‘Christians, Muslims, we're all together now because of the war . . . we're all Lebanese'

MARK MACKINNON
From Saturday's Globe and Mail

ZGHARTA, LEBANON — When Faiz Osman and his relatives fled their homes in south Lebanon — 18 people crammed into a bedraggled brown station wagon — they had no idea where their journey would take them. It was a desperate scramble just to escape their war-hit hometown, which had been made unlivable by constant Israeli attacks and growing food shortages.

Last night, after several days on the road, their exodus ended in this scenic Christian village in the mountains northwest of Beirut.

Like thousands of others, the Shia Muslim family was warmly welcomed by this tiny community, which threw open its schools and public buildings to the refugees driven north by ceaseless Israeli bombardment of their towns and villages. Mr. Osman and his many relatives spent last night in an elementary school, where they were given foam mattresses to sleep on, and food cooked in the kitchens of Zgharta's families.

“Christians, Muslims, we're all together now because of the war,” the 38-year-old painter said. “We're all Lebanese.”

In another part of the world, it would be the heartwarming tale Mr. Osman describes: Christians and Muslims uniting when their country is under attack. But in Lebanon, the truth is always more complicated than that.

While Shia refugees from the Hezbollah-controlled south were pouring into Zgharta, none went to the nearby village of Bcharré. The reason: Zgharta is dominated by supporters of Suleiman Franjieh, the head of a Christian faction that is pro-Syria and allied with Hezbollah. Bcharré is near the hometown of Samir Geagea, the head of a rival faction that is vehemently anti-Syria and blames Hezbollah for instigating the conflict with Israel.

It's happening across the country, refugees from the south are pouring into areas that are seen as under the control of pro-Syrian forces, such as Mr. Franjieh's faction and that of General Michel Aoun, another Christian leader. Meanwhile, areas where anti-Syrian political blocks hold sway — including Mr. Geagea's faction and the main Druze and Sunni groupings — have been almost entirely untouched by the conflict.

“The refugees are going to places where Hezbollah has allies, where they know they will get a warm reception,” said Farid Chedid, a Beirut-based political analyst. In anti-Syrian areas, an influx of Shia refugees would be “bad chemistry,” he said.

The danger, Mr. Chedid said, is that a rift that existed in Lebanon before the war will continue to deepen. Groups that are anti-Syrian blame Damascus for last year's murder of popular ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri, and had been calling for Hezbollah to disarm its militia even before Israel attacked. Pro-Syrian groupings accuse politicians like Mr. Geagea of acting as agents for Israel and the United States.

While the break is purely political for now, it has the potential to get far worse. Sectarian divisions were the cause of Lebanon's devastating 1975-1990 civil war, which also featured military intervention by Syria and invasion by Israel. The multi-sided conflict left 100,000 people dead.

The new divisions were evident in the different atmospheres on the streets of Zgharta and Bcharré yesterday. In Zgharta, trucks drove between refugee centres. flying the flags of both Hezbollah and Mr. Franjieh's al-Marada party. Hatred for Israel was regularly expressed in conversation.

“It's not a war versus Shiites, it's a war versus Lebanon,” said Alfred Gibaili, an affluent refugee who had put his family up in $150-a-night rooms at the Country Club in Ehden, another village seen as loyal to Mr. Franjieh. “Hezbollah is only a result. Israel is the cause of the conflict.”

In Bcharré, where youths sat in Internet cafes and planned nights out in swish bars, the conflict seemed a world away. Though the town's population was swelled by residents who had abandoned their apartments in Beirut and returned to their village homes, the war was now only a sound heard on the other side of the mountains, where Israeli bombs were falling yesterday on the Shiite-dominated town of Baalbek.

There's still anger here at what is seen as Israel's disproportionate reaction: More than 330 Lebanese, almost all of them civilians, have been killed in the 10-day-old conflict, while 500,000 have been driven from their homes.

But many in Bcharré agree that the root problem is Hezbollah, which has long stood outside the Lebanese mainstream, keeping a separate militia that it has refused to fold into the country's regular army.

The Israeli offensive was sparked by a July 12 cross-border raid that saw Hezbollah kidnap two Israeli soldiers and kill eight others.

