Lebanon

The systematic burning and destruction of a Palestinian camp in Lebanon

Dan Pearson — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 10:49:00 -0500

Short Information Teaser

the media is banned and the world is silent? -Michael Birmingham reports from Nahr al-Bared

Excerpt

October 24, 2007

By Michael Birmingham in Nahr al-Bared

Body

By Michael Birmingham October 24th, 2007

NAHR AL-BARED,LEBANON-Nahr Al Bared is a Palestinian refugee camp in the north of Lebanon which has been home to about 40,000 Palestinian people, most of whom are the children and grandchildren of those who left Palestine in 1948. Some like Abu Mohammad were born in Palestine. He was ten years old, and next year it will be sixty years since the formation of the State of Israel was achieved through the ethnic cleansing of Abu Mohammad and so many others from their home in Palestine. He told me this as the two of us sat alone in the pitch dark while rats ran around beside our chairs at his house. As I left he went in to sleep alone amongst ashes and rodents, with no neighbours around him. Trying to belief that he still has something left to protect.

Between May and September of this year, a ferocious battle took place between the Lebanese Army and a small armed group known as Fatah Al Islam. From the first the day, the Lebanese Army surrounded the camp and fired in artillery, maintaining this course for months. Most of the residents of the camp were forced to leave with the clothes on their backs within the first three days. As the number of young Lebanese soldiers killed and horribly maimed rose through the battle, Lebanon became awash with patriotism and grief, any questioning of the army taboo.

Something terrible has been done to the residents of Nahr al Bared, and the Lebanese people are being spared the details. Over the past two weeks, since the camp was partly reopened to a few of its residents, many of us who have been there have been stunned by a powerful reality. Beyond the massive destruction of the homes from three months of bombing, room after room, house after house have been burned. Burned from the inside. Amongst the ashes on the ground, are the insides of what appear to have been car tyres. The walls have soot dripping down from what seems clearly to have been something flammable sprayed on them. Rooms, houses, shops, garages – all blackened ruins, yet having had no damage from bombing or battle. They were burned deliberately by people entering and torching them.

How many we do not know, it is too large for a few people to comprehensively assess. But finding an un-bombed house or business that has not been torched is very hard indeed.

Why did this happen? Why have the people whose entire life’s work is to be found in ashes on the floor of these burned out homes, not been given any information about this - not a word? Each day new people return to find that this is what has happened to their homes.

It is not just the burning of houses. Cars that residents were ordered to leave behind in the first days of the battle have been smashed up. Mopeds and TVs and all that ordinary people value, also broken up. Fridge after fridge with bullets through them. All of this clearly done from inside the houses, not from any outside battle.

People returning to their homes sit outside alone on the ground. Stunned. When you ask them to bring you into their houses, they tell you, person after person, of how their valuables were stolen. Even where the valuables were well hidden, everything was ransacked and valuables found. Explosives were used to get through locked doors or to open safes. Items that people have had stolen include everything from clothes to cars. That which has not been burned, which was not smashed, which was of value seems to have vanished. Where?

This camp was strictly out of bounds to the Palestinian people. They could not have done this. Who did this and why must surely be investigated before more vital evidence has disappeared. A small amount of this may be attributable to Fatal al-Islam fighters. But there is clear evidence that some elements of the army acted improperly.

On the inside walls of many, many houses, are written slogans. Everything from proud soldiers noting army units, to profoundly racist, offensive slogans against Palestinian people. Many families have found some of their belongings in nearby houses. Faeces are on some mattresses and floors.

Every day that goes by more families return to the camp. Within hours, they have swept up and cleared away ashes and debris, so that they can try to imagine where to begin again. Mattresses with faeces are being burned. Journalists are still prohibited from the camp. Cameras are illegal there. Human rights groups have not entered. Every day that goes by, more evidence is lost.

For those of us who lived in nearby Baddawi refugee camp during the battle, this follows from months of people from Nahr al Bared telling stories of torture and abuse at checkpoints, and in the Lebanese Ministry of Defence at Yarsi. It also follows on peaceful demonstrators from Nahr al Bared who bravely tried to tell the world what was happening being shot dead near Baddawi. The world ignored completely even their deaths.

Amnesty International, the largest human rights organisation in the world was concluding a report on the situation of Palestinians in Lebanon during the past week. It’s delegation left Lebanon without seeing Nahr Al Bared – before it left holding a Beirut press conference which was abruptly ended at the first mention of Nahr Al Bared.

The United States Government played a key role in this battle, strongly supporting politically and with munitions the Lebanese government’s decision to seek a military solution. The Lebanese offered to Fatah Al Islam simply to surrender or die. The European Union and many Arab countries also clearly supported this approach. The moral and legal imperative to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and not to target civilian communities was not a concern. The Palestinians of Lebanon, the subject of so many crocodile tears from around the world during infamous massacres in the past, once again are without support at the moment when it might actually matter.

What happened in Nahr al Bared? Why does the world not seem to care?

Michael Birmingham is an Irish peace activist who has been mostly based in Lebanon since July 2006. He has formerly worked on human rights and social justice in Ireland and Iraq.

What We Leave Behind: From Kosovo to Lebanon, Cluster Bomb Casualties Continue to Mount

voices — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 20:04:22 -0600

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Frida Berrigan writes of indiscriminate weaponry and the permanent state of terror they create

Excerpt

By Frida Berrigan
(c) In These Times, December 11, 2006

In just one week in October, a series of bomb scares swept across Germany. Outside of Hannover, 22,000 people were evacuated when three bombs were discovered. A few days later in the same city, a weapons removal squad defused a 500-pound bomb found near the highway. Finally, a highway worker was killed when his cutting machine hit a buried bomb on the main highway into Frankfurt.

The bombs hadn’t been planted by terrorists, and they weren’t the opening salvos of the next war. The culprit was unexploded ordnance left over from a war fought more than 60 years ago. “We’ll have enough work to keep us busy for the next 100 to 120 years,” the owner of a bomb-defusing company told the New York Times.

Body

By Frida Berrigan
(c) In These Times, December 11, 2006

The submunitions dispersed by cluster bombs are a lot smaller than 500 pounds, but their use in every major conflict since World War II ensures that bomb clearers the world over will have work for decades—even centuries—to come. From Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, to the countries of the former Yugoslavia, and onto Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, modern battlefields are littered with bombs that continue to kill long after wars have ended. Ninety-eight percent of those killed or injured by cluster bombs are civilians. And yet international efforts to restrict the use of cluster bombs—modeled after landmine treaties of previous years—are being undermined by lack of U.S. participation. Worse, instead of destroying old cluster bomb stockpiles, the United States is exporting them to allies around the world.

What is a cluster bomb?

