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Derry Anti War Coalition (link to website)

Colm Bryce's second letter from Beirut

Thursday 23rd November 2006

Hi folks,

Got back from Beirut on Monday night and wanted to bring you up to date with the rest of our trip.

Sunday morning started very early. There was an official tour organised from the conference to the South of Lebanon, but we arranged with Caoimhe Butterly to travel down with her and get as far south as we could. Lebanon is a small country, Beirut to the southern border is about 100 km. Most travel is by minibus and we met Caoimhe at the station, across from the Kuwaiti embassy on one of the main roads out of town.

Caoimhe had been staying in Chatila palestinian refugee camp, in South Beirut, with a family she knows well. We had hoped to visit with them, but time was too pressing. But it is worth saying just how terrible the conditions still are for the Palestinian refugees. The Lebanese government has never given them the right of citizenship, fearing that they might tip the sectarian balance of Lebanese politics, since many are muslim. So they are stateless, with no passport and cannot travel. They have no right to work in many areas of employment and cannot live anywhere except the camps, which are guarded by soldiers. They are forbidden from bringing cement or other building materials into the camps, so as to discourage them from extending their homes. The family Caoimhe stayed with lived in two rooms (a mother, disabled from a stroke, and five grown children) all of them well educated and highly involved in local community work. If they want to study they have to pay the fees for foreign students, which are prohibitive. The result is that the camps are massively overcrowded and are close to third world slums.

The Palestinians have been living in these conditions since 1948. Chatila and Sabra (the neighbouring camp) were the site of a terrible massacre by the Christian Falange militia, an organisation inspired by European fascism in the 1930's (the MP that was assassinated yesterday was a Falange member) in 1982, during the Israeli occupation. The Israeli military, led by Ariel Sharon, surrounded the camp, just after most of the PLO fighters had left Beirut under the terms of a ceasefire, and Sharon gave the go ahead for the Falange to enter the camps and murder hundreds of women, children and older men still there. And this was not the only massacre carried out by the Falange in those years. During the recent war, Falange members toured East Beirut in a cavalcade chanting 'The Zionists, the Christians and the Israeli army will finish Hezbollah'. But it is a measure of how much things have shifted in Lebanese society that, even in East Beirut they got beaten up for their trouble, and a rally they called at the end of the war drew only handfuls of people. But these are some of the roots of the divisions in Lebanese society, and the reasons the Palestinians continue to live in such pitiful conditions.

Hezbollah, who got the position of minister of labour in the recent government, as one of their first acts tried to lift the restrictions on the Palestinians right to work and their provision of free hospital care to the poor is an example of the only access they have to medical care.

Ibrahim Mousawi came down to see us off and say his goodbyes. But he had to hurry back, as Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader was due to make a speech that day, which everyone was waiting to hear as he was expected to announce mass demonstrations against the government. The speech was due to be broadcast at 10.00am. It was repeatedly delayed, eventually broadcast at 1.00pm, due to security concerns - the Israeli's would still love to kill him, and wouldn't hesitate to launch a raid on the building he was in if they knew where he was speaking, ceasefire or no ceasefire. His home and office in Dahiya were obliterated in the bombing. (Ibrahim told us later by phone that the speech had in fact been recorded the previous day in a mosque in Dahiya, which probably accounts for the even tighter than usual Hezbollah security we had to escort us when the Irish contingent left the main tour group on Saturday to tour about on our own).

We set off in a minibus around 9am, in blazing sun, out past the airport and along the coast. The first thing we noticed was that every single bridge and overpass on the main road to Sidon and Tyre had been bombed by the Israeli military. On many you could still see the huge holes, 15 or 20 feet across, made by the missiles and the twisted steel of the reinforced concrete.

Some have been repaired, but most still have to be negotiated by diversions and temporary crossings. The Israeli justification was that this would prevent the movement of the two Israeli soldiers who had been captured by Hezbollah. But, combined with the targetting of most petrol stations, it created a massive problem for the movement of people fleeing the bombing from South Lebanon and for those trying to get supplies through to the devastated areas. The Samidoun network, in the later stages of the war, made several attempts to break the blockade and get releif supplies through to the South, but their biggest problem was getting enough benzene to fuel the transport.

The main power station on the coast, just north of Sidon, had also been badly bombed, the massive oil storage tanks destroyed, and for weeks the oil leaked into the sea and covered the coastline. So much of the bombardment, and it was precision bombing, was of this vindictive nature. The further south we went, the more the effects of the bombing was inescapable. Some people we met, in the Christian area of Beirut, for example, where we stayed for the first two days, recalled the bombs and missiles passing overhead from the Israeli ships moored off the coast, but had liitle direct experience, apart from the arrival of refugees or Europeans and other westerners being evacuated from the port.

Down here, everyone had a story of seeing people killed. Our taxi driver, Hassan, had spent much of first few weeks ferrying refugees from his village to Beirut. At a bombed out bridge, just outside of Sidon and he explained that how he had stopped his minibus a hundred yards from the bridge because an F16 fighter was just above it on a bombing raid. He calculated that he had maybe two minutes between each pass that the F16 made in which to get past the bridge and to safety. But when he moved the fighter appeared again suddenly, and the car in front of him, carrying a family, was directly hit. He heard the screams of the people inside, as they burned to death, but there was nothing he could do but press on.

