Saturday, July 22, 2006

. . . Lebanon



BEIRUT, Lebanon - The deadliest day yet in the deepening two-front Middle East crisis claimed more than 70 lives Wednesday in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and northern Israel, with no immediate cease-fire in sight.
"The country has been torn to shreds," a desperate Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, said at a meeting he had called of foreign diplomats, including the U.S. ambassador.

"Is this the price we pay for aspiring to build our democratic institutions?" he said in a bitter and emotional speech. "Can the international community stand by while such callous retribution by the state of Israel is inflected on us?"

In the Lebanese capital, bombs and rockets fell throughout the day, including, Israeli military officials said, a wave of aircraft that dropped 23 tons of explosives on a suspected Hezbollah bunker in the south. The attack appeared to be part of the ongoing effort to kill Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.

In the first land combat in Lebanon during the current conflict, two Israeli soldiers were killed and nine wounded when they were set upon by Hezbollah guerrillas near Naqura. A tank that came to rescue them met with fierce shelling.

Small groups of Israeli commandos have been slipping in and out of southern Lebanon to assess damage and, presumably, locate targets. At nightfall, Israeli tanks and artillery on their side of the border stepped up their barrages, commanders said, for fear that Hezbollah fighters might mount an incursion into Israel.

Two loud explosions boomed over Beirut even as about a thousand U.S. citizens boarded a chartered cruise ship, the Orient Queen, for Cyprus in the first large stage of an evacuation that has left the Lebanese even gloomier about what might lie ahead.

The Lebanese government, weak and divided, is unable to deal with the crisis. Despite the hopes raised by the so-called Cedar Revolution, which ended nearly three decades of Syrian control, the government remains trapped in the sectarian straitjacket of a system that apportions political offices by religion. Siniora has not spoken directly to Nasrallah since the war broke out nine days ago, and dealings between the government and the Hezbollah chief are through the Shiite speaker of parliament, Nabil Berri, who is loyal to Syria.

At the United Nations, the Americans, who have signaled that they will give Israel more time to continue the bombardment of Lebanon to weaken Hezbollah's military power, opposed a French proposal for a Security Council resolution calling for a lasting cease-fire.

"It is very hard to understand from the people calling for a cease-fire how you have a cease-fire with a terrorist organization like Hezbollah," John R. Bolton, the U.S. ambassador, told reporters.

In Washington, U.S. officials said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice might travel to the Middle East on Sunday, dropping off a team of diplomats to hold talks before continuing to Asia on Thursday on a previously scheduled trip. But she has canceled stops in South Korea, Japan and China, and could return to the Middle East after Asia, the officials said. That schedule could give Israel additional time to shell Hezbollah before having to negotiate a cease-fire.

Before heading to the region, Rice will travel to New York to the United Nations to discuss with Secretary-General Kofi Annan what could happen once there is a cease-fire. The discussions will include Israeli demands for a 12-mile buffer zone in southern Lebanon. There is some talk about placing international troops in that zone and along the Syrian border to prevent the import of more rockets from Syria and Iran.

Sounding an alarm about humanitarian conditions in southern Lebanon - where Israeli bombs, rockets and shells have pounded villages, roads and bridges, much of the population has fled and supplies are running short - Louise Arbour, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said the fighting could amount to war crimes.

"The scale of the killings in the region, and their predictability, could engage the personal criminal responsibility of those involved, particularly those in a position of command and control," said Arbour, the former war crimes prosecutor at the World Court.

The violence Wednesday sprawled over both sides of the border, even killing two Israeli Arab brothers, ages 3 and 9, as they played outside in the Galilee town of Nazareth, by one of roughly 120 rockets Hezbollah launched into Israel.

Israeli weaponry rained down on Lebanon throughout the day and into the night, according to Lebanese authorities, killing 63 people, most of them said to be civilians and one known Hezbollah fighter, apparently in the Naqura firefight.

Southern Lebanon, the heartland of Shiite villages dominated by Hezbollah, was particularly hard hit.

In the village of Serifa, a neighborhood was wiped out - 15 houses flattened, 21 people killed and 30 wounded - in an airstrike. The town's mayor, Afif Najdi, called it "a massacre."

A convoy escaping the town was later bombed by warplanes, killing several people and injuring many others.

"I'm all alone and there's no one to save me," said Fatmeh Ashqar, 27 years old. She had severe neck wounds and burns, while a passenger riding with her, Alia Aladeen, had severe head injuries that left her in a coma.