Although varied in size and configuration, a cluster munition is essentially a large canister—as long as 13 feet and weighing up to 2,000 pounds—packed with bomblets or submunitions. Launched from the air by fighter planes, bombers or helicopters, or shot out of artillery, rockets or missile systems, the canister is designed to break open mid-air, spreading the submunitions over areas as large as two or three football fields. While some modern systems are outfitted with GPS or infrared guidance systems, or “wind correction” kits to stabilize their spin, most are free-falling or gravity devices. The bomblets—a single canister can hold hundreds—ranging in size from a soda can to a flashlight battery, are packed with shrapnel and an explosive charge. They are meant to explode on impact with the ground, differentiating them from landmines, which are triggered by the victim.

Militaries throughout the world value cluster bombs because a single volley can impede or slow advancing troops and destroy or render unusable airfields and surface-to-air missile sites. But the weapons do not always work as designed. Mine removal teams, post-conflict workers, military officials and even the companies themselves admit that wind, weather and soil conditions, as well as possible mechanical malfunction or human error, can all drive the “dud rate” for these weapons as high as 40 percent.

Cluster bombs are not singled out for prohibition under international law, despite the fact that they cannot distinguish between civilian and combatant and their effects stretch beyond the duration of hostilities—two crucial litmus tests for munitions under the Geneva Conventions that govern conduct during conflicts.

Israel’s war against Lebanon: cluster bombs on display

Lebanon provides an object lesson in how these tenets of the Geneva Conventions are not upheld and how implementation of existing law is inadequate to the challenge. On August 14, 2006, Israel and Lebanon signed a peace agreement ending their 34-day war, yet the body count continues to rise. According to a November Handicap International report, since mid-August, unexploded ordnance has killed 21 and wounded another 121 Lebanese civilians.

An Israeli Defense Forces spokesman insists that “all of the weapons and munitions used by the IDF are legal according to international law and their use conforms to international standards.” That is cold comfort for the family of 11-year-old Ramy Shibleh, one of the post-war victims. He was gathering pinecones outside Halta, a small southern town where the Lebanese army had already cleared mines twice. But more bombs remained, including the one that Ramy and his brother hit with their cart of pinecones. Reuters reports that Ramy tried to toss the rock-like object out of the way, but it exploded, tearing off his right arm and the back of his head and killing him instantly. His mother keeps the shreds of the yellow shirt Ramy was wearing when he died. “He was only picking the pine nuts to buy the toys he loved,” she told reporters.

With its weapon industry and the billions in military aid that it provides to Israel each year, the United States is implicated in the war and its grim aftermath without firing one shot or dropping one bomb. At least two of Israel’s cluster bomb and launch systems are U.S.-manufactured. Human Rights Watch discovered remnants of the “M483A1” 155mm-artillery projectiles, which each contain 88 M42 AND M46 submunitions. The projectiles are known as “Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions” (dual in the sense that they are anti-personnel and anti-vehicle) and were developed at “the Army’s Center of Lethality”—the Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center in Picatinny, New Jersey. The researchers also found M26 rockets fired from Lockheed Martin’s Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS). Each MLRS can fire up to 12 rockets at once, and each rocket contains 644 M77 submunitions.

While the Israel Defense Force (IDF) is responsible for the vast majority of the millions of cluster bombs used throughout the war, recent reports from Human Rights Watch assert that Hezbollah shot a hundred or more Chinese-made rockets packed with cluster submunitions. During the war, three civilians in northern Israel were wounded, but as of this writing, there have been no reports of post-conflict casualties from these Hezbollah weapons.

The State Department is investigating Israel’s use of American-made cluster bombs during the war in Lebanon—in particular, whether Israel broke a secret agreement made with the United States in 1967 not to use cluster bombs against civilians. In their October 2006 report “Foreseeable Harm,” Landmine Action disclosed the conditions of the agreement, including the stipulation that Israel was to use cluster munitions “only for defensive purposes, against fortified military targets, and only if attacked by two or more ‘Arab states.’ ” Additionally, the secret provisions prohibit use of the bombs except against “regular forces of a sovereign nation” and in “special wartime conditions,” according to the administration and congressional officials. The arrangement gave the IDF greater latitude than the typical regulations that require foreign governments to use U.S.-origin military items solely for internal security and legitimate self-defense.

There have not been any follow-up reports in the media on the status of the State Department’s investigation, or its conclusions. Calls to the Office of Defense Compliance by In These Times requesting more information were not returned. But it does not take months of careful study to conclude that the IDF flagrantly violated U.S. law as well as the secret agreement made to skirt that law, to say nothing of the Geneva Conventions.

And then there is the timing. During the last three days of the war—as the final touches on the peace agreement were being made—Israel dumped an estimated 1.2 million bomblets throughout Lebanon, a country smaller than Connecticut. Jan Egeland, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, was decidedly undiplomatic in his assessment: “What is shocking and, I would say, to me, completely immoral is that 90 percent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution.”

With their failure rate of up to 40 percent, more than one of every three bombs may not detonate immediately—lying in wait for children, trucks and livestock.

While the IDF has not explained their decision to saturate southern Lebanon with bombs, an October 6 New York Times article posits that Israel wanted to inflict as much last minute harm on Hezbollah as possible, or slow the repopulation of border communities. An unnamed Israeli commander of a rocket unit in Lebanon told Haaretz on September 12 that the saturation bombing with cluster weapons was “insane and monstrous; we covered entire towns in cluster bombs.”

The saturation bombing has effectively crippled agriculture. Farmers’ fields and orchards are now minefields and their crops are rotting on the stalk. The summer tobacco, wheat, and fruit, as well as late-yielding crops like olives, cannot be harvested and winter crops, like lentils and chickpeas, have not been planted because farmers cannot plow their fields. Many of the two to three daily casualties are poor farmers desperate to feed their families from fields that are now de facto minefields.

Rida Noureddine, an olive and wheat farmer whose land is littered with cluster bombs, feels the frustration of many southern Lebanese who are dependent on the land. He told the New York Times, “I feel as though someone has tied my arms, or is holding me by my neck, suffocating me because this land is my soul.”

Cluster bombs in the eyes of the world

With the spotlight on Israel’s use of cluster bombs in Lebanon and the failure of international law to stop the carnage there, the call for a ban on cluster bombs similar to the prohibition on landmines is growing louder. Belgium instituted a ban and Germany announced their troops will no longer use cluster weaponry. Australia and Norway have declared a moratorium. Sweden, Mexico, the Vatican and the International Committee of the Red Cross are all calling for a ban.

The model for their efforts is the Landmine Ban or “Ottawa Treaty,” which entered into force in March 1999. The treaty prohibits the manufacture, trade and use of anti-personnel mines, obliges signing countries to destroy stockpiles within four years and clear their own territory within 10 years, and urges governments to help poorer countries clear land and assist landmine victims. Non-governmental organizations like Landmine Action and the Mennonite Central Committee argue that once a cluster submunition hits the ground, it is essentially a landmine and should be barred under the treaty.

