06/24/07 "The
Independent" -- - They are in the
schools, in empty hospitals, in halls and mosques
and in the streets. The Shia Muslim refugees of
southern Lebanon, driven from their homes by the
Israelis, are arriving in Sidon by the thousand,
cared for by Sunni Muslims and then sent north to
join the 600,000 displaced Lebanese in Beirut. More
than 34,000 have passed through here in the past
four days alone, a tide of misery and anger. It will
take years to heal their wounds, and billions of
dollars to repair their damaged property.
And who can blame them for their flight? For the
second time in eight days, the Israelis committed a
war crime yesterday. They ordered the villagers of
Taire, near the border, to leave their homes and
then - as their convoy of cars and minibuses
obediently trailed northwards - the Israeli air
force fired a missile into the rear minibus, killing
three refugees and seriously wounding 13 other
civilians. The rocket that killed them is believed
to have been a Hellfire missile made by Lockheed
Martin in Florida.
Nine days ago, the Israeli army ordered the
inhabitants of a neighbouring village, Marwaheen, to
leave their homes and then fired rockets into one of
their evacuation trucks, blasting the women and
children inside to their deaths. And this is the
same Israeli air force which was praised last week
by one of Israel's greatest defenders - Harvard law
professor Alan Dershowitz - because it "takes
extraordinary steps to minimise civilian
casualties".
Nor have the Israelis spared Sidon. A heap of
rubble and pancaked walls is all that is left of the
Fatima Zahra mosque, a Hizbollah institution in the
centre of the city, its minaret crumbled and its
dome now sitting on the concrete, a black flag still
flying from its top. When Israeli warplanes came
early yesterday morning, the 75-year-old caretaker
had no time to run from the building; he died of his
wounds hours later. His overturned white plastic
chair still lies by the gate. The mosque is unlikely
to have been used for military purposes; a school
belonging to the Hariris, Sidon's all-powerful Sunni
family, stands next door; they would never have
allowed weapons into the building.
Not that Hizbollah - which killed two more
Israeli civilians with their rockets in Haifa
yesterday - have respected Sidon, whose population
is 95 per cent Sunni. They tried to fire
Iranian-made missiles at Israel from the seafront
Corniche and from beside the city slaughterhouse
last week. On both occasions, residents physically
prevented them from opening fire.
The multimillion-dollar Hariri Foundation -
created by the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri,
who was assassinated last year - has helped 24,000
Shia refugees out of the south and on to Beirut but
its generosity has not always been happily received.
One group of refugees sheltering in a technical
school in Meheniyeh punched and taunted Hariri
workers. Elsewhere, the foundation's staff have been
cursed by fleeing families. "They are telling us
that we are working for the Americans and that this
is why we are taking them out," said Ghena Hariri -
Rafik's niece and a Georgetown graduate. "It is
something that drains our energy. We are working 24
hours a day and at the end of the day they curse us.
But I feel so sorry for them. Now they are being
told by the Israelis to leave their villages on foot
and they have to walk dozens of kilometres in this
heat."
It's not difficult to see how this war can damage
the delicate sectarian framework that exists in
Lebanon. One group of Shia families - housed in a
school in the Druze mountains of the Chouf - tried
to put Hizbollah's yellow banners on the roof and
members of Walid Jumblatt's Druze Popular Socialist
Party had to tear them down. Their act may have
saved the refugees' lives.
Yet many of the Shia in this beautiful Crusader
port have learnt how kind their Sunni neighbours can
be. "We are here - where else can we go?" Nazek
Kadnah asked as she sat in the corner of a mosque
which Rafik Hariri built and dedicated to his
father, Haj Baha'udin Hariri. "But they look after
us here as their brothers and sisters and now we are
safe."
These sentiments provoke some dark questions.
