The suffering south

Charles Glass

Jezzine, South Lebanon There was a time when the drive from Sidon to Beirut, if negotiated by a reckless Lebanese taxi-driver, took just over half an hour. But, as with so many other things in Lebanon, those days are gone. A lovely, red-haired woman who lives in Sidon was reminiscing the other day about the old Lebanon, in which she and her late husband could easily visit Beirut. They would drive up the coast road, go to the theatre or cinema, have dinner in a smart restaurant and go dancing in one of the discos which used to flourish in West Beirut. Then they would have a pre-dawn breakfast at Al-Ajame. (Al-Ajame. Just to say the word sends many Lebanese into rap- tures of nostalgia for ante-bellum Beirut and the jeunesse doree perdue. It was a wonderful restaurant in the heart of the Ot- toman downtown souks, built of stone and bisected by a pedestrian path, where you could sit, eat, drink and watch the life of a busy city walk past. Its Lebanese food was excellent.) After breakfast, they would drive back to their home, a mansion overlooking Sidon and the sea, to sleep.

The road is now cut, thanks to an Israeli occupying force which has severed the south from the rest of Lebanon. The half- hour brisk drive along the coast between Sidon and Beirut is now a tortuous journey through mountain passes on war-damaged roads. It takes five hours. Lorries laden with goods take longer, since they must queue for days at the Israeli crossing point just north of the Christian village of Jez- zine. My friend in Sidon has simply stopped going to Beirut rather than endure the long journey, the applications for permission from the Israelis and the indignity of being searched and questioned by the occupier at the crossing point.

On the day I came south, the crossing was officially closed for the Jewish Sab- bath. A woman with two children was pleading with an Israeli soldier to be allow- ed through. The Israeli solider allowed me, a western journalist, to pass. He told her that she, like all those Lebanese who hap- pen not to be westerners or newsmen, would have to wait until he reopened the road on Sunday morning. She clutched the smaller child to her breast and cried, while a privileged son of the western world drove past her into her occupied homeland.

The only constant in the south's modern history has been the central government's neglect of its interests. While Beirut pro- spered on transit trade to the Arab oil states, banking and tourism, southerners were left to till their fields as peasants of feudal landlords, most of whom were fellow Shi'ite Muslims with little interest in change. Before that, the area of the south known as Jebel Amal, Mount Hope, was the site of fierce resistance to the Turks. Perhaps the southerners are at their best under occupation, when they know who their enemy is and they risk all to evict him.

They are fed up with politicians in Beirut talking about the 'historic resistance' of the south. In place of rhetoric, southerners would prefer things the government is not giving them: guns, money, roads, schools and hospitals. They are suffering under oc- cupation, and members of their govern- ment in Beirut are too busy shooting at one another to do anything for the south. Meanwhile, Israel is destroying the south's

economy. Cutting the Sidon-Beirut highway has robbed the south of the only market for its two main products, citrus fruits and tobacco. Lebanese_ oranges and grapefuits rot in their orchards while the Israelis dump their cheaper fruits in the markets of Sidon. (If the Europeans who were so willing to send their soldiers to PM the US in the Multinational Force wanted to help Lebanon, they would send cargo ships to Sidon and Tyre to buy the Lebanese crops.) Israeli restrictions on fishing have reduced fishermen to penal"' and forced those of Sidon to declare a strike. The southerners are paying a high price survive under the Israeli Defence Forces.

The hills of Jebel Amal meander gentlY to the sea, and most of the ridges are home to small farming villages. Israeli PIO seems to vary. In some villages, it tries to establish small collaborationist militias' Others it leaves alone. And there are 'villages its forces regularly enter t° dynamite houses, detain people and search for arms. The IDF put some villages under siege, not allowing people in or out. Las: January they arrested the Shi'ite

religious leader of Hallousieh and blew hp his house. He is still being held in Ansar detention camp. In the village of Ma'arake, near Tyre, Israeli soldiers last month ig- nored the protests of United Nations troops and the stone barricades of the villagers to enter and fire tear gas at crowds of people chanting 'Allahu akhbar'. One young man in Ma'arake said the Israelis had previouslY detained him for two weeks at their eentr.e in Tyre, and he showed dark spots on his hands which he said were left by the elec- trodes they used while interrogating The people there use the loudspeaker on tne,

minaret to warn whenever an Israeli

is coming their way. patrol In the village of Bazourieh, people used! similar early warning system. So, 11)r soldiers reportedly drove in a Lebanese civilian car and wore civilian clothes to g° through a UNIFIL checkpoint and enter the, village to detain people. The action resulte°, m clashes between villagers and Israelis. /1". least one man was wounded. A UN source said the wounded man must have been °11,f, of the many 'flying Arabs' the Israelis see"' to hit when they shoot into the air. The most inexplicable instance of an Israeli security operation took place, n°t. ITI a hostile village, but in the Palestan refugee camp of Ain Helouie near Sidond. The camp, which held 26,000 registere refugees, had already been destroyed in the Israeli invasion of June 1982. The story has been reported, but it is almost impossible t° believe. On the night of 16 May, apPrrig- imately 200 Israeli soliders entered the camp. Based on the testimony of pales"' man eyewitnesses, as well as European an American relief workers, this is what h°13- pened next. They walked quietly through streets ta° narrow for vehicles of any kind, until theY, reached a cluster of adjoining breeze -b10.0- houses which had been rebuilt after the 1°- vasion. A number of the people who were

inside said they heard the Israelis outside digging, but they assumed there was nothing wrong because the Israelis did not try to enter the houses. One old man said that he felt reassured and simply went back to sleep. International relief agencies said there were 54 people, including small children, asleep in the eight houses. 'Sud- denly,' said Kamli Mansour, a mother of ten children, 'everything collapsed on us, the refrigerator, the furniture, everything. The explosion lifted that young boy there,' and she pointed to a little boy standing near her in the rubble of her house, 'to the ceil- ing. Then he fell to the ground and injured his legs.' No one died.

The Israelis offered several successive ex- planations, but finally settled on this: their patrol had discovered explosives at the site. It was not safe to take them away for dismantling, so the soldiers detonated them on the spot. Some people wondered whether, if they had found explosives near a house in Tel Aviv, the IDF would have warned the people inside before detonation. In AM Helouie, if their spokesman is telling the truth, they did not bother.

The Lebanese National Resistance claims an operation against Israeli soldiers almost every day. They have completely demolish- ed the IDF headquarters in Tyre twice,

without warning the soldiers inside. But some southerners remain unimpressed by the resistance, even though it has caused more Israeli soldiers' deaths than the PLO ever did.

Only when most southerners become convinced that Israel intends to remain forever will the armed attacks on the Israelis grow. Lebanon's prime minister, Syria's president and Israel's foreign minister still talk about the possibility of a negotiated withdrawal, which is what southerners would prefer. Now, they wait.

On the road back to Jezzine and the peace of the Hotel Wehbe, we passed the mountain caves where Fakhreddine II, the great Lebanese emir who tried in vain to make a nation out of mountain tribes, hid from the Turks for several months in 1633. Fakhreddine (after whom a lovely restaurant in Piccadilly is named) ruled and expanded Lebanon for 30 years, challeng- ing the Sultan in Constantinople and forg- ing alliances with the Medicis. The Sultan's forces Finally caught him in a cave near' here, and two years later he and his three sons were beheaded in Constantinople. The dream of an independent, united and peaceful Lebanon died with them, just as it is dying now. But it was born again in another generation.