"Maybe she will live, maybe she will not," said Dr. Abdullah Shihab at Jebel al Amel Hospital where at least 18 of the wounded were taken. "But she is ultimately in God's hands." Further north in Ghaziyeh, one person was killed and two were wounded when an Israeli missile struck a building housing a Hezbollah social institution and a neighboring home. And in the village of Salaa, an airstrike destroyed several houses. Six people were killed in an airstrike in the southern town of Nabitiyeh.

In the Bekaa region, another Shiite and Hezbollah stronghold, 11 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a four-story building in Nabi Sheet, near the ancient city of Baalbek.

The Israelis also bombed two bases of the pro-Syrian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, in Sultan Yaacub.

Homes in southern Lebanon received taped phone calls in classical Arabic, warning that they needed to evacuate because strikes would hit home by home. The recording ended by saying it came from the Israeli army.

The Israelis also used a radio station near the border to broadcast warnings into southern Lebanon for residents to leave.

The radio warning also stressed that any truck, including pickups traveling south of the Litani River would be suspected of transporting weapons or rockets and would therefore be a potential target.

While much of bombardment was directed at poor Shiite areas, the Israeli's new emphasis on trucks - they have hit several carrying medical and relief supplies and even cement in the past few days - brought the war home to one of Beirut's most wealthy Maronite Christian areas Wednesday morning.

Warplanes fired rockets into two dirty red trucks carrying water-drilling equipment - apparently mistaken for rocket tubes - parked in a vacant lot, sending the well-to-do neighbors scrambling to their balconies and then, in several cases, loading their cars and heading for the mountains.

An Israeli army spokesman, Capt. Jacob Dallal, told The Associated Press that Israel had hit "1,000 targets in the last eight days - 20 percent missile launching sites, control and command centers, missiles and so forth."

He refused to rule out a land invasion. "There is a possibility - all our options are open," Dallal said. "At the moment it's a very limited, specific incursion but all options remain open."

Brig. Gen. Alon Friedman, a senior army commander, told Israeli army radio: "It will take us time to destroy what is left."

Even as much of the attention was focused on Lebanon, fighting raged between Israelis and Palestinians in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, with 13 Palestinians killed in a series of Israeli raids.

Fierce fighting in the Mughazi refugee camp in central Gaza overnight and into Wednesday morning left at least seven Palestinians dead. By 9 a.m., the lobby at the Aqsa Hospital in nearby Deir al-Balah was jammed with cots holding as many as 60 wounded Palestinians, mostly militia members but some children. The wounds appeared to be mainly shrapnel from tank fire.

A reporter and and a cameraman for al-Jazeera television were slightly wounded covering the fighting and an ambulance driver who attempted to come to their aid was also wounded.

At least three other Palestinians - one a woman - were killed in other incidents.

In the West Bank city of Nablus, about 50 Israeli armored vehicles, including tanks and bulldozers demolished a Palestinian security compound and a half-dozen other Palestinian government buildings.

-- JAD MOUAWAD, The New York Times

Goodbye to Beirut



IN THE year AD 551, the magnificent, wealthy city of Berytus — headquarters of the Romans' East Mediterranean fleet — was struck by a massive earthquake. In its aftermath, the sea withdrew several miles and the survivors — ancestors of the present-day Lebanese — walked out on the sands to loot the long-sunken merchant ships revealed to them.

That was when a giant tsunami returned to swamp the city and kill them all. So savagely was the old Beirut damaged that the Emperor Justinian sent gold from Constantinople to every family left alive.

Some cities seem forever doomed. When the Crusaders arrived in Beirut on their way to Jerusalem in the 11th century, they slaughtered every man, woman and child in the city.

In World War I, Ottoman Beirut suffered a terrible famine — the Turkish army had commandeered all the grain and the Allied powers blockaded the coast. I still have some ancient postcards I bought here 30 years ago of stick-like children standing in an orphanage, naked and abandoned.

An American woman living in Beirut in 1916 described how she "passed women and children lying by the roadside with closed eyes and ghastly, pale faces. It was a common thing to find people searching the garbage heaps for orange peel, old bones or other refuse, and eating them greedily when found …"

How does this happen to Beirut? For 30 years, I've watched this place die and then rise from the grave and then die again, its apartment blocks pitted with so many bullets they look like Irish lace, its people massacring each other.

I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000 people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of houses.

Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost always ignore.

They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite.

But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis — in some of their cruellest attacks on this city and the surrounding countryside — tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water and electricity?

We say that they started this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties — more than 300 in all of Lebanon by last night — with Israel's 34 dead, as if the figures are the same.

And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel's "disproportionate" response to the capture of its soldiers by Hezbollah.

I walked through the deserted centre of Beirut yesterday and it reminded me more than ever of a film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful to last, a phoenix from the ashes of civil war whose plumage was so brightly coloured that it blinded its own people. This part of the city — once a Dresden of ruins — was rebuilt by Rafiq Hariri, the prime minister who was murdered scarcely a mile away on February 14 last year.

The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful precursor to the present war in which his legacy is being vandalised by the Israelis, still stands beside the Mediterranean, waiting for the last UN investigator to look for clues to the assassination — an investigator who has long ago abandoned this besieged city for the safety of Cyprus.

At the empty Etoile restaurant — best snails and cappuccino in Beirut, where Hariri once dined with French President Jacques Chirac — I sat on the pavement and watched the parliamentary guard still patrolling the facade of the French-built emporium that houses what is left of Lebanon's democracy. So many of these streets were built by Parisians under the French Mandate and they have been exquisitely restored, their mock-Arabian doorways bejewelled with marble Roman columns dug from the ancient Via Maxima a few metres away.

Hariri loved this place and, taking Chirac for a beer one day, he caught sight of me sitting at a table. "Ah Robert, come over here," he roared, turning to Chirac like a cat about to eat a canary. "I want to introduce you, Jacques, to the reporter who said I couldn't rebuild Beirut!"

And now it is being unbuilt. The Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport has been attacked three times by the Israelis, its shopping malls vibrating to the missiles that thunder into the runways and fuel depots. Hariri's transnational highway viaduct has been broken by Israeli bombers. Most of his motorway bridges have been destroyed. The Roman-style lighthouse has been smashed by a missile from an Apache helicopter. Only this small jewel of a restaurant in the centre of Beirut has been spared. So far.

It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and Shiyah that have been pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a million Shiite Muslims to schools and abandoned parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hezbollah, another of those "centres of world terror" the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands.

Here lived Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of God's leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man, and Sheikh Mohammed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of clerics, and many of Hezbollah's top military planners — including, no doubt, the men who planned over many months the capture of the two Israeli soldiers last Wednesday.

But did the tens of thousands of poor who live here deserve this act of mass punishment? For a country that boasts of its pinpoint accuracy — a doubtful notion in any case, but that's not the issue — what does this act of destruction tell us about Israel? Or about ourselves?

In a modern building in an undamaged part of Beirut, I come, quite by chance, across a well-known and prominent Hezbollah figure, open-neck white shirt, dark suit, clean shoes.

"We will go on if we have to for days or weeks or months or …" And he counts these awful statistics on the fingers of his left hand. "Believe me, we have bigger surprises still to come for the Israelis — much bigger, you will see. Then we will get our prisoners and it will take just a few small concessions."

I walk outside, feeling as if I have been beaten over the head. Over the wall opposite there is purple bougainvillea, white jasmine and a swamp of gardenias. The Lebanese love flowers, and Beirut is draped in trees and bushes that smell like paradise.

As for the inhabitants of the southern slums of Haret Hreik, I found hundreds of them yesterday, sitting under trees and lying on the parched grass beside an ancient fountain donated to Beirut by the Ottoman Sultan Abdelhamid. How empires fall.

Far away, across the Mediterranean, two American helicopters from the USS Iwo Jima could be seen, heading through the mist and smoke towards the US embassy bunker complex at Awkar to evacuate more citizens of the American Empire. There was not a word from that same empire to help the people lying in the park, to offer them food or medical aid.

And across them all has spread a dark grey smoke that works its way through the entire city, the fires of oil terminals and burning buildings turning into a cocktail of sulphurous air that moves below our doors and through our windows. I smell it when I wake in the morning. Half the people of Beirut are coughing in this filth, breathing their own destruction as they contemplate their dead.

The anger that any human soul should feel at such suffering and loss was expressed so well by Lebanon's greatest poet, the mystic Khalil Gibran, when he wrote of the half-million Lebanese who died in the 1916 famine, most of them residents of Beirut:

My people died of hunger, and he who

Did not perish from starvation was

Butchered with the sword …

They perished from hunger in a land

rich with milk and honey …

They died because the vipers and

sons of vipers spat out poison into

the space where the Holy Cedars and

the roses and the jasmine breathe

their fragrance.