Why, for example, can't these poor people be shown
the same compassion from Tony Blair as he supposedly
felt for the Muslims of Kosovo when they were being
driven from their homes by the Serbs? These
thousands are as terrified and homeless as the
Kosovo Albanians who fled to Macedonia in 1998 and
for whom Mr Blair claimed he was waging a moral war.
But for the Shia Muslims sleeping homeless in Sidon
there is to be no such moral posturing - and no
ceasefire suggestions from Mr Blair, who has aligned
himself with the Israelis and the Americans.
And what exactly is the purpose of driving more
than half a million people from their homes? Many of
these poor people sit clutching their front-door
keys, just as the Palestinians of Galilee did when
they arrived in Lebanon 58 years ago to spend the
rest of their lives as refugees. Yes, the Shia
Muslims of Lebanon probably will go home. But to
what? A war between the Hizbollah and a Western
intervention force? Or further bombardment by the
Israelis?
The Sidon refugees now have 36 schools in which
they can shelter - but they are the lucky ones.
Across southern Lebanon, the innocent continued to
die. One was an eight-year-old boy who was killed in
an Israeli air raid on a village close to Tyre.
Eight more civilians were wounded when an Israeli
missile hit a vehicle outside the Najem hospital in
Tyre. And during the morning, one of Lebanon's
journalists, Layal Nejib, a photographer for the
magazine Al-Jaras whose pictures were also
transmitted by Agence France Press, was killed in
her taxi by an Israeli air strike near Qana, the
same village in which 106 civilians were massacred
in a UN base by Israeli artillery shells in 1996.
She was only 23.
In her marble-walled home above Sidon, Bahia
Hariri - Ghena's mother, the sister of the murdered
former prime minister and a local member of
parliament - sat grim-faced, scarcely controlling
her fury. "We are in this terrible situation but we
haven't any window to resolve this situation," she
said. "Rafik Hariri is no longer with us. The
international community is not with us. Who is with
us? God. And the old Lebanese. And the Arab world,
we hope, will help us. The only resistance we can
show is to be a united Lebanon. But we have only a
small margin in which to dream."
They are in the schools, in empty hospitals, in
halls and mosques and in the streets. The Shia
Muslim refugees of southern Lebanon, driven from
their homes by the Israelis, are arriving in Sidon
by the thousand, cared for by Sunni Muslims and then
sent north to join the 600,000 displaced Lebanese in
Beirut. More than 34,000 have passed through here in
the past four days alone, a tide of misery and
anger. It will take years to heal their wounds, and
billions of dollars to repair their damaged
property.
And who can blame them for their flight? For the
second time in eight days, the Israelis committed a
war crime yesterday. They ordered the villagers of
Taire, near the border, to leave their homes and
then - as their convoy of cars and minibuses
obediently trailed northwards - the Israeli air
force fired a missile into the rear minibus, killing
three refugees and seriously wounding 13 other
civilians. The rocket that killed them is believed
to have been a Hellfire missile made by Lockheed
Martin in Florida.
Nine days ago, the Israeli army ordered the
inhabitants of a neighbouring village, Marwaheen, to
leave their homes and then fired rockets into one of
their evacuation trucks, blasting the women and
children inside to their deaths. And this is the
same Israeli air force which was praised last week
by one of Israel's greatest defenders - Harvard law
professor Alan Dershowitz - because it "takes
extraordinary steps to minimise civilian
casualties".
Nor have the Israelis spared Sidon. A heap of
rubble and pancaked walls is all that is left of the
Fatima Zahra mosque, a Hizbollah institution in the
centre of the city, its minaret crumbled and its
dome now sitting on the concrete, a black flag still
flying from its top. When Israeli warplanes came
early yesterday morning, the 75-year-old caretaker
had no time to run from the building; he died of his
wounds hours later. His overturned white plastic
chair still lies by the gate. The mosque is unlikely
to have been used for military purposes; a school
belonging to the Hariris, Sidon's all-powerful Sunni
family, stands next door; they would never have
allowed weapons into the building.