The United States is not among the 151 states that have ratified the Landmine Ban, and the Bush Administration’s February 2004 landmine policy reserves the right to use so-called “self-destructing mines” through 2010. Israel, Burma, North Korea and 36 other countries also remain outside the international consensus banning landmines.

Another possible tool for anti-cluster bomb campaigners is the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). As ratified, the Convention prohibits or restricts the use of weapons that cause excessive injuries or have indiscriminate effects on people—including weapons that leave undetectable fragments in the human body, mines and booby-traps, incendiary weapons (such as white phosphorus used by the United States in Iraq and Israel in Lebanon) and blinding laser weapons.

In November 2003, a fifth protocol, addressing “Explosive Remnants of War” like cluster weapon duds, was added. So far, only 26 nations have signed on to Protocol V and agreed to negotiate responsibility for clearance, provide risk education to the local population, improve the reliability of munitions through “voluntary best practices,” and continue to implement existing international humanitarian law. These are useful measures, but they do not address the use of cluster bombs, just what to do after they have landed. In addition, ratification by many more countries—especially by countries like Israel and the United States that are using these weapons—is needed for the effort to be more than symbolic.

The CCW’s Third Review Conference ran from November 7-17 in Geneva. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and other key NGOs and nations see an immediate freeze on the use of inaccureate and unreliable cluster munitions as a worthy outcome of the meeting along with elimination of stockpiles of legacy systems, and a complete ban on the use of cluster munitions against military targets in populated areas. ICRC will hold an “international expert meeting” in 2007 as a first step toward a new global pact on cluster weapons. Against the backdrop of Lebanon’s suffering, there is broad support for these steps. But maintaining the sense of urgency will not be easy, especially in the face of diplomatic foot-dragging by key states like the United States, which says Protocol V is an adequate response to cluster weapons (even though the United States has not yet ratified the measure). In advance of the meeting, the State Department asserted support for Protocol V, but cautioned that it is not interested in “negotiating new rules on cluster munitions or other explosive remnants of war.”

Concerted and genuine support from the United States (as a world leader and one of the largest manufacturers of cluster bombs) for banning cluster bombs won’t bring Ramy back to his grieving family, and it won’t restore Rida’s orchards and livelihood, but it could ensure that future generations do not share their suffering.

U.S. cluster weapons: vital, versatile and vicious

While the United States has not ratified the landmine treaty or the CCW, and does not indicate any willingness to accept even partial responsibility for this summer’s brutal war, the Pentagon is concerned about cluster weapons. In an October 2004 report to Congress, the Department of Defense described cluster munitions as “vital” and “versatile,” but military officials admit they are “keenly aware of and interested in reducing our cluster munitions dud rates and improving the accuracy of the delivery methods.” Consequently, the Pentagon recently adopted the “Cohen Policy,” named after former Defense Secretary William Cohen, which requires the military to only purchase new cluster weapons that have a 1 percent or smaller dud rate.

Human Rights Watch estimates that the U.S. has a stockpile of 1 billion “old, unreliable and inaccurate” cluster munitions. Some of the so-called “legacy” weapons have been dismantled, but the Defense Department continues to transfer cluster weapons and delivery systems to allies around the world. The Defense Department analyzed various submunitions and found failure rates of 3 to 23 percent under test conditions, but military officials and others acknowledge that these rates can be exacerbated by environmental factors.

The Army, Marines and other military services are requesting hundreds of millions of dollars for new cluster weapons and the retrofitting of existing systems to conform to the Cohen policy. Weapons manufacturers have adapted to the new policy, and their promotional material emphasizes the “limited footprint” and “targetable” nature of their weapons. In vivid military jargon, weapons manufacturer Textron describes the CLAW (Clean Lightweight Area Weapon) as “the next generation smart soft target munition.” (For those not familiar with the lingo, a soft target is a person.) The Rhode Island-based company boasts that a “single 64-pound munition has the footprint and effectiveness of a 1,000 lb. legacy cluster bomb.”

The Cohen policy and the new weapons it has spawned ensures that despite whatever progress is made in Geneva and at other international fora to ban cluster bombs, the eight U.S. companies that produce cluster weapons, including recognizable names like Textron, General Dynamics, L-3 Communications, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, will continue to manufacture the systems and the military will keep using them.

The United States may well be the largest producer, but it is not alone. Human Right Watch asserts that 33 other countries produce more than 210 different types of cluster munitions. And at least 12 other countries have transferred cluster munitions to as many as 58 nations.

U.S. bombs at work

In its 2004 report, the Pentagon acknowledged “the potential danger to non-combatants posed by UXO [unexploded ordnance]” and declared that it had “developed strict rules of engagement and targeting methodologies, intended to minimize risks to civilians in or near the zone of conflict.” But, in a world far removed from law, policy and dud rate calculations, cluster weapons continue to do what they are designed for.

A quick look at some of the war zones of the last 20 years should be enough to make anti-cluster bomb campaigners out of just about anyone.

According to Handicap International, in 1999, the United States and allies dropped more than 2,000 cluster bombs on the territory of former Yugoslavia, where the stated aim was humanitarian intervention. Human Rights Watch documented that cluster strikes killed 90 to 150 civilians and injured many more, constituting up to 23 percent of the total civilian deaths in the conflict, even though cluster bombs amounted to just 6 percent of bombs dropped.

A few years later in Afghanistan, the goal was different, but the results were similar. From October 2001 to March 2002, in a bid to topple the Taliban, the United States dropped about 1,228 cluster bombs, representing about 5 percent of the U.S. bombs dropped during that time period. According to Handicap International, there were 121 casualties due to cluster bombs during the same period, but it is impossible to link them all to the United States, as both the Soviet Union and the Taliban had used cluster munitions in previous wars. In an October 2001 incident, a U.S. cluster bomb apparently intended for a nearby military base fell on the small community of Qala Shater, causing 11 to 13 deaths. Casualties included a 17-year-old boy named Najibullah who died in front of his home and 70-year-old Faqir Mohammed.

Iraq: a steel rain’s gonna fall

Over the last 15 years, Iraq has borne the brunt of U.S. cluster bomb use. During the First Gulf War, Handicap International estimates that the United States dropped 47,167 air-delivered cluster munitions containing more than 13 million submunitions. In one day alone—February 21, 1991—U.S. military personnel fired a total of 220,248 M77 submunitions from the Multiple Launch Rocket System made by Lockheed Martin. During the war, the company’s signature system was dubbed “steel rain.” The 1991 “air war” lasted just 43 days, but in the years that followed more than 4,000 civilians have been killed or injured by cluster munition duds. Iraqi civilians were not the only casualties—at least 80 U.S. soldiers have been injured by cluster munitions.

