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A front-row seat for this
Lebanese tragedy
By Robert Fisk
05/22/07 "The
Independent" --- -- -There is something obscene
about watching the siege of Nahr el-Bared. The old Palestinian
camp - home to 30,000 lost souls who will never go "home" -
basks in the Mediterranean sunlight beyond a cluster of orange
orchards. Soldiers of the Lebanese army, having retaken their
positions on the main road north, idle their time aboard their
old personnel carriers. And we - we representatives of the
world's press - sit equally idly atop a half-built apartment
block, basking in the little garden or sipping cups of scalding
tea beside the satellite dishes where the titans of television
stride by in their blue space suits and helmets.
And then comes the crackle-crackle of rifle fire and a shoal of
bullets drifts out of the camp. A Lebanese army tank fires a
shell in return and we feel the faint shock wave from the camp.
How many are dead? We don't know. How many are wounded? The Red
Cross cannot yet enter to find out. We are back at another of
those tragic Lebanese stage shows: the siege of Palestinians.
Only this time, of course, we have Sunni Muslim fighters in the
camp, in many cases shooting at Sunni Muslim soldiers who are
standing in a Sunni Muslim village. It was a Lebanese colleague
who seemed to put his finger on it all. "Syria is showing that
Lebanon doesn't have to be Christians versus Muslims or Shia
versus Sunnis," he said. "It can be Sunnis versus Sunnis. And
the Lebanese army can't storm into Nahr el-Bared. That would be
a step far greater than this government can take."
And there is the rub. To get at the Sunni Fatah al-Islam, the
army has to enter the camp. So the group remains, as potent as
it was on Sunday when it staged its mini-revolution in Tripoli
and ended up with its dead fighters burning in blazing apartment
blocks and 23 dead soldiers and policemen on the streets.
And yes, it is difficult not to feel Syria's hands these days.
Fouad Siniora's government, surrounded in its little "green
zone" in central Beirut, is being drained of power. The army is
more and more running Lebanon, ever more tested because it, too,
of course, contains Lebanon's Sunnis and Shia and Maronites and
Druze. What fractures, what greater strains can be put on this
little country as Siniora still pleads for a UN tribunal to try
those who murdered ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005?
We read through the list of army dead. Most of the names appear
to be Sunni. And we glance up to the fleecy clouds and across
the mountain range to where the Syrian border lies scarcely 10
miles away. Not difficult to reach Nahr el-Barad from the
frontier. Not difficult to resupply. The geography makes a kind
of political sense up here. And just up the road is the Syrian
frontier post.
The soldiers are polite, courteous with journalists. This must
be one of the few countries in the world where soldiers treat
journalists as old friends, where they blithely allow them to
broadcast from in front of their positions, borrowing their
newspapers, sharing cigarettes, chatting, believing that we have
our job to do. But more and more we are wondering if we are not
cataloguing the sad disintegration of this country. The Lebanese
army is on the streets of Beirut to defend Siniora, on the
streets of Sidon to prevent sectarian disturbances, on the roads
of southern Lebanon watching the Israeli frontier and now, up
here in the far north, besieging the poor and the beaten
Palestinians of Nahr el-Bared and the dangerous little
groupuscule which may - or may not - be taking its orders from
Damascus.
The journey back to Beirut is now littered with checkpoints and
even the capital has become dangerous once more. In Ashrafieh in
the early hours, a bomb explosion - we could hear it all over
the city - killed a Christian woman. No suspects, of course.
There never are. Posters still demand the truth of Hariri's
murder. Other posters demand the truth of an earlier prime
ministerial murder, that of Rashid Karami. Several, just the
down the road from our little roof proudly carry the portrait of
Saddam Hussein. "Martyr of 'Al-Adha'," they proclaim, marking
the date of his execution. So even Iraq's collapse now touches
us all here in our Sunni village where the Sunni dictator of
Iraq is honoured rather than loathed.
A flurry of rockets rumbled over the camp before dusk. The
soldiers scarcely bothered to look. And across the orange
orchards and the deserted tenement streets of Nahr el-Bared, the
sea froths and sparkles as if we were all on holiday, as this
nation trembles beneath our feet.
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
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