Source:
Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060722.wmideast-hills0722/BNStory/Front/home

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Related: Israel Bombing Christian, Sunni Muslim Neighborhoods
http://www.shortnews.com/shownews.cfm?id=55844&CFID=18748794&CFTOKEN=77825117

2006 Israel Lebanon conflict - Action Alert

via www.saveleb.org

A protracted colonial war

With US support, Israel is hoping to isolate and topple Syria by holding sway over Lebanon

Tariq Ali
Thursday July 20, 2006
The Guardian

In his last interview - after the 1967 six-day war - the historian Isaac Deutscher, whose next-of-kin had died in the Nazi camps and whose surviving relations lived in Israel, said: "To justify or condone Israel's wars against the Arabs is to render Israel a very bad service indeed and harm its own long-term interest." Comparing Israel to Prussia, he issued a sombre warning: "The Germans have summed up their own experience in the bitter phrase 'Man kann sich totseigen!' 'You can triumph yourself to death'."

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In Israel's actions today we can detect many of the elements of hubris: an imperial arrogance, a distortion of reality, an awareness of its military superiority, the self-righteousness with which it wrecks the social infrastructure of weaker states, and a belief in its racial superiority. The loss of many civilian lives in Gaza and Lebanon matters less than the capture or death of a single Israeli soldier. In this, Israeli actions are validated by the US.

The offensive against Gaza is designed to destroy Hamas for daring to win an election. The "international community" stood by as Gaza suffered collective punishment. Dozens of innocents continue to die. This meant nothing to the G8 leaders. Nothing was done.

Israeli recklessness is always green-lighted by Washington. In this case, their interests coincide. They want to isolate and topple the Syrian regime by securing Lebanon as an Israeli-American protectorate on the Jordanian model. They argue this was the original design of the country. Contemporary Lebanon, it is true, still remains in large measure the artificial creation of French colonialism it was at the outset - a coastal band of Greater Syria sliced off from its hinterland by Paris to form a regional client dominated by a Maronite minority.

The country's confessional chequerboard has never allowed an accurate census, for fear of revealing that a substantial Muslim - today perhaps even a Shia - majority is denied due representation in the political system. Sectarian tensions, over-determined by the plight of refugees from Palestine, exploded into civil war in the 1970s, providing for the entry of Syrian troops, with tacit US approval, and their establishment there - ostensibly as a buffer between the warring factions, and deterrent to an Israeli takeover, on the cards with the invasions of 1978 and 1982 (when Hizbullah did not exist).

The killing of Rafik Hariri provoked vast demonstrations by the middle class, demanding the expulsion of the Syrians, while western organisations arrived to assist the progress of a Cedar Revolution. Backed by threats from Washington and Paris, the momentum was sufficient to force a Syrian withdrawal and produce a weak government in Beirut.

But Lebanon's factions remained spread-eagled. Hizbullah had not disarmed, and Syria has not fallen. Washington had taken a pawn, but the castle had still to be captured. I was in Beirut in May, when the Israeli army entered and killed two "terrorists" from a Palestinian splinter group. The latter responded with rockets. Israeli warplanes punished Hizbullah by dropping over 50 bombs on its villages and headquarters near the border. The latest Israeli offensive is designed to take the castle. Will it succeed? A protracted colonial war lies ahead, since Hizbullah, like Hamas, has mass support. It cannot be written off as a "terrorist" organisation. The Arab world sees its forces as freedom fighters resisting colonial occupation.

There are 9,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli gulags. That is why Israeli soldiers are captured. Prisoner exchanges have occurred as a result. To blame Syria and Iran for Israel's latest offensive is frivolous. Until the question of Palestine is resolved and Iraq's occupation ended, there will be no peace in the region. A "UN" force to deter Hizbullah, but not Israel, is a nonsensical notion.

tariq.ali3@btinternet.com

Source: The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,,1824536,00.html?gusrc=rss

Mission impossible

Past experience indicates that any UN force in south Lebanon will struggle to keep the peace, writes Ian Black

Thursday July 20, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

"If you think you understand Lebanon, you haven't been properly briefed." This wise but slightly despairing advice used to hang in the office of the spokesman for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon - known by its acronym Unifil - when it still played at least a symbolic role in policing the volatile border between Israel and its northern neighbour.