In 2003, one of the earliest reported uses of cluster weapons during Operation Enduring Freedom was also one of the most gruesome. U.S. cluster weapons fired on the al-Hilla community killed 33 and injured another 109. According to Amnesty International, “Injured survivors told reporters how the explosives fell ‘like grapes’ from the sky, and how bomblets bounced through the windows and doors of their homes before exploding.”

In the period between “shock and awe” and “mission accomplished,” the U.S. and U.K. forces dropped between 1,300 and 1,500 cluster munitions from the air, and another 11,600 from land-based systems. The death toll from these assaults has been difficult to calculate. Handicap International places at least a portion of the blame for that difficulty on the Coalition Provisional Authority, saying that “[d]uring the 2003 conflict and its aftermath, the CPA strongly discouraged casualty data collection, especially in relation to cluster submunitions.” The report goes on to note that, as of September, there is still no data collection mechanism for tracking new casualties in Iraq.

Ban it all

Indiscriminate weaponry like cluster bombs hides who is responsible and removes culpability. Without responsibility, how can there be law? The big bomb releases the little bombs, which might kill a soldier tomorrow, a farmer next month, or a child a year from now. Cluster bombing is different from strafing a village, massacring a family or executing a suspected militant. Hands and consciences remain clean while bodies are shredded and pulped. There is no My Lai massacre or No Gun Ri atrocity with cluster weapons. Rather, a permanent state of terror is created where all human activity is dangerous and costly.

Recent experience in Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere demonstrates the grave and lasting consequences of cluster bombs, and reveals the shortcomings of existing international law and its enforcement. Weapons that indiscriminately kills long after hostilities have abated is an anathema to international law—and human decency. It is time to ban them all.

Frida Berrigan is a senior research associate with the Arms Trade Resource Center, a project of the World Policy Institute.

For Israel's Security... Zainab Fawqi-Sleem and the Question of Lebanon

voices — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 19:45:17 -0600

Excerpt

August 28, 2006

by Ramzi Kysia

Yesterday, I shed my first tears for Lebanon.

Yesterday, I visited Houla, a stone’s throw from the Israeli border.

Yesterday, I was discovered by Zainab Fawqi-Sleem - a young, Lebanese woman who was killed in Houla, alongside her sister-in-law, Selma, on July 15th. Zainab is but one of over 1,300 innocents killed in this war, but she is the one who found me.

Body

August 28, 2006

by Ramzi Kysia

Yesterday, I shed my first tears for Lebanon.

Yesterday, I visited Houla, a stone’s throw from the Israeli border.

On October 31st, 1948, in one of the few massacres of the Nakba to occur inside Lebanon, proto-Israeli militas seized the town of Houla, setting off bombs and burning down several houses. They took eighty-five people captive, and summarily executed eighty-two of the them. There’s a memorial to the massacre in the center of town, not far from homes smashed flat by this current war.

According to news reports, Israel bombed and shelled Houla on at least ten separate occasions during this last war. Israeli soldiers repeatedly invaded the town and occupied people’s homes. They remain, in one home, in one corner of the village, to this day. If I had run across those soldiers, I wonder what I could have said to them? What might they have said to me?

I was in Houla yesterday with LebanonSolidarity, a local relief and resistance organization. I was in Houla to assess how we might be able to help the people living there. We brought medicines, and arranged for a doctor to come by and give free medical exams. We took down the names and ages of the people made homeless by the bombings, so we might bring them some donated clothes.

Throughout South Lebanon, there are thousands of destroyed homes and buildings, and tens- of-thousands of homeless. Some towns, like Bint Jbeil and Khiam, are more rubble than anything else. Traveling through South Lebanon today, I am reminded so much of Palestine, of Nablus and Jenin and Gaza.

For Israel’s security, Arabs must not possess functioning towns or secure homes.

More than anything, the people of Houla need drinking water. The town’s main pump was destroyed during the war, and the $20,000 needed to replace it is beyond the scope of our group’s resources. And, again, I am reminded of Palestine and the theft of local water sources, taken in the West Bank to supply Israeli settlements with lush, green, desert lawns and private swimming pools.

For Israel’s security, Arabs must not possess secure access to potable water.

Short hours before Zainab was killed in Houla, Israel bombed a powerplant in al-Jieh, just south of Beirut. Al-Jieh was one of several powerplants across Lebanon that were destroyed during this war.

For Israel’s security, Arabs must not possess electricity.

As in Gaza, where Israel has repeatedly shot at and shelled Palestinian beachgoers, the al -Jieh bombing has stolen Lebanon’s oceanfront. The bombing destroyed the powerplant’s oil tanks, and ruptured the berm built to protect against a spill. Millions of gallons of heavy fuel oil has leaked into the Mediterranean, ruining Lebanon’s once pristine beaches.

For Israel’s security, Arabs must not possess beaches.

The ancient port city of Tyre, some twenty-five kilometers from Houla, has one of Lebanon’s last, remaining, usable beaches. Some Lebanese still go there, to swim and visit with family or friends and, for a while, escape the disaster that is South Lebanon today. Young men with slicked-back brush cuts pass a beer among themselves, as they watch women in French bikinis jump in and out of the surf. In the heart of “Hezbollah” country, at the center of George Bush’s “Islamo-Facist state-within-a-state”, you can still see children building sandcastles here.

But, farther out in the ocean, the Israeli navy maintains its blockade of Lebanon. Nothing is allowed in or out. In Washington D.C., Congressman Tom Lantos has blocked all U.S. humanitarian aid until Lebanon’s government agrees to deploy UN troops along the border with Syria, to stop and search all cross-border traffic - something that Syria has already said it will not permit. Farther south, Israel’s long-running blockade of Gaza has caused, in the UN’s words, a “humanitarian catastrophe” as malnutrition rates there skyrocket.

For Israel’s security, Arabs must not possess open borders, or engage in free trade with the world.

Like so many places in South Lebanon, the roads in and around Houla are severely damaged from the war. South Lebanon’s streets have suddenly come to resemble their sister thoroughfares in Palestine. There, Israeli bulldozers have combined with decades of enforced neglect and the violence to birth a network of degraded and barely passable roads. Here in Lebanon, the same thing has been accomplished in a matter of weeks by dropping over a billion dollars worth of bombs and shells and tanks and soldiers on the South.

For Israel’s security, Arabs must not possess modern roads.

From the hills of Houla, one can see Israel/Palestine. Just over the border, and even before the war, Israel had permanently tethered a videodrone blimp, visible for all to see. The drone is constantly filming Houla, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Overhead, the low, humming sounds of Israel’s unmanned reconnaissance planes have become another permanent part of the landscape.

For Israel’s security, Arabs must not possess privacy.