The Litany River crosses Lebanon from East to West about 25 kms from the Israeli border, just north of the ancient city of Tyre. The whole area south of the Litany was occupied by Israeli from 1978 to 2000, when they were finally forced to leave by Hezbollah. It was this whole region that the Israelis wanted to reoccupy in the recent conflict, and if they could, force much of the population to leave. It is a measure of the success of the resistance that they were unable to hold a single village despite massive bombardment and even those who have lost everything, their house, their relatives, their livelihood, are even more determiend to stay and rebuild.

South of Tyre, the roads climb up into the hills of South Lebanon, which are very fertile, full of olive groves and tobacco plantations, and dotted with small villages. This time of year is the olive harvest, but most of the crops in this whole area cannot be harvested because of the cluster bombs that were scattered throughout here by the Israelis, especially in the last days of the war. The rough estimate is that around 4 million individual cluster bombs were dropped in the 33 days, around three quarters of them in the last three days, when the ceasefire had already been brokered. Each day brings new reports of children injured or killed. As of last week, as least 33 people had been killed since the war ended by cluster bombs, more than 50 injured. Caoimhe told us that just the previous week a man had been harvesting olives and dislodged a cluster bomb when he pulled down one of the high branches, and was instantly killed.

The UN are distributing water bottles with a warning on the label about cluster bombs, giving pictures of what to avoid. Many of them are shaped like innocent objects, like tennis balls or apples, which is a chilling indictment of the callousness of this weapon. The UN, by the way, were everywhere in this area, in their white vehicles, bases and roadblocks. They have already begun to breed resentment among the local people, beginning heavy-handed house raids for weapons. Some local activists had staged a protest outside one of the UN bases the previous week with the slogan that the UN was on the 'Wrong side of the border'. So far they have not moved in a big way against Hezbollah and you get the feeling that they are getting people used to their presence with roadblocks etc. But there is a growing suspicion of what the UN's role will be.

The first village we stopped at was Qana, (which is the biblical town of Cana, where the wedding feast was held). This was one of the key aims of our trip, because of the massacre there in late July, which we are pretty certain was caused by a Raytheon 'bunker buster' bomb. We briefly stopped at the site of the 1996 atrocity in which 50 people were killed by an Israeli bomb while sheltering in a UN base. We spoke to a local man who had lost his sister in the 1996 attack (he had been injured by schrapnel) and lost his father in the recent fighting. We then visited the site of the July 2006 massacre. The rubble from the building has been cleared and dozens of marble tombs have been set on what was the ground floor. A huge piece of metal, the fuselage of the bomb, twisted and barely recognisable, was propped against one of the walls, under photographs of the people killed, most of them children.

Hassan called at a local house to see if he could get someone to talk to us about what had happened and a young woman came back with him. Hala Chaloub was a survivor of the bombing. She had lost both her children, two young girls, two of her brothers and 20 members of her extended family in the massacre. Her eyes were hollow with grief and she spoke quietly of what had happened, while Caoimhe translated. They had been sheltering in the house for 18 days, many of them relatives from surrounding houses. The day of the bombing was the first day the children had been able to go out to play. Her oldest daughter, she was 4 or 5, had said to her that day that she now knew that they were oppressed and she said it was remarkable that even at that age she could develop that consciousness. The bomb hit in the early hours of the morning, bringing the house down on top of them and churning up the earth underneath them. She was buried alongside her two daughters. She thinks the youngest died instantly, because she never heard from her again, but her and her oldest daughter were still alive, their mouths filled with earth and unable to call for help except to groan. They were eventually found, her daughter was still alive, her body still warm. She was taken to a nearby house, but without oxygen and no possibility of getting an ambulance, she died in the house.

It's hard to describe how harrowing and humbling it was to listen to Hala describe what had happened. All of us in turn were overcome with tears and had to walk away to compose ourselves. We asked her about what she wanted people to know. She spoke so defiantly and eloquently, about Bush and Blair, and their complicity in what had happened. That she hoped people knew why the people support the resistance and will alwasy support the resistance. As we left, she quietly sat down on the graves of her daughters. And the tears came again for us.

We found it very hard to speak for the next part of the journey. There was something about the horror of what had happened in Qana that made what we did in Derry seem so small and marginal. It felt almost like an intrusion to mention that we faced trial for the action at Raytheon, compared to what people here had been through. The company that made the bomb and its guidance system is, of course, a tangible expression of the connection between Derry and the war, and the need to challenge the wilful blindness and political silence about the implications of Raytheon's presence here. And the massacre in Qana, in particular, was at the forefront of our minds on the 9 August. But to the people in South Lebanon, it is only a tiny fragment of the problem they face, the awesome military and political might of Israel and the US and UK, just a few miles away, still to this day flying overhead in multi-million pound fighter jets, their tanks audible across the valley on the Israeli border. And to think that Qana is only one incident on one day of even just the last 5 years of relentless bombing and killing in Palestine, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, of war crimes on a barely imaginable scale.

