Heady days in Lebanon

By Michael S.Arnold, Jerusalem Post, 19.6.00

Special to the Chicago Sun-Times (June 8) - The traffic grows noticeably heavier at Sidon, where several lanes of cars converge under a banner that reads, "All of Lebanon is welcome in south Lebanon."

But the change is most perceptible just after Nabatiye, where Lebanese Army soldiers check those hoping to proceed further south. Lebanese citizens are allowed in freely to celebrate their country's liberation from 22 years of Israeli occupation. Journalists must produce convincing identification and a compelling reason to visit the area.

Palestinians are barred entirely, though they come to the area in throngs, traveling over paths they remember from the days when the Palestine Liberation Organization established a mini-state in southern Lebanon - Fatahland, so named for the main faction of the PLO - and staged frequent attacks across the border into northern Israel.

It was those attacks that led Israel to invade Lebanon, its soldiers greeted initially with rice and flower petals, only to find themselves leaving their "security zone" two decades later.

The crowds have thinned considerably since the first days after the withdrawal, says Mona Sadiqi, a young Lebanese journalist whose name has been changed to protect her identity.

Sadiqi has visited Israel's former security zone several times in recent weeks, guiding foreign reporters around for a few hundred dollars a day, a princely sum by local standards.

On June 4, the day after our visit, she will return again, this time with her family, bringing them for a candlelight vigil at the infamous Khiam Prison. June 4 and 5, in fact, have been proclaimed national holidays in Lebanon, and candelight vigils were held around the country to celebrate the departure of the Israeli enemy.

Yet Sadiqi still is moved each time she passes the army checkpoint and begins the descent along the winding mountain roads that lead to the Israeli border.

Southern Lebanon is a splendidly mountainous region, an enlarged version of the Upper Galilee, an area of peaks and crevices largely denuded of trees by Israeli soldiers fearing ambush, its hillsides covered with light green grass and dotted with the spires of village mosques and churches.

Along its roadsides lie man-made monuments to the occupation, hulls of burned-out tanks and military vehicles abandoned by retreating IDF soldiers or their South Lebanese Army allies.

And there are other markers whose presence serves as both a celebration and a warning: yellow Hizbullah murals showing the group's trademark Kalashnikovs, the green flags of the rival Amal Shia movement, wildly distorted caricatures of Jewish soldiers with bites taken out of their skulls, a model of an Israeli army helmet neatly pierced by a deadly Islamic sword and looking for all the world like a newfangled Viking helmet or one of those arrow-through-the-head party favors.

THESE ARE heady days in south Lebanon, a still volatile celebration of the victory of the Islamic Resistance and Lebanese willpower over the cursed Zionist occupiers.

It is the only time, Prime Minister Salim al-Hoss observes in an interview, that "Israel has withdrawn from Arab territory without leaving behind a flag on an embassy."

With the government still coy about its willingness to deploy the Lebanese Army in the area, Hizbullah has become the main force in the liberated zone. By and large they have acted with a remarkable restraint that has won them praise from virtually all sectors of Lebanese society.

"Other than a few thefts and scuffles here and there it couldn't have been a better situation," says Jamil Mroue, publisher of the English-language Daily Star newspaper.

"For all the fear of ethnic cleansing, the Israeli withdrawal has led to the first instance of ethnic mending in our history."

Sadiqi describes the Israeli withdrawal as "the happiest day of my life."

It is perhaps the only time, she says, that she has known real happiness in a life that began during Lebanon's disastrous civil war and has been almost conterminous with Israel's extended presence in her country.

Though it has been two weeks since the last Israeli soldiers left Lebanon, there is still a sense of celebration along the border. The village of Kfar Kila - site of the Fatma Crossing, formerly known in Israel as the Good Fence - has a downright carnival feel.

Couples who have come for a weekend outing in the newly liberated areas munch corn-on-the-cob as they search for the Israeli soldiers sitting behind sandbags in a cement tower just over the fence, or gawk at the silent, red-roofed villas of Metulla a few hundred meters in the distance.

"It's the first time in my life that I've been down in this area," says Yehya Zein, a 29-year-old marketing manager who has come down for the day from Beirut with some friends. "I had to come and see what's happening."

Hizbullah fighters keeping order in the area conduct a brief search of visitors, confiscating pistols that they line up on top of an old oil drum while their owners stroll the border promenade. Next to the pistols sits a discarded bomb covered with Hebrew writing.

THE CROSSING itself has been barricaded with concrete blocks after some Lebanese tried to scale the fence in the first days after the liberation.

