and rebuilding had also clearly begun in earnest. Earthmoving equipment could be seen clearing the roads of the crushed remains of people’s lives, now mere landfill. Repair crews were already restringing cables and laying pipeline and conduits. Hezbollah had also had also put up trademark yellow banners to welcome returnees, journalists and visitors in English, Arabic and French. “Made in USA” captioned the worst areas of destruction, as did “This is your democracy, USA” and This is the new Middle East”. “The Great Lebanon has deseated [sic] the murders[sic].” Rice, they will not see your new mideast.” In Tyre, mass graves were being dug for the dead and almost every town and village along the way was having funerals.
Our group, a total of about twenty Lebanese and international volunteers, were all making their way that day to Deir Kifa to do grass roots relief work and solidarity with the hardest hit areas. Our destination was the spacious home of Mohammed Elamine, an old friend of mine from Saudi Arabia whose hospitality I had shared under completely different circumstances only six weeks earlier, just days before the invasion. He and his wife Lourdes were among the American citizens evacuated near the start of the bombing and shelling, and he was now staying with his youngest son Rami in Baltimore while another son, Bilal, a well-known journalist and co-founder of Left Turn Magazine, opened the house for us.
Mohamad, Alberto and I had left Beirut early in order to go to Maroun al-Ras, on the border with Israel before meeting the group at Deir Kifa. Alberto had been refused entry by Israeli soldiers a few days earlier, and the mayor of the town, whom he had interviewed, had expressed grave concern for the welfare of those still inside, mostly old people with whom the Israelis had allowed no communication. We wanted to see what we could do to help, and to report to the groups on the current status.
The good news was that the soldiers had left the day before. We spoke to Mustafa Faris, an 80-year-old resident who had survived alone on cracked wheat, onions and well water for 34 days. Had he spoken toe the soldiers? Had they supplied the townspeople with food and water, as they had told Alberto a few days ago? He had spoken with them, but they had supplied nothing. I asked in what language they had communicated. In Arabic, he replied. The soldiers were all Arabs, including Druze, Bedouins, Algerians, Yemenis and Moroccans. (Some of them may have come from Israel’s third-class non-Jewish Palestinian minorities, while others were probably from among the second-class Jews from Arab countries.)
Mustafa’s nephew, Nimr Faris, invited Alberto and me to come to his house while Mohamad went back to the car to get the few relief supplies that we had brought with us. A few weeks ago, Nimr and thirty other family members, including twenty children, had fled to Sidon after ten terrifying days in the unfinished lower level of their house under the bombs and shells, while being penned in by Israeli soldiers occupying the town. Only his elderly father, Diab, the brother of Mustafa, and his mother refused to leave. Tears poured and embraces lingered as the three of them were reunited, removing the anxious doubts about each other’s safety and welfare. In this family, at least, all members survived unscathed, a blessing compared the tragedies of some of their neighbors.
The total number of dead in the village was uncertain. Two were being buried that day, and at least three were suspected to be under the rubble of the homes. The smell of death was strongest near the entrance of the village, where the Israelis had bombed the cemetery. How long do corpses continue to reek after they are buried? Or was the smell from the surrounding destruction, with fresh fodder for maggots and bacteria? As I tucked my nose in my shirt, I wondered how Israeli soldiers could allow themselves to remain among the stench of their handiwork as a reminder of their actions. What does that do the mind?
As we left Maroun al-Ras, we took a route through many more villages, most of them with large swathes of destruction. The scale of it stretches the imagination, and especially the short time scale during which the destruction took place. It is hard to imagine that these were the lovely villages and towns through which I had passed less than two months ago.
One of the remarkable things about the resistance in south Lebanon was the degree to which Hezbollah preserved its communication system. Wireless systems would have been intercepted, so it appears to depend upon cables, probably with lots of redundant routes so as to survive ruptures and to cut off tapped connections. Indeed, some of the residents report seeing such work in years past, suspecting that some of their more influential neighbors had gotten special privileges. This might explain why Israel attacked the telephone and electrical systems so heavily. Wherever we went, the road was strewn with cables and electrical pylons had been topples. Bombs and artillery craters has ruptured the roads and the conduits beneath and beside them.
All for naught. Hezbollah appeared to have preserved its communication and coordination systems intact regardless of how much the Israelis threw at them. There were stories of entire mountaintops being raised on jacks so as to fire rockets from inside, then reclose before the Israelis hit back. The truth may be more prosaic, but there is no doubt that guerilla tactics included elaborate underground fortifications that permitted them to survive and continue fighting under the most persistent barrages. It brought to mind the massive concrete bunkers that I had seen littering the countryside in Yugoslavia many years ago. Marshall Tito’s fortifications were more visible in order to act as a deterrent for any forces foolish enough to consider trying to invade his country. The Israelis had clearly encountered a situation unlike any they had seen before.
When we finally arrived at Deir Kifa, we found that we were the first to arrive, although we had been on the road more than seven hours. Only the caretaker, Abu Yousef and Bilal Elamine were there, although others from Tyre were not long in joining us. We took the opportunity to relax, wash off the dust and smells of the day and refresh ourselves. It wasn’t until 9:00 in the evening that three other cars from Beirut arrived. A late evening meeting determined that some of us would do more factfinding at some villages while the rest would begin relief at the neighboring village of Silaa. We went to bed thankful that we would soon be working side by side with the people rebuilding their communities.
Paul Larudee