What is going on here is about the war, the US and UK's plans for a 'New Middle East', designed and reconfigured for their purposes. So many of the people we spoke to, even in the smallest village, were well versed in the statements of Bush, Rice and Blair. They connected what happened here to the disaster in Iraq, their need to open up another front, with what was happening to the Palestinians. But again and again, the point was made that they didn't succeed in Lebanon. The people fought them, the resistance won and it has thrown a spoke in the wheel of their 'New Middle East'. Again, people here spoke of the need to live in dignity, of the long years when arab people and their corrupt governments cowered in fear, humiliated. One of the fighters we spoke to explained it this way - 'I have lived through six wars. This is the first that Israel has lost. And it has changed everything.'

The next village we reached was Alta Ghaab, a small village of perhaps 1000 or 2000 people, right beside the border. It was here that the two Israeli soldiers were captured in a skirmish on the border in early July. This is where Caoimhe is based, working on community projects, living with a local family. She is known all over the village and made many introductions for us. Houses in the village had posters commemorating the fighters who had died, their martyrs. 18 of them were killed in this village. We set off to the high part of the village. In the centre of town, many hosues were damaged and destroyed with missile strikes. But as we climbed the hill, whole streets, then whole areas were in ruins, completely devastated. The high ground of the village was the area closest to the Israeli border. At that point, the border was perhaps hlaf a mile away, on the other side of a valley filled with tobacco fields, the main crop fo the village. We could see the Israeli watchtowers, hear the roar of their tanks in the still afternoon. And where we stood, in every direction, the houses had been destroyed. Not a single one left standing. Hundreds of houses, two or three storey concrete buildings, blown apart by missiles, and every wall pockmarked with bullet holes and smaller shells. We were told that the Israelis had brought in bulldozers when they couldn't take the village, in order to flatten everything before them and build a parking space for their tank units, a launch pad for their invasion. But they never got a foothold. Still, what they have left behind is in ruins, the countryside littered with landmines and cluster bombs and unusable.

The people of the village are in a state of shock about what happened. It is difficult for them to talk too directly about it. As we made our way through the village, there was a prize giving ceremony taking place in the village hall, students getting their exam results. As we left the building we heard a great cheer. It was for the youngest fighter killed, a boy of 18, who had sat his exams just before the war and got the highest results in the whole region. Another cheer just later, was for another fighter, the geography and history teacher at the school, who ran the local football team, who was also a Hezbollah fighter and was also killed. This gives you some idea of the people who did the fighting. And in this village the stories of how they fought were remarkable. There were maybe 50 or so fighters, who held off hundreds upon hundreds of Israeli soldiers, backed by Apache helicopters, F16 fighters, tanks and bulldozers. They lost 18. The Israelis lost 70 to 100 in this village alone. And the pattern was repeated in all of these villages along the border. The resistance fighters were the local people, who knew every street and lane and fought with great determination and courage. Though the ones we spoke to were very modest people, with a great understanding, quietly expressed, of what they were doing, the exact opposite of the portrayal of them as bloodthirsty fanatics.

By the time we had visited the cemetary and paid our respects, it was getting dark and we were all a bit silent, overwhelmed by what we had seen and heard, not knowing how to find words for what we were thinking. We were invited into a local house, lit only by candles, the electricity now only on for a few hours at a time, all of us awkward and feeling as though we were imposing. But the few hours we spent with them brought our spirits back. The young son and daughter had great English and spoke about what had happened, played games with the youngest child Sasha and we were given sweet tea and bread. The daughter was 18 and the English teacher at the local school. She spoke about how the people who were against us, the governments, all talked between themselvs, organised themselves, pushed the same policies of globalisation and private greed and she knew that in different countries, in Mexico, in France, everywhere, there are people trying to resist, but why didn't the resistance meet each other and plan our strategy to strengthen the resistance everywhere? We agreed and spoke about Genoa and Florence, and about the Cairo anti-war conference next March. She is exactly the sort of person who should have been at the conference in Beirut, there must be thousands like her, but who never knew about it. It was exactly the right question to leave on - for Davey, Des and myself. Kieran, Jimmy and Gary were staying on for another two days - and it is the question that all of us need to set out to answer.

It was a tremendous privilege to travel to Lebanon on behalf of the Derry Anti-War Coalition, that simple act of solidarity meant a lot to people there. But the real importance of the visit has to be to encourage all of us to redouble our efforts to oppose the war, in its broadest sense, to never forget that it is people like us who are living underneath the bombs, to refuse to allow Bush and Blair to portray them as caricatures, to dehumanise them, to present them as driven by some irrational ideology, to understand that the hope of humanity lies in making the connection between them and us, and uniting the resistance. The resistance fighter who drove us back to Beirut (we didn't know he was until he showed us a picture in his mobile phone of Nasrallah shaking hands with him, when he was dressed in his uniform) said 'We only want to live in peace, on our own land. I have no problem with the Israeli people. We are all people. And I hate the blood. But their government, the US and Britain, they do not want peace. They want to dominate us. To get peace we have to resist.'

Salaam,

Colm





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