Even now, the scene at times gets mildly ugly, with some Lebanese making obscene gestures at the Israeli soldiers or shouting martial slogans.

The Israelis are largely aloof, sometimes taking photos of the Lebanese taking photos of them. At one point, when a soldier twirls his green-fatigue cap on his hand, a few Lebanese interpret it as a veiled attempt to give them the finger, and tempers rise accordingly.

"One day you will regret that you ever came to our land!" yells one well-dressed young man, a businessman from Beirut who gives only his first name, Wissam.

"The Jews came from their Diaspora and occupied our land - Palestine, the Golan Heights, the Sinai. If they want to come and live in peace, that's okay. But they can't come here and try to rule the entire region, treating everyone who's not Jewish as if they're inferior."

His anger is shared by several other young men in the area, who describe themselves as Hizbullah members.

"We hope to kick them out of Palestine, too, back to where they came from, to Europe and Germany and Ethiopia," says a house-painter who doesn't want to give his name.

"They came here and massacred and kicked the Palestinians out of their houses. There was Deir Yassin and 50 other massacres. We will use their own tactics against them."

Peace with Israel, the man's bearded friend says, is "impossible."

"They have our blood on their hands," he says. "They're a bunch of murderers. There's not a pair of eyes in this country that hasn't cried because of those rapists and murderers. If one of those Jews looks at me with even one eye, I'll poke out both of them."

Several Lebanese remark on the incongruity of the scene: they stroll up and down as if on a promenade while the former occupiers sit in a fortified position behind a towering wire-mesh fence that resembles a baseball backstop.

"We're happy to see them imprisoned behind their own borders," says Ibrahim el-Jouni, who has brought his family down for the day from Beirut. "We're standing here happy and free and they're terrified, hiding in their cage like wild dogs."

For the most part, though, the border is peaceful, vaguely resembling a petting zoo. Fingers point and a cry goes up when the soldiers are spotted above their sandbags. How young they are, the Lebanese remark.

Say, isn't that one a Sephardi? they ask, remarkably aware of the divisions within Israeli society. Do they put only the Arab Jews on border duty?

The soldiers, when they rouse themselves from their seats, take out binoculars to get a closer look at the Lebanese.

"I don't want to give them the finger or do stupid things," Zein says. "I would like to talk to them if I had the chance, to see what's happening."

When he waved at one of the soldiers, Zein says, the Israeli responded by blowing him a kiss.

"Maybe he's a gay?" Zein wonders aloud.

FARTHER down the border road, a sadder scene is unfolding. A group of Palestinian refugees has climbed to the top of an abandoned building, from where they have their first view of the country they left 52 years ago.

Elsewhere along the border, Palestinian families separated by a few meters of barbed wire pass messages back and forth, using Israeli soldiers as couriers.

With access to the Israeli side of the Fatma crossing restricted, however, Palestinians here can only gaze at a land many of them know only from tales handed down from generation to generation.

"I feel very sad, even bitter today," says Hassan Zaher, a taxi driver whose family originally hails from Acre, gazing out over the Galilee hills stretching south from Metulla. "I'm happy to see my land, but unhappy to see it occupied."

"I haven't seen my homeland in 52 years," says one woman, who left Acre during Israel's War of Independence, when she was 7. "My only wish is to die there. I don't want to be a refugee, homeless, any more. We'll go back to Nablus and Ramallah as a first step, and from there back to Jaffa and Acre - even as Israeli citizens, if we have to."

The group is divided over whether the Palestinians should resort to violence to reclaim their land, a common question after Hizbullah's apparent success in forcing Israel out of Lebanon with guerrilla warfare.

"The only way to go is the Hizbullah way, to fight for your land," says Yussuf Abdel-Ghani, a taxi driver with a degree in political science. "Israel doesn't understand anything but the logic of force."

A dentist named Zangeri, wearing a Nike cap and speaking fluent English, disagrees.

"Force can't solve anything," he says. "We're a new people in a new millennium, and we need to find new methods."

The group has come to the border for different reasons. Zangeri is on a rather desperate search for his roots. He is told that a few Zangeris may remain in a village called Qordana in the Safed region. One or two of his relatives may live in Shfaram.

He had hoped to find someone on the Israeli side of the border who would search the Galilee for him, giving his telephone number in Lebanon to any Zangeris he encountered.

Abdel-Ghani, who has brought his young son and daughter to the border, has a different motive.