And the sword continues to cut its way through Beirut. When part of an aircraft — perhaps the wing-tip of an F-16 hit by a missile, although the Israelis deny this — came streaking out of the sky over the eastern suburbs at the weekend, I raced to the scene to find a partly decapitated driver in his car and three Lebanese soldiers from the army's logistics unit. These are the tough, brave non-combat soldiers of Kfar Chima, who have been mending power and water lines these past six days to keep Beirut alive.

I knew one of them. "Hello Robert, be quick, because I think the Israelis will bomb again, but we'll show you everything we can." And they took me through the fires to show me what they could of the wreckage, standing around me to protect me.

A few hours later the Israelis did come back, as the men of the logistics unit were going to bed, and they bombed the barracks and killed 10 soldiers, including those three kind men who looked after me amid the fires of Kfar Chima.

And why? Be sure: the Israelis know what they are hitting. That's why they killed nine soldiers near Tripoli when they bombed the military radio antennas. But a logistics unit? Men whose sole job was to mend electricity lines?

And then it dawns on me. Beirut is to die. It is to be starved of electricity now that the power station in Jiyeh is on fire. No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive. So those poor men had to be liquidated.

Beirutis are tough people and are not easily moved. But at the end of last week, many of them were overcome by a photograph in their daily papers of a small girl, discarded like a broken flower in a field near the border village of Ter Harfa, her feet curled up, her hand resting on her torn blue pyjamas, her eyes — beneath long, soft hair — closed, turned away from the camera.

She had been another "terrorist" target of Israel and several people, myself among them, saw a frightening similarity between this picture and the photograph of a Polish girl lying dead in a field beside her weeping sister in 1939.

I go home and flick through my files, old pictures of the Israeli invasion of 1982. There are more photographs of dead children, of broken bridges. "Israelis Threaten to Storm Beirut", says one headline. "Israelis Retaliate". "Lebanon At War". "Beirut Under Siege". "Massacre at Sabra and Chatila".

Yes, how easily we forget these earlier slaughters. Up to 1700 Palestinians were butchered at Sabra and Shatila by Israel's Christian militia allies in September of 1982 while Israeli troops — as they later testified to Israel's own commission of inquiry — watched the killings. I was there. I stopped counting the corpses when I reached 100. Many of the women had been raped before being knifed or shot.

Yet when I was fleeing the bombing of Ghobeiri with my driver Abed last week, we swept right past the entrance of the camp, the very spot where I saw the first murdered Palestinians. And we did not think of them. We did not remember them. They were dead in Beirut and we were trying to stay alive in Beirut, as I have been trying to stay alive here for 30 years.

I am back on the coast when my mobile phone rings. It is an Israeli woman calling me from the United States, the author of a fine novel about the Palestinians.

"Robert, please take care," she says. "I am so, so sorry about what is being done to the Lebanese. It is unforgivable. I pray for the Lebanese people, and the Palestinians, and the Israelis." I thank her for her thoughtfulness and the graceful, generous way she condemned this slaughter.

Then, on my balcony — a glance to check the location of the Israeli gunboat far out in the sea smog — I find older clippings. This is from an English paper in 1840, when Beirut was an Ottoman metropolis: "Anarchy is now the order of the day, our properties and personal safety are endangered, no satisfaction can be obtained, and crimes are committed with impunity. Several Europeans have quitted their houses and suspended their affairs, in order to find protection in more peaceable countries."

On my dining room wall, I remember, there is a hand-painted lithograph of French troops arriving in Beirut in 1842 to protect the Maronite Christians from the Druze. They are camping in the Jardin des Pins, which will later become the site of the French embassy where, only a few hours ago, I saw French men and women registering for evacuation. And outside the window, I hear again the whisper of Israeli jets, hidden behind the smoke that now drifts 30 kilometres out to sea.

Fairuz, the living legend of Lebanese song, was to have performed at this year's Baalbek Festival, cancelled now like all the country's festivals. One of her most popular songs is dedicated to her native city:

Peace to Beirut with all my heart

And kisses — to the sea and clouds,

To the rock of a city that looks like an old sailor's face.

From the soul of her people she makes wine,

From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine.

So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?

Disgracefully, we evacuate our precious foreigners and just leave the Lebanese to their fate.

-- Robert Fisk

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