On July 14th, 2006, Ibrahim Sleem owned a modest ranch house in Houla. Within the walls of his home now lay a surreal jumble of charred furniture, clothes and children’s toys, broken glass, scattered fragments of wood, and chunks of concrete fallen from the walls and ceiling. Sixteen members of his family, including five children, gathered in this home on July 15th, for a quiet meal. As they were visiting after dinner, a bomb or shell exploded among them, killing Ibrahim’s daughter Selma and his daughter-in-law, Zainab. It was an American ordinance that destroyed this home, and killed Zainab and Selma. The writing on the bomb’s fragments is in English, not Hebrew. It happened at precisely 8:28pm. The clock that used to hang on the wall is now forever frozen at that moment.

Outside the home is a small shed, with tools hanging on its walls. Next to the shed is a modest flower garden, and a beautiful Eucalyptus tree. More than all of the destruction I have seen in these past weeks, much more than simply the damage I saw inside the Sleem family home— that shed, that garden, and that tree tore a hole inside of me.

Someone lived in this place. Someone used those tools to maintain their home. Someone planted that garden, and carefully tended it. Someone sat beneath that tree in the afternoons and enjoyed a cup of tea. Someone loved this place.

Zainab Fawqi-Sleem was twenty-two years old and two months pregant when, for Israel’s security, she was killed. Zainab’s nine month old daughter, Nadine, will never know her mother’s love. Zainab’s unborn child will never know life at all.

Living in Lebanon today, I am left with a single, unanswered question. It’s a terribly important question. It is a vitally important question.

The United States speaks for Israel’s security from all we Islamo-Facist terrorist Arabs living throughout the Middle East. The United Nations Interim Force speaks for Israel’s security here in Lebanon. During the war, Hosni Mubarak, the dictator of Egypt, spoke for Israel’s security. During the war, King Abdullah, the dictator of Jordan, spoke for Israel’s security. In Marjayoun, a mostly Christian village in South Lebanon, the Lebanese Army even offered the Israelis tea when they invaded.

For the West, and for all its pet Arab dictators, this is the proper moral response to Israeli terror. We Arabs must not only accept all of the bombs and the blockades. We must not only accept the destruction of our homes and dreams. We must, in fact, rejoice in our own devastation. This is, after all, the joyous “birth-pangs of a new Middle East.”

My question, our question, Lebanon’s question, is simply this: Who will speak for Zainab Fawqi-Sleem?

Ramzi Kysia is a Lebanese-American essayist and activist. He is currently working with LebanonSolidarity.org to resist war and renew shattered communities in South Lebanon.

A Resistance to War

voices — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 19:44:04 -0600

Excerpt

August 22, 2006

by Ramzi Kysia

lebanonsolidarity.org

Last week, I made my first trip to South Lebanon since the war began. Having traveled a fifth of the world, and been present during “wars” in Iraq, Palestine, and New York – I can honestly say that I have never seen such complete devastation in my entire life. The only thing that even comes close are the pictures I’ve seen from World War II. Much of South Lebanon simply lies in ruin.

In the South, Israeli warplanes occasionally break the sound barrier, rattling people as they fly off on God knows what missions. Israeli drones constantly fly overhead. The low, insistent hum of their engines serves as a continual reminder that Lebanon is not yet safe.

Body

August 22, 2006

by Ramzi Kysia

lebanonsolidarity.org

Bombed out gas stations and the twisted, blackened remains of what once were cars line the roads. The roads themselves are a wreck, pockmarked with craters and covered by fallen bridges, in places completely impassable. There are miles of roads lined with chalk-colored vegetation, so covered are they from the dust of destroyed buildings that you can see no green whatsoever. Almost every single city and village throughout South Lebanon has significant war damage. Almost every single one. The dead are still being pulled from the rubble.

In Qantara, a village of some three hundred and fifty families, twenty-five homes are destroyed, and another fifty seriously damaged. A man passes out pictures of his fifteen year old son in barely controlled panic. He hasn’t seen the boy for nearly a month.

In Sriefa, three entire blocks of homes are smashed to ground. Other buildings and shops throughout the town are bombed and destroyed. Women walk the streets, sobbing.

In Sultanya, dozens of homes are destroyed. The local hospital lies bombed and gutted by fire. The house I stayed at in the village has three unexploded cluster bombs in its garden.

Bint Jbeil, a city of over eighty thousand people, is completely shattered. Much of the city is simply rubble, but even what’s left standing is damaged. The entire back wall of the three-story primary school is just gone. The city center is barely passable to cars, so cratered are the roads. I literally did not see a single building in all of Bint Jbeil without serious damage. Not one. Not a one.

In Siddiqine, block after block of residential neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble. From over three-hundred multi-story homes and buildings, nothing larger than a breadbasket remains. I met a man wandering through the wreckage who gave a short, sardonic laugh when he found out I was an American. “Here is the democracy,” he said, pointing at the ruins, “here is the freedom.” Then his eyes teared up, as he told me that he couldn’t even figure out where his house used to stand.

This wasn’t a war against Hezbollah, with some collateral damage on the side. This was a war against the basic structures necessary to sustain civilians in South Lebanon. This was a war against the basic structures of human life.

But there are Lebanese who will not let that happen.

During the war, a coalition of Lebanese educators, engineers, architects, merchants, health care workers, NGO workers, students, and others, came together under banner of Civil Resistance - the Arabic phrase for non-violent direct action. Our founding statement of purpose began with the words, “We, the people of Lebanon, call upon the local and international community to join a campaign of civil resistance to Israel’s war against our country and our people. We declare Lebanon an open country for civil resistance.”

During the war we organized a fifty-two car convoy to take needed relief supplies from Beirut to the South, disregarding the Israeli ban on traveling in our own country. We were stopped by internal, Lebanese politics – something we are going to make sure does not happen again. Today, Lebanon is united in resistance to war.

Today, we are organizing a nation-wide petition demanding that the Lebanese government expel Jeffery Feldman, the U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon, as a threat to peace.

Today, we are organizing to provide direct assistance to communities in need throughout South Lebanon.

In just the past, few days we’ve organized solidarity missions to Qantara and Selaa. In Selaa, short hours before the ceasefire took effect, Israel destroyed thirty-five homes, killing at least eight people, and shutting off running water to the entire community.

We organized a mission to Selaa, building connections with civic leaders in the village. With donated funds from across Lebanon, we purchased a suction pump and water storage tanks for the villagers. We distributed food, donated clothes, children’s toys, and sanitary supplies. We located a doctor willing to come to the village to provide free medical exams, and helped fill needed prescriptions. Since the phone lines are down in the village, we contacted the Lebanese Army on their behalf to request assistance in removing unexploded bombs from the area.