Timur Goksel, the affable Turk who occupied that post for 20 of Unifil's 28-year existence, has long left his office in Naqoura on the Mediterranean, and is now an academic at the American University of Beirut, where he is well placed to help journalists seeking to understand the latest deadly interaction between the two countries.

"They are barely able to take care of themselves," he said of the UN peacekeepers. "How can you expect them to do their work?"

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Unifil is still a ghostly presence along the border drawn by the French and British mandatory authorities in the 1920s. And as has happened before, it has again been caught up in violence it is always unable to prevent. A Ghanaian soldier was killed this week, and over the years it has lost some 250 personnel to hostile action or accidents. In the last bout of serious fighting in 1996, 106 Lebanese refugees were killed when Israeli artillery fire hit a container in a UN base where they were sheltering.

As the international community scrabbles for a way out of this crisis, unable so far even to agree on a ceasefire, discussions are already being held about a beefed-up international presence or "stabilisation force", as Kofi Annan put it. That will have to include some elements of the mission Unifil has always been charged with, but has never succeeded in carrying out. The lessons of the past suggest it will not be easy.

Unifil arrived in 1978 after a spectacular Palestinian attack inside Israel triggered Israel's "Operation Litani", which swept Palestine Liberation Organisation guerrillas away from its northern border. The blue-helmeted UN soldiers were targets from the start for Israeli monitoring and psychological warfare designed to undermine its effectiveness or ensure it never hindered Israeli operations.

The Irish UN troops, for example, were jokingly referred to as the "whisky army", and Israeli-backed Christian militiamen - known by the Unifil acronym LAUIs (Lebanese armed and uniformed by Israel) - harassed them mercilessly in their base at Camp Shamrock.

Unifil was tolerated by the Israelis but disliked for its good relations with PLO units in the area. After the 1982 invasion, when the PLO had gone but were replaced by a new Shia resistance, the UN forged friendly ties with them too. Mr Goksel helped visiting journalists meet bearded young men in the southern villages, their Kalashnikov rifles propped against the walls as they explained their determination to fight Israel's troops and intelligence agents.

The UN's white armoured vehicles became a familiar sight as they patrolled the low hills near the coast. But it is harder to operate in the more heavily wooded terrain to the east - classic guerrilla country that has seen countless clashes between the warring sides over the years.

After 1982, Unifil became little more than a helpless bystander. Its formal mission, as before, was to verify an Israeli withdrawal, restore international peace and security, and assist the government of Lebanon "in ensuring the return of its effective authority in the area". It never achieved any of those objectives, as it ruefully but honestly admits.

It was at this time, as Israel consolidated its border "security zone", that Iran began to openly support the resistance, much of it by the Lebanese Shia Amal movement. Gradually there were more and more black flags and posters of "martyrs" attesting to the growth of a more militant Shia movement, which Hizbullah eventually came to dominate.

Mired in what became known as the Lebanese "quagmire" it had itself created, Israel struggled on until 2000, when the Labour prime minister Ehud Barak decided to withdraw his forces unilaterally. However, Unifil has proved no more able to stop Hizbullah attacks since then. Israeli anger was fuelled when four of its soldiers were abducted in a previous incident and the UN did nothing.

If Unifil is to be of any use in helping stabilise a ceasefire it will need many more soldiers, and heavier weapons. Its current force of 2,000, with personnel from China, France, Ghana, India, Ireland, Italy and Poland, is woefully inadequate.

Since the current crisis began, Unifil has been unable to supply food and water to its own troops or deliver humanitarian aid to civilians because Israel will not guarantee their safe passage. In one incident, shrapnel from tank shells fired by the Israelis seriously wounded an Indian soldier. In another, Hizbullah launched rockets and the Israelis fired back as UN troops were escorting villagers to safety in Tyre.

With fighting still heavy, it is hard to imagine a new force being quickly assembled or deployed. John Bolton, the hawkish US ambassador to the UN, posed the right question: "You would have to ask what would make a new multilateral force different from or more effective than Unifil." The answer is that it would have to be far larger and more robust, mandated to allow the Lebanese government to truly deploy south to its own international border once Hizbullah was disarmed. However this dangerous crisis ends, that is not going to be a simple task.

