La sale guerre
Charles Glass
On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he woke he felt completely spattered with bird shit.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Jonathan Cape, 1982)
Touline, South Lebanon
It was the Saturday before last that they stopped him. Ghassan Raa'i was driving his red BMW through an Israeli army checkpoint in a eucalyptus grove in the hamlet of Tamriye. The Israelis told him to get out of his car, they needed it for a little while. Several plainclothes agents of the Israeli Shin Beth got into the car and drove in the direction of Touline a few miles away. Whether the Israelis knew it or not, their drive into Touline took them past Raa'i's house, a plain concrete bungalow on the right side of the road. They drove out of the village past the house of the Mukhtar, Yusuf Mara'i, through a road- block of the Ghana Battalion of UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon).
Mara'i, an old man who has been Mukh- tar — a kind of mayor whose main task is registering births and deaths — since 1963, was sitting in the shade of the front porch of his house dispensing coffee to his neigh- bours, as he was when he spoke to me a few days later. The porch, just opposite the UNIFIL post at one entrance to the vill- age, appeared to be the gossip centre of Touline. Mara'i said he saw the red BMW drive part his house with Israelis inside. He thought at the time they had stolen the car, so he mentioned it to Raa'i's mother and brothers. The Israelis drove through here to Nabatieh and back,' Mara'i said. He did not know what, if anything, the Shin Beth men did in Nabatieh, a large Shi'ite Mus- lim market town where the Israeli occupy- ing forces have had a particularly tough time with what they call 'terrorism'.
Raa'i's brothers went to the Israeli checkpoint at Tamriye to ask for the car back and to see how their brother was. Four hours later, the Shin Beth men arrived at the checkpoint and returned the red BMW to Raa'i. This was not the first time the Shin Beth men had comman- deered a private car. United Nations sol- diers report scores of such cases, and Israeli sources admit it happens. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman says the IDF itself uses its own civilian cars for clandestine operations, but the Shin Beth has its own methods.
An IDF spokesman in Northern Israel explained that the Shin Beth, Israel's internal security service which reports directly to the prime minister rather than to the army, has specific functions in South Lebanon. The spokesman, who briefed me in the lobby of a hotel just south of the border, said Shin Beth operates under the direct control of the IDF in Lebanon. They don't come with their own policy,' he said. 'Their presence is needed because of their expertise in investigation, Arab affairs and their experience in uncovering groups in the West Bank and Gaza.' The Shin Beth has been accused of killing unarmed civilians (see Spectator, 28 July), but the spokesman could not comment on their specific operations. On the day that the Shin Beth borrowed Ghassan Raa'i's car, no one was killed or, apparently, otherwise bothered by the Shin Beth in Nabatieh.
All resistance movements have at one time or another killed informers and col- laborators. The French are believed to have murdered 30,000 in the aftermath of the Allied liberation. The Algerians killed informers during the war for independ- ence, as have the PLO and IRA. But in South Lebanon's tribal society, killing sus- pected collaborators can have the opposite effect of the one intended. Rather than frighten people away from the Israelis, it can turn large numbers of people into informers bent on avenging a member of the family. Resistance supporters often say that every time the Israelis kill a Lebanese civilian, they turn hundreds of people into resisters. What do they think happens when the resistance kills someone?
No one other than his wife Selha heard a thing the night the men knocked on Ghas- san Raa'i's door. His brother Adnan, who lives next door, slept soundly, as did the other neighbours. Selha said that about ten minutes after her husband answered the door, she heard four shots ring out, she heard no cars drive away, and there was no car parked in front of the house when she went to Adnan's house to tell him what had happened. It is possible the men had come from Touline or had simply walked back to their houses in villages nearby. The UN troops in Touline said no armed men drove into the village that night.
Many people other than the Mukhtar saw the Shin Beth driving the red BMW through the dusty roads of South Lebanon. BMWs are not common, and Raa'i and his brothers were modestly prominent in the villages in this remote part of Shi'ite South Lebanon. They had inherited a small trans-
port business — a few trucks and cars and a little land from their father. Raal and his wife Selha were the same age, 27, and had seven children. The oldest is eleven. Selha showed me a colour photo- graph of Ghassan, a good-looking, mous- tachioed boy in jeans with his arm resting on a giant tractor. At some moment during its four hour tour, of the South with the Shin Beth, local authorities believe, the red BMW was recognised by someone who told the resistance that Ghassan had prob- ably loaned the car to the Israelis. Selha, who was dressed in mourning, said that men knocked on their door three nights later at 11.30. Ghassan put on his blue, rubber sandals before answering the door. He went outside, and someone closed the door behind him. Selha said she heard voices and a scuffle. When she called her husband, he told her not to worry and to go back to sleep. She stayed inside, but she could not sleep. In the comfort and relative security of a UNIFIL office, a military. source in the South said the Lebanese National Resist- ance had killed eight suspected collabor- ators in August and three in July. One of the latter was Jouad Khalifa, the mayor of Sarafand, whose portrait adorns posters on nearly every building in the seaside village. A friend in Amal, the Shi'ite MuSitm militia, said the resistance may have made a mistake in its car-bomb killing of Khalifa' Even if the mayor had cooperated with the. Israelis, he was popular in his village an°, came from a large family. My friend sain the resistance was too small to alienate whole families and villages. Some night, resistance fighter may be in desperate nee' of shelter when the Israelis are searching for him. He would not be wise to stop in Sarafand. Or, possibly, in Touline. Selha and Adnan began to look in the dark for Ghassan. They first went to the place she thought the shots had come from,but they found nothing. They took t°', children to Ghassan's mother's house and continued the search. In the morning:, Ghassan's mother and brothers went back to the Israeli checkpoint at Tamriye where his car had been taken. The soldiers ther,, h, said they knew nothing. Ghassan's fan" went to the Israeli security office in TYre' but the soldiers there had no information either. The Mukhtar explained why the faintly did not bother to ask the UNIFIL soldiers, in Touline. `UNIFIL won't arrest anyone' he said, 'Israel will.' At 1.30 that Wednes- day afternoon, some neighbours came, the family and said they had found Glr'd. san. All of them rushed to the field behTe his house, several hundred yards down the family's cultivated terraces near the bot- tom of a canyon. Ghassan lay there, four bullet holes in his body, his dried blood staining the rocky soil. His blue sandals lady beside him. The skin on his right arm had been burned, apparently with a lighted cigarette. The Mukhtar said his killers Pei probably burned him to determine wile he was dead or not. He was.
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