As time goes on, we will maintain and deepen our ties to Selaa, Qantara, and other villages we are able to help, shifting from providing direct relief to other work, such as restoring schools and organizing cultural events. We will not give up.

We are not alone. Samidoun, another grassroots Lebanese coalition, is assisting three, other villages in South Lebanon. As we do our work in the South, we hear of other such coalitions, other such campaigns.

Abid Na’im lost his sixty-five year old father in the bombing of Selaa. There was barely enough left of the remains to bury but, despite his grief, Abid summed up the spirit of Lebanon today when he told us, “It’s impossible to beat the people. You can destroy the stones, you can destroy the homes – but you can’t destroy the people.”

Ramzi Kysia is a Lebanese-American essayist and activist. He’s working with LebanonSolidarity.org to resist war and renew shattered communities in Lebanon.

A Proportionate Response

voices — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 19:43:12 -0600

Excerpt

August 21, 2006

See also: Grieving Relatives of Qana Massacre Emerge From the Rubble to Bury Their Dead, (Aug 22), Kathy Kelly speaks with Ami Goodman on Democracy Now! Kathy attended a funeral that took place in Qana where an Israeli airstrike on the town on July 30th killed 29 people.

Upon arrival in Beirut in early August, 2006, Michael Birmingham met Abu Mustafa. Michael is an Irish citizen who has worked with Voices campaigns for several years. Abu Mustafa is a kindly Lebanese cab driver.

Having fled his home in the Dahiya neighborhood which was being heavily bombed, Abu Mustafa was living in his car. Abu Mustafa joked that he sometimes went back to his home in the already evacuated area of the Dahiya, just to take a shower or sometimes a proper nap. His family was living with relatives in a safer area. Toward the end of the war, Israeli bombs blasted buildings quite near his home. He tore out of the suburb in his cab and made that his home until we met him again on August 15th.

Body

August 21, 2006

That day, he took us to the Dahiya where we saw hundreds of people, including parents walking hand in hand with toddlers, process silently along streets lined by wreckage. Even the small children looked extremely sad and grim.

Before the “Shock and Awe” bombing of Iraq in 2003, a contingent of peace activists living in Baghdad hung huge banners at various locales stating, “To bomb this place would be a war crime.”

On Dahiya’s streets, we saw the sequel, banners that said “Made in the U.S.A.” in Arabic and English, detailing U.S. complicity in manufacturing and shipping the weapons that demolished homes, gas stations, shopping malls, overpasses, clinics, the town square, ….block after block of ruin.

On the fourth floor of a five-story apartment building, a father and his daughters scooped up successive loads of broken glass and pitched them onto the sidewalk below. They called out a warning before each load came crashing down. You have to start somewhere.

On August 17 and 18, two men, both named Mohammed and both in their twenties, took Michael, Ramzi Kysia, Farah Mokhtarazedei, and me to towns and villages south of the Litani River. In each of the towns we visited, we saw appalling wreckage. Nowhere could we see military targets.

In Sriefa, the town center was almost completely destroyed. Residents told us that five or six F-16s bombed the area on July 19th, destroying ten houses, many of them three story buildings. We stared at the rubble, spotting household items, - a child’s high chair, a weaving loom, a toy plastic television.

Neighbors had buried nine corpses in shallow graves when it was too dangerous to be outside for any length of time. On the outskirts of Sriefa, as a handful of women and youngsters watched, workers exhumed the bodies and placed them in plastic body bags which were then wrapped in green shrouds and laid in wooden coffins. Workers sealed the lids and then wrapped the coffins in flags. These slain men were communists. The flags bore dual symbols for Lebanon and the Lebanese communist party.

Later, we watched a long funeral procession pass, carrying 25 of the 40 people killed in Sriefa. Uniformed men, marching, led the procession. Women followed, clutching one another in grief, next boys bearing flags, and finally the coffin-bearing vans, each with pictures of the brothers, fathers, and sons that would be buried.

Abbas Najdi stopped to talk with us on a street in Sriefa and then invited us to his home. During the bombing, his wife and children left Sriefa, but Abu Abbas, age 78, decided to stay. He wanted to watch over his home and the family’s sole source of income, the “tabac” which was carefully stored in a shed below the second story where they lived. Fortunately, he had decided to sleep on the ground floor during the first night of bombing. The back part of his home, their sleeping room, took a direct hit. Debris from a collapsing building across the street blocked the Najdi family’s front door, trapping Abu Abbas inside for two days. Neighbors eventually freed him. Abu Abbas’s left leg was injured by flying glass, but he felt very lucky to have survived at all. Unluckily, his entire tabac crop was burnt, the harvest of one year’s labor.

Before we left the Najdi family, one of the daughters, Zainab Najdi, a University student, stood to say goodbye and then laughed. “My pants are falling down,” she explained, still graceful as she pulled them up. “I am ‘daifah’” —the Arabic word for thin or weak. Her loose clothes disguised how thin she is, but when we embraced, I could nearly encircle her waist with my hands.

On the morning of the 18th, explosions awakened us. I thought the cease fire had ended. Our hosts reassured us that the Lebanese army was blowing up explosives. In the garden outside the home where we stayed, the local Hezbollah municipal leader spotted three unexploded cluster bombs. We had nearly driven over two cluster bombs lying on the road the previous day. The sound of each blast destroying hideous bombs was oddly comforting. You have to start somewhere.

Many people we talk to in Lebanon understand that the majority of Israelis urged their government to fight this war once it began. Did the proponents of war, in Israel, understand that there is no sign of a military target in the villages of southern Lebanon where homes, schools, clinics, grocery stores and children’s playgrounds have been destroyed?

On August 18th, Anthony Cordesman published a working draft of a report called “Preliminary Lessons of Israeli-Hezbollah War.” I read excerpts of it in commentary written by Helena Cobban. Cordesman, a seasoned military strategist, writing about the Israeli Air Force bombardment of Lebanon, remarks that “the air campaign continued to escalate against targets that often were completely valid but that sometimes involved high levels of collateral damage and very uncertain tactical and military effect. The end result was to give the impression Israel was not providing a proportionate response, an impression compounded by ineffective (and often unintelligible) efforts to explain IAF actions to the media.

I honestly don’t understand. Why is a target completely valid if it involved high levels of collateral damage, that is to say high levels of civilians who are maimed and killed, of civilian infrastructure ruined, of families rendered homeless, penniless, jobless and hungry? Cordesman states that there was uncertain tactical and military effect. Before completing the draft, I wish that Mr. Cordesman could stand for just five minutes at one intersection in the small city of Bint Jbail. He would see certain usage of conventional military weapons used against a civilian population. He would see certain evidence of a war crime. Turn in one direction and you see the remains of a school building, some desks and chairs still aligned in careful rows, visible because a whole side of the building is demolished. In another direction, a damaged stadium. Next to it, a field where 30 rockets killed a flock of sheep. One man managed a chuckle, telling us that 2 million dollars was spent to kill these sheep, that these must have been the most costly sheep in all of Lebanon. On the 27th and 28th of July, 100 bombs fell between two mosques in Bint Jbail within 11 minutes. At one point, the Israelis bombed for 11 hours straight. Then there was a break and they bombed for 21 hours until most of the town was completely destroyed. It’s estimated that about 60,000 people lived in Bint Jbail.