Source: The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,,1825197,00.html?gusrc=rss

Srifa was a bustling hillside village. Then yesterday the Israeli jets came

Clancy Chassay outside Srifa
Thursday July 20, 2006
The Guardian


A Lebanese woman cries in front of a destroyed truck in southern Beirut. Photograph: Mohamed Messara/EPA

Aliyah, 30, lay on a life support machine in the Jabal Amal hospital in a coma. She was one of a handful of survivors who made it out of Srifa, a village in south-east Lebanon. The man treating her put her chances of survival at less than 20%. "She has severe injuries and has lost a lot of blood," he said.

Fatima Ali Ashma was more fortunate, but not much more. She lay on a hospital bed struggling to breathe.

The force of the blast which overturned the mini van she was fleeing in crushed her chest, damaging her lungs. She sustained severe injuries to her neck and arm.

Speaking slowly and with difficulty, she described what had happened to her. "In the morning we woke up to find that 10 people in the village had been killed. The authorities told us that if we could leave we should get out. So we got in the car and left. As we were leaving, they bombed the road in front of us." There were 10 people in the van with Fatima: all were wounded. "No ambulance could get through. Everyone who could has left Srifa, but the dead bodies are still in the houses."

The attack destroyed 15 houses, killed at least 17, and wounded at least 30. It happened on a day in which 63 people were killed in the bloodiest day of the Middle East conflict so far.

Srifa sits on a hillside overlooking a coastal plain that leads down to a sandy bay which ends with the white cliffs of Naqora and the border with Israel. It was a local beauty spot, where tourists came to see turtles lay their eggs. But it is also in the Hizbullah heartland from which rockets been fired into Israel.

Yesterday, plumes of smoke could be seen rising from its red-tiled rooftops, outlined on the horizon, as the Israelis flattened it. "There was a massacre in Srifa," its mayor, Afif Najdi, told Reuters.

At the hospital in Tyre, 10 miles from Srifa, Dr Ahmad Mrouwe hung up the phone and put his head in his hands. He had just heard that his colleague, Said, had been killed in one of many Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon that day.

Said had braved the dangerous journey to the village of Aitaroun on the Lebanon-Israeli border to rescue his wife, mother, and two children, who were trapped in the thick of the fighting between Israeli forces and Hizbullah militants. The family had made it all the way to Horsh - 10 minutes from the hospital - when an Israeli missile blew their car apart.

In the hospital waiting room sat Ayas Jouman, whose wife Ayran and two daughters, Sanine and Alice, aged six and two, had been killed the previous day. Ayas had been talking with his wife only 15 minutes earlier; she told him she had just bought him a new shirt.

Dr Mrouwe was doing his best to direct his beleaguered staff. He said the death toll from Srifa may be even higher, perhaps 21, all buried underneath the rubble of their homes.

Silah, a nearby village, had also been hit. "They have been calling us to help them. They have five persons killed, but we cannot move them because it is still under heavy shelling," said Dr Mrouwe. "They have eight wounded, and no one can reach there to help them. I think all the wounded there will die."

Despite the hospital's frantic atmosphere, Dr Mrouwe said the number of casualties arriving had dropped significantly. "Cars can't reach here: there's no way of leaving the southern areas."

The last person to arrive at the hospital had been wounded eight hours before - that was the amount of time it took to cover the journey from her village of Qana. Normally it would take 20 minutes. "She had to change cars many times to get through the destroyed roads," said Dr Mrouwe.

He said the hospital had about 15 days of medical supplies but only five days of food and water. "We are trying to bring supplies from Beirut, but it's impossible." As he spoke an ambulance screamed into the hospital. One after another, four bloodied bodies were rushed into operating theatres.

Twenty-two-year-old Jihad sat down and tried to come terms with what had just happened. "No pictures," he muttered through his tears. He had been fleeing his village, Bughrel, north of Tyre, when a bomb exploded 15 metres in front of the car in which he and his family were travelling, flipping the vehicle and sending shrapnel spinning through it. Seconds later. an Israeli F16 dropped a bomb onto the road behind him, sending another car hurtling into a nearby shopfront.

He had been told by the village authorities to try to get out, and, like so many others, had hoped he could make it to a safe place unhurt.

As he sat in the chair, his hands shaking, he watched as doctors across the hall operated on his 14-year-old sister. He put his head back and stared at the ceiling, tears running down his face.

Source: The Guardian Unlimited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1824751,00.html