"We were brought up with the idea that the Israelis were superhumans with a huge army and air force and bombs," he says. "This visit showed us that the Israelis aren't invincible and if we fight we can get our land back. The Israelis are human, just like us - just as strong and as weak as we are."

A FEW kilometers away, the Khiam Prison is even more crowded than the Fatma Crossing.

If the Lebanese government intends to turn the former Israeli position at the Beaufort Castle into an arts center dedicated to the Lebanese resistance, Khiam already has become a place of pilgrimage for those wanting to see a more horrific side of the occupation.

A few Amal banners line the road leading into the mountain town, but it is Hizbullah, the leader of the battle against Israel, that dominates the entrance to the prison.

Intense and bearded young men offer visitors bitter coffee beneath a towering Hizbullah banner draped over the prison entrance. Crowning the archway is a photo of Mustafa Dirani, the former Amal security chief still held by Israel as a bargaining chip for IAF navigator Ron Arad, captured in Lebanon in 1986.

A few meters away, visitors pore over lists of prisoners held in Khiam, those who served as jailers, and 14 prisoners who died from torture and abuse.

Inside, Ahmed Yihye is holding forth to an agitated crowd on the nine years he spent in Khiam for his part in the Islamic Resistance.

Standing on a platform in a square where inmates used to be tortured, Yihye, handsome and charismatic, holds his audience of several dozen in thrall.

The tale he is telling so casually, however, is one to curdle the blood.

This is where they would blindfold us, handcuff us and hang us by our wrists, Yihye says, demonstrating the posture with the aid of a nearby metal pole. Suspended in this position, he says, the inmates would endure savage beatings, sometimes daily for a period of months.

Then there were other indignities: being stripped naked and covered in jam - to attract flies - on hot summer days; being doused with ice-cold water in the freezing Lebanese winter; going months without a shower, until every prisoner was covered with lice.

The lice, however, proved both a diversion - prisoners could pass the time by playing with them - and a blessing, because when a prisoner's infestation became too severe the guards would take him out of his dank and airless cell for a brief spell in the sunlight.

That was about the only time the prisoners saw the sun, Yihye says, turning off the electricity - newly-installed - for a more realistic effect as he leads visitors on a guided torture tour.

IT BECOMES increasingly difficult to see as the tour leaves the entranceway and progresses down a narrow, fetid passageway; a sense of vertigo and disorientation begins sets in.

Now, however, there is the benefit of some natural light in a few cells, an improvement introduced following a Red Cross inspection in 1996, after the prison had been operating for 13 years.

Here, Yihye says, marking off a small square known as the "chicken coop" at the bottom of one wall, is where they would force us to crouch for 15 minutes at a time with our hands pulled forward over our heads, although we could barely fit in the hole.

These were the solitary confinement cells, he says, pointing out two tiny rooms which could be closed off from the rest of the prison by a heavy metal door. The other cells - in which six prisoners crowded into an area 2 meters long by a meter wide and 1.8 meters high - seem roomy by comparison.

Jailers would place the prisoners' food - sometimes army rations left over from the 1973 Yom Kippur War - in a bowl on the ground, step in it, and then kick it across the room to them.

Electrical wires would be attached to their fingers, and water would be applied to create sparks.

Women prisoners had electrodes attached to their nipples; he won't be more graphic, Yihye says, because the tour includes several religious women with their heads covered.

Here, in a courtyard once filled with sharp gravel, a pregnant woman was made to kneel and then was beaten.

On and on Yihye's description goes, yet he seems remarkably buoyant during the presentation. Did he suffer any lasting physical damage from his incarceration, he is asked?

Oh yes, Yihye says, and reels off a list. He has two injured vertebrae which cause him constant backaches. A blood virus, and eye problems. Nervous disorders, too. Oh, and also rheumatism.

Yihye is 32 years old and he says all this with a smile.

Many in the crowd demand that the SLA men who ran Khiam be jailed there themselves and treated similarly.

"They wouldn't be able to feel what I felt," Yihye says. "The least that should be done to them is to kill them."

REVISITING the scene of his torture four years after he was freed, Yihye is asked how he explains man's inhumanity to man.

"The people who did this are people who love the material things in life, who can be easily bought," he says. "But the fact of my presence here today gives me a sense of pride, because it represents the freedom of my country Lebanon from the cancer that is Israel."

Outside, dusk is falling over south Lebanon. Lights from villages on the Golan Heights and the Shaba Farms twinkle in the distance.

To the south, violet light bathes the Upper Galilee. It is hard to reconcile such unspeakable atrocities with a place of such unspeakable beauty.