Of what military value, as a target, is a school, an entire block of residences, a town square, a favorite swimming hole? Why is it strategically valuable to drop many hundreds of cluster bombs that fall in gardens and along roadsides between small farming villages?

The residents of Bint Jbail and other southern Lebanese cities as well as those who lived in the Dahiya and in Baalbeck had jobs, homes, and basic securities just a little over a month ago. Now, billions of euros and other currencies, along with ingenuity, resources, talents, will be directed toward aid and recovery. Such aid might have been helping relieve suffering elsewhere in the world had this war not “escalated.”

Both legally and rationally, you cannot say “everyone living there is Hezbollah. You can’t just walk away from the appalling damage and say, they were warned. Or can you? Can a state get away with it, backed up by other world bodies?

If that’s the case, then ordinary people bear a grave responsibility to demand that leaders own up to war crimes. Yes, finding a proportionate response to war crimes when so much power is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, many of them reckless and dangerous leaders of the United States and Israel, is a daunting task. But let’s think of the people finding courage to return and rebuild, let’s think of those trying to demine and clear out the cluster bombs, let’s think of the parents trying to help children orient themselves to a vastly insecure world. With them, we might acknowledge, you have to start somewhere.

Kathy Kelly, () is a co-coordinator of Voices in the Wilderness, www.vcnv.org. Her book, Other Lands Have Dreams, is available at www.counterpunch.org

VCNV Author

Kathy Kelly

The Massacre at Qana

voices — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 19:41:50 -0600

Excerpt

August 19, 2006

Two days ago, driving toward the village of Qana, we saw men at work, creating neatly aligned rows of rectangular cement structures that would soon be ready for burials. On foot, we entered Qana, thinking we should at least identify the site where a massacre had taken place when, on July 30th, an Israeli bomb hit a building that sheltered children as they slept. It took five hours for ambulances to reach them. Statistics differ, but the most recent Human Rights Watch report estimated that twenty-three were killed.

Turning a corner, we saw men arranging white plastic chairs for guests who came to mourn with family members in the funeral tradition. The men sat in front of one home. Women were next door.

Body

August 19, 2006

Turning a corner, we saw men arranging white plastic chairs for guests who came to mourn with family members in the funeral tradition. The men sat in front of one home. Women were next door.

Farah and I approached four women sitting quietly and tearfully in a small outdoor patio. They invited us to sit with them. For much of the time, we sat silently. Each time a neighboring woman arrived, the women would stand and embrace one another tearfully. They have borne their pain for eighteen days, since 1:00 a.m. on July 30th when the bomb slammed into the building just across the road from where we sat, the building where their children slept. The funeral was delayed until it would be safe to bring families together and to construct the graves.

Umm Zayneb, the mother of six year old Zayneb, poured out a torrent of words, telling the details of what had happened to Zayneb and entrusting us with her views which we could only barely understand. Our translators were next door, sitting with the men. We could see that Umm Zayneb had suffered injuries. Under her veil, she wore a medical hood and a thick brace encircled her neck. She stiffly shifted her tall, slender body, unable to point across the street to what was once a building where frightened children had huddled together for shelter during the bombing. Surveillance planes must have known that children were in the building. Many times, in the daytime, Zaynab ran back and forth between the house and the shelter. Umm Zaynab said we must be able to see how close she was to her home. Yes, we could see. We listened to the drone of an unmanned surveillance plane still crisscrossing the skies above. Couldn’t they see? What kind of censorship would obscure this information?

“She liked to practice English,” Umm Zaynab told us, her words turning to sobs. “She was happy because she could say English words.” This sentence aroused a new flood of agony. The brace forced her to contain her shudders. She rocked diffidently, overwhelmed with grief.

Umm Zaynab asked one of the children to bring a stack of newspapers and magazines. “Here,” she said, carefully sorting through reports on the massacre at Qana. “This is Zaynab.” Photo after photo showed Zaynab held aloft, lifeless, by a strong, helmeted relief worker who shouted his shock and terrible awe. In another, Zainab lies next to Zahara. The force of the explosion seems to have destroyed the internal organs of the little girls, as they slept. Their bodies are not mutilated.

Next she placed in our hands a framed picture of Zaynab, a curly headed little girl with huge dark eyes posing seriously for the camera. One can only imagine her smile.

“Who are the terrorists?” Umm Zayneb whispered, slowly reaching over to point at Zayneb’s picture. Her eyes held mine as she answered her own question. I heard her say “Bush.” “She is saying that Zayneb and the children aren’t the terrorists,” Farah interjected, understanding more Arabic than me. “She says the real terrorists are the ones who kill children.”

Looking at the burnt and blackened hillsides throughout southern Lebanon, you can only imagine the cedar trees that only one month ago made these hills as green as the hills in Israel.

Cana. New Testament scriptures say that Jesus spent time here. Nearby is a small cave, reputed to mark the site of a wedding feast Jesus had attended. A story tells of Jesus’ mother, Mary, entreating the beloved son to show concern for newly arrived wedding guests. She identified them as people who weren’t being served. She didn’t want them to be excluded, left out. Who would listen to a widow’s concern? Her son must help. The tradition tells of a miracle, of water turned to wine.

Qana. Who will listen to bereaved mothers entreating the heavens for an end to the hellish, fiery explosions that slaughter their children. The facts tell of a massacre, the astonishing technological capacity to identify and then to exclude the children from life itself.

A banner hangs in Qana, addressed to Condoleeza Rice. “Rice, they will not see “our new Middle East.”

Kathy Kelly kathy@vcnv.org is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org) On August 17 and 18, she traveled in southern Beirut with three other participants in Voices campaign work who joined international solidarity efforts in Beirut during August, 2006

VCNV Author

Kathy Kelly

Aftermath, Heartbreak and Determination

voices — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 19:40:45 -0600

Excerpt

Aug 16, 2006

On Flashpoints: Beirut after the bombing: an extended interview with Beirut-based human rights activist Tina Nac’cach

Body

Aug 16, 2006

On Flashpoints: Beirut after the bombing: an extended interview with Beirut-based human rights activist Tina Nac’cach

August 15 Update from Lebanon

voices — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 19:40:07 -0600

Excerpt

August 15, 2006

Greetings from Beirut, where day 2 of the cease fire might signal very rapid change. If road passage is quickly repaired, many groups are ready to begin reconstructing areas in southern Lebanon, Beirut suburbs, and other areas destroyed by the past month of warfare. Hassan Nasrallah has vowed that Hezbollah will undertake reconstruction in southern Lebanon.

