Lebanon’s rival factions unite for war

The Sunday Herald
July 22, 2006
www.sundayherald.com/56944

By Hugh Macleod
Shatila, south Beirut

Across rusty corrugated roofs held down with car tyres, at the east end of Abu Hassan Salame street where goats and children pick their way through piles of rotting waste, Mahmoud Kallam points to the place where 24 years ago the far right Christian militias of the Lebanese Phalange party began their slaughter of hundreds of defenceless Palestinians.

“Now look a little to the left,” said Kallam, a Palestinian researcher and life-long resident of the Chatila slum south of Beirut as columns of brown smoke from Israeli airstrikes on suspected Hezbollah positions a few kilometres south billowed into the air.

“That’s where the missile landed last night. How do the Israelis expect peace when we are raising our children under the sound of explosions? My five year old son has a bullet case he found on the street and insists on carrying it around with him. I don’t know why.”

Beside him, our driver, a member of the Shia Muslim Amal militia who fought for two years against the Palestinians for control of Chatila during the bloody Camp War that begun in 1985 and which destroyed Kallam’s house, shook his head in disgust.

As Israel masses thousands of troops along its northern border in preparation for a possible first major land invasion of south Lebanon since 1982, Lebanon’s mosaic of rival factions, once divided by civil war, say they are now united for a battle against their common enemy.

Lebanon is a country founded on recognising difference. Since its independent from French rule in 1943, political power has been divided between Christians and Muslims, with the president required to be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim.

Druze and Allawis, sects of Shia Islam, and Armenians, Greek Orthodox and Protestant Christians also have seats reserved for them in Lebanon’s confessional parliamentary system. The 380,000 Palestinian refugees, over half of whom live in the squalid slums south of Beirut after being driven from their homes by the creation of Israel in 1948, are not represented politically in Lebanon.

However, with the slums awash with weapons and many of their leaders advocating armed conflict with Israel, they remain a powerful threat to the Lebanon’s security.

It was to eliminate the threat to Israel of the then Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) led by the late Yasser Arafat that Tel Aviv launched its 1982 ground invasion of Lebanon.

Beirut was shelled, Syrian armoured divisions in Lebanon’s eastern Beka’a valley were bombed and the PLO was driven to Tunisia. But only 18 years later did the last Israeli tank cross the newly demarcated UN ‘Blue Line’ back to Israel, its troops having suffered continual losses to the often suicidal attacks of Hezbollah fighters.

In the labyrinth streets of Chatila, where fresh food and medical supplies have been cut off since Israeli missiles began thumping into the suburbs of south Beirut on July 13, young Palestinians, outraged by the continued suffering of families in Gaza, praise God that the fight against Israel has once again come to their doorstep.

“This is our final chance. This is our war, it’s our problem,” said Mahmoud Marouf, a 26-year-old music store owner, as security guards from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), whose armed members maintain security in the camp, looked on with interest.

As the voice of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah blared from old megaphones, Rabea Zaarour considered whether the leader of the Shia militia group armed and funded by Iran and supported by Syria could now become a figurehead of Palestinian resistance.

“No government has done anything to face Israel,” he said, taking the opportunity to email friends before another power cut. “Hezbollah is now the only venue for resisting Israel and as ours is a war of existence we will take every occasion to fight for it.” Hezbollah has not yet been on a recruiting drive in the camp, but if they did, said Zaarour, he would be ready.

Across the besieged capital of a country that in less than a year and a half has seen its five-time prime minister assassinated, Syrian troops withdrawn and its parliamentary elections hailed by Washington as a beacon of Middle East democracy, Antonie Richa, vice president of the party whose militia, then under the control of the Israeli army, had brought terror to the families of Kallam, Marouf and Zaarour, contemplated his response to Lebanon’s latest bloodshed. Would his Christian party allow Lebanon to be sacrificed to the cause of Islamic resistance?

“Israel is the first benefactor of Hezbollah and this crisis. Hezbollah has made a mistake and now the country is being destroyed,” he said surrounded by concerned looking officials in the headquarters of the Phalange Party in Saifi over looking the port in East Beirut.

“But we must support the government. We cannot set militia against militia. This is what outside groups want to see. We are encouraging our young members to join the Lebanese army and we wish to see it deployed to the south.”

Richa denied his group maintained an armed wing, though party members acknowledged they used armed security forces.

Lebanese President Emile Lahoud said on Friday that the Lebanese army, which has already suffered causalities in Israeli airstrikes, would “fight the invading folks of Israel” though he admitted it was not his decision to make, but the government’s.

Lahoud has faced a growing clamour for his resignation from all sides of the Lebanese political spectrum since his term of office was extended under pressure from Damascus in September 2004, triggering the UN to pass resolution 1559 calling for the withdrawal of Syrian troops and the disarming of all militia in Lebanon.

Now, the as-yet unanswered question of who fights for Lebanon’s security that has long been the dark shadow stalking the country’s recent economic and political prosperity, threatens not only to bring down Lahoud, but also his government.

Driving up the lush Beka’a valley near the border with Syria visitors may be delighted by the scenery, but turn up the wrong lane and you soon find yourself flagged down by armed gunmen, guarding entrances to the mountain strongholds of the PFLP-GC, the Palestinian rejectionist group, whose leadership is based in Damascus.

Israel and the US say the militant group is supported by Syria and airstrikes around the valley as our car drove through on Wednesday morning and the burning wreckage of a truck presumably targeted as a possible weapons transporter, suggested that Hezbollah is not the only militia group in Lebanon being attacked by Israeli airstrikes.

“The aim of this war is to disarm the Palestinians,” Anwar Raja’a, head of the PFLP-GC in Lebanon told The Sunday Herald hours after the group’s camp in Naameh, on the coast 15km south of Beirut was struck by Israeli jets. “We need to hold onto our weapons. The development of the battle will decide when and where our weapons are used.”

Speaking from the southern port city of Tyre, from where tens of thousands of refugees have fled a relentless Israeli barrage of missiles and mortars, Sultan Abu al-Aynayn, commander of Fatah, the largest Palestinian faction in Lebanon which in March had announced it would collect its weapons and secure them inside the camps south of the capital, said his group would stand beside Hezbollah: “We will participate the moment there is a land invasion. The Palestinians cannot be outside this battle.”

In a television interview on Thursday, Hassan Nasrallah appointed Nabih Berri, leader of the Shia Amal movement united with Hezbollah, as his “sole official negotiator” with the Lebanese government, and by extension with the international community.

But, pledged Abu Jafaar Mohammed Nasrallah, head of the executive committee of Amal interviewed in an abandoned school in the southern Beirut suburbs, political pressures would not alter the Lebanese will to fight.

“Israel and the US are trying to implement 1559 by force,” said the former fighter turned teacher. “But there is a truth that the West should know: the resistance in Lebanon is Lebanese, not Iranian or Syrian. The resistance will continue whether Syria and Iran agree or not.”

One of the group’s commanders had been “martyred” on Thursday fighting Israeli forces that had crossed two kilometres over the border into the village of Maroon al Ras, said Abu Jafaar, pledging more to follow.

“Israel may have defeated the united Arab armies, but resistance works on a different system,” he said, the room suddenly plunged into darkness by another power cut.

“It is like a spirit force; not known and not seen. If Israel begins a ground offensive, let the world anticipate that a new page in Middle East history will have begun.”