Not that Hizbollah - which killed two more
Israeli civilians with their rockets in Haifa
yesterday - have respected Sidon, whose population
is 95 per cent Sunni. They tried to fire
Iranian-made missiles at Israel from the seafront
Corniche and from beside the city slaughterhouse
last week. On both occasions, residents physically
prevented them from opening fire.
The multimillion-dollar Hariri Foundation -
created by the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri,
who was assassinated last year - has helped 24,000
Shia refugees out of the south and on to Beirut but
its generosity has not always been happily received.
One group of refugees sheltering in a technical
school in Meheniyeh punched and taunted Hariri
workers. Elsewhere, the foundation's staff have been
cursed by fleeing families. "They are telling us
that we are working for the Americans and that this
is why we are taking them out," said Ghena Hariri -
Rafik's niece and a Georgetown graduate. "It is
something that drains our energy. We are working 24
hours a day and at the end of the day they curse us.
But I feel so sorry for them. Now they are being
told by the Israelis to leave their villages on foot
and they have to walk dozens of kilometres in this
heat."
It's not difficult to see how this war can damage
the delicate sectarian framework that exists in
Lebanon. One group of Shia families - housed in a
school in the Druze mountains of the Chouf - tried
to put Hizbollah's yellow banners on the roof and
members of Walid Jumblatt's Druze Popular Socialist
Party had to tear them down. Their act may have
saved the refugees' lives.
Yet many of the Shia in
this beautiful Crusader port have learnt how kind
their Sunni neighbours can be. "We are here - where
else can we go?" Nazek Kadnah asked as she sat in
the corner of a mosque which Rafik Hariri built and
dedicated to his father, Haj Baha'udin Hariri. "But
they look after us here as their brothers and
sisters and now we are safe."
These sentiments provoke some dark questions.
Why, for example, can't these poor people be shown
the same compassion from Tony Blair as he supposedly
felt for the Muslims of Kosovo when they were being
driven from their homes by the Serbs? These
thousands are as terrified and homeless as the
Kosovo Albanians who fled to Macedonia in 1998 and
for whom Mr Blair claimed he was waging a moral war.
But for the Shia Muslims sleeping homeless in Sidon
there is to be no such moral posturing - and no
ceasefire suggestions from Mr Blair, who has aligned
himself with the Israelis and the Americans.
And what exactly is the purpose of driving more
than half a million people from their homes? Many of
these poor people sit clutching their front-door
keys, just as the Palestinians of Galilee did when
they arrived in Lebanon 58 years ago to spend the
rest of their lives as refugees. Yes, the Shia
Muslims of Lebanon probably will go home. But to
what? A war between the Hizbollah and a Western
intervention force? Or further bombardment by the
Israelis?
The Sidon refugees now have 36 schools in which
they can shelter - but they are the lucky ones.
Across southern Lebanon, the innocent continued to
die. One was an eight-year-old boy who was killed in
an Israeli air raid on a village close to Tyre.
Eight more civilians were wounded when an Israeli
missile hit a vehicle outside the Najem hospital in
Tyre. And during the morning, one of Lebanon's
journalists, Layal Nejib, a photographer for the
magazine Al-Jaras whose pictures were also
transmitted by Agence France Press, was killed in
her taxi by an Israeli air strike near Qana, the
same village in which 106 civilians were massacred
in a UN base by Israeli artillery shells in 1996.
She was only 23.
In her marble-walled home above Sidon, Bahia
Hariri - Ghena's mother, the sister of the murdered
former prime minister and a local member of
parliament - sat grim-faced, scarcely controlling
her fury. "We are in this terrible situation but we
haven't any window to resolve this situation," she
said. "Rafik Hariri is no longer with us. The
international community is not with us. Who is with
us? God. And the old Lebanese. And the Arab world,
we hope, will help us. The only resistance we can
show is to be a united Lebanon. But we have only a
small margin in which to dream."
