Remnants from the 2006 war (6)

“I am tired of thinking of the big picture. It drives to despair to think about diplomacy and the Security Council. The only way to go on now is to ignore everything and concentrate on small achievable goals.” This is what a colleague of mine told me this morning.

Lately, we haven’t been able that there would be a way out for us anytime soon especially that the UN Security Council has seemingly given up on Lebanon. First, they wanted to issue a draft resolution that does not take into account the complexity and specificities of Lebanon. Any decision that would call for the disarmament of Hizbullah while keeping Israeli soldiers on Lebanese soil will only fuel an internal conflict. Despite the fact that France and the rest of the council’s members are convinced of the need to take into consideration the Lebanese demands, the United States does not want any concessions that do not blindly favor Israel.

Meanwhile, the war continues and for all those who think that Qana was a sad incident during this war, I say there are Qana massacres every single day. For suspicious minds, those who believe that Arab media is trying to manipulate the world and “invent” images of children getting killed, I say that I was present when they pulled children’s bodies from under the rubble in Chiyah (a southern suburb of Beirut) and I was at hospitals where children were suffering from burns and wounds and laid marks of shrapnel on their bodies. And if you don’t believe me, there were tens of “unbiased” foreign reporters.

The Lebanese media is an exceptionally vivid and powerful one. Freedom of expression is sacred in the media here. The debates on national televisions are highly diverse and are sometimes critical of Hizbullah. So for all those who believe war images coming from Lebanon are propaganda spare us your lectures and come here on the ground to see with your bare eyes! There are plenty of places were bodies are rotting on the ground, places that journalists cannot even reach! The horror and the terror that you see and witness are nothing in comparison with the reality of what’s going on.

I invite everybody after and if this war ever ends to pay Lebanon a visit and see with their own eyes what has really happened here. Self-defense? I am even tempted to laugh when I hear this argument! A couple of months ago, I remember how Israeli soldiers kidnapped Palestinian prisoners from a Palestinian jail humiliating prisoners and jailers there. The whole world did not see this as a provocation! That’s beside the point anyway. What is going on here is beyond any rational explanation.

Unfortunately, the world will soon get bored and turn a blind eye on the conflict. The tragedy will continue though whether the world watches or not! Today, I was sitting at the office in a Christian neighborhood in Beirut when we saw outside thousands of leaflets falling everywhere from the sky. The message was mean and direct, all the inhabitants of Chiyah, Burj al-Barajneh and Hay al-Sellom must leave immediately.

For those who do not know, all these names are those of dense neighborhoods in Beirut which had been more or less spared so far. This means that hundreds of thousands of people more than the million displaced already will be forced to leave their homes. Where will they go? The schools are already over crowded and children I have seen with my own eyes are living in deplorable situations where basic hygienic conditions are missing.

Yesterday, I was volunteering with a humanitarian group to play with the kids and help them deal with their traumas. Children are so innocent, they don’t realize really what’s going on, they want to play and have fun. Part of the activities is to allow children to express their feelings by drawing. They perfectly know that there is a war but it’s amazing how they have a capacity to evade it and imagine a rosy way out. I wonder for how long they could cope with this situation.

One nine-year old girl, Myriam, comes to me and tells me how much she likes to draw fish and the sea. She holds her younger sister’s hand compassionately. “I am praying all the time for peace, so I can return to my home” she says with a smile.

Again and again, I ask the world what is Israel achieving? Creating more hate, more frustration and more destruction. This will NOT solve anything.

Few minutes after the leaflets were dropped, my sister, who lives far from these neighborhoods, called me panicked saying that she wanted to move in with me.
“It would be safer to stay in a Christian neighborhood,” she said. I tried to calm her stressing that she was in rather safe Beiruti street. Shortly after hanging up, I kept thinking if that was something reasonable to say anyway. Is there really a safe place to stay?

*This entry was published in a blog on Beirut during the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel published by the website of the german newspaper, Die Zeit.