Body

August 15, 2006

Earlier today, Abu Mustafa, a cab driver,who lives in Dahiya, an area on the outskirts of Beirut which was heavily bombed during the war, took us to his neighborhood. Hundreds of people walked slowly along streets lined by wreckage. Many parents walked hand in hand with their children; all, even the toddlers, looking extremely sad and grim.

Before the Shock and Awe bombing of Iraq, a contingent of peace activists living in Baghdad hung huge banners at various locales stating, “To bomb this place would be a war crime.” Today we saw the sequel, banners that said “Made in the U.S.A.” in Arabic and English, detailing U.S. complicity in manufacturing and shipping the weapons that demolished homes, gas stations, shopping malls, overpasses, clinics, the town square, ….block after block of ruin.

On the fourth floor of a five-story apartment building, a father and his daughters scooped up load after load of broken glass, called out a warning and pitched it onto the sidewalk below. You have to start somewhere.

Mr. Yakoub Sarah introduced himself to us. He is Lebanon’s Minister of the Environment for the area. With him was a Prime Minister from Hezbollah. He asked for my impression of what I’d seen. I told him I’d seen clear evidence of war crimes, using conventional military weapons against a civilian area. He assured us that Lebanon is a proud country and that it will rebuild.

Last night Farah and I sat with the group of young Lebanese people who welcomed us to accompany them on their convoy project. (Lebanese Special Forces stopped the convoy, but the group is still intact and planning to link with several villages in southern Lebanon to assist with reconstruction and also continue helping people who can’t return to their homes.) “It was so good to wake up this morning with this war over,” said Maha, a young architect teaching at AUB. “You don’t feel like you have a huge weight on your chest.”

A meeting had been planned at the small café where we gather, but when we arrived about 15 people were listening intently to Hassan Nasrallah. An Egyptian woman who has joined the group said she was surprised to see people from different traditions and religious backgrounds so united in their acceptance of Nasrallah’s leadership at this point.

Earlier in the day I had gone to visit the Daughters of Charity in East Beirut to learn more about possibilities for bringing relief to villages in southern Lebanon. “Crazy,” said one friend that Sr. Vincent called the previous day. “Impossible. There is no way.” When I arrived at the convent today, each of the nuns with whom I spoke was very troubled. The Israelis had bombed the convent of a Lebanese congregation of nuns the previous night.

No need now for them to visit West Beirut or southern Lebanon to assist in cleaning up the wreckage.

This morning, I felt special appreciation for a note from a friend who quoted Eduardo Galeano’s observation of a graffiti message he once saw painted on a wall: “Let’s save our pessimism for better times.” It’s a gift to feel solidarity with people rolling up their sleeves and facing the tasks of rebuilding. We write with gratitude for all those committed to building a better world, a world wherein it’s easier to be good.

Sincerely,

Kathy

VCNV Author

Kathy Kelly

Approaching a Ceasefire

voices — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 19:39:03 -0600

Excerpt

August 13, 2006

Here in Beirut, explosions rocked the city during one ten minute stretch in the afternoon and again this evening. Periodic distant thuds assured us that the approach toward a cease fire would be fiery, deadly.

Farah and I told our Irish friend, Michael Birmingham, that the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina should help all of us understand how it’s possible that profiteering and murderous forces would consider depopulating an area for mercenary gain. Michael is legend for being our most cynical companion, albeit our saint. “Come on,” he said, “don’t tell me you’re serious.”

Body

August 13, 2006

Dan Berrigan’s line came to mind, “Serious, serious says my blood in the falling.”

Well. My blood isn’t falling. I’m in a safe section of Beirut, reading about the rockets exploding in northern Israel and the audible bombs slamming into neighborhoods just a taxi drive away from where I sit. Farah and Michael have returned for the 10:00 p.m. meeting with ordinary young Lebanese civilians, —architects, students, landscapers, marketing professionals, —who have courageously dedicated themselves toward building solidarity with devastated families who’ve survived the past vicious weeks of war. I stayed behind, reluctant to face a third lengthy meeting today, and instead offered to visit with Catholic sisters in East Beirut to ask if they could help us find ways to deliver relief into southern Lebanon.

Many people have theorized about why this war started and what are the ultimate goals. But there’s no doubt that ethnic cleansing has been enforced in southern Lebanon and in areas of Beirut where the Israeli Defense Forces dropped leaflets threatening people with death and destruction if they didn’t immediately leave their homes.

The most serious question persists: how to turn off this war?

Who wouldn’t place intense hope, however naive, in a cease fire holding?

But there’s more, much more, that should preoccupy U.S. people. U.S. taxpayers must acknowledge their contribution toward Israel’s disproportionate and overwhelming capacity to afflict terror and horror on southern Lebanon and the suburbs of Beirut. When reading the statistics about carnage, contamination, displacement, —the unbearable numbers of wounded, the numbers maimed, the numbers buried, the numbers of orphans and widows and parents holding corpses of their children, — statistics about Israel’s losses and Lebanon’s losses, —when we read these statistics we must remember that since the Bush administration, the U.S. has spent $9.4 billion helping Israel build its arsenal and military. The U.S. sent 600 pound bunker busters to Israel after the war began—and we’re almost certain those bunker busters blasted underground in the Dahiya neighborhood today. The U.S. deliberately stalled prospects for a cease fire.

If equipping an area with weapons, including nuclear weapons, was a reliable way to ensure security, Israel and Palestine would be paradise by now. Has the U.S. policy toward Israel safeguarded homes and towns in northern Israel in this sorry saga of spiraling hatred?

Shouldn’t we all shudder and groan, wondering what weapons will be used next as U.S. leaders accommodate themselves to ongoing, hideous warfare?

We watch many Lebanese families, displaced and disoriented, walking streets of downtown Beirut with unimaginable dignity, —the women covered, mothers and children walking hand in hand. As these people, forced to flee the simplicity of village life, walk along streets bursting with the modern fast life, I hope that their steps will slow all of us down. I hope that we can, just for moments, imagine walking hand in hand with them while thinking hard about how to turn off this war. The ancient command, envisioned in the Exodus narrative, “Let my people go,” might mark all of our steps. We might displace ourselves from our absurdly “protected” comfort zones.

How desperately we need trustworthy advocates of unarmed conflict resolution, dare I say nonviolence, who can lead us, the willing and unwilling “displaced,” to a place wherein we reclaim our collective capacity to share resources, live simply, and put an end to war.

VCNV Author

Kathy Kelly

U.S.: Deny Israeli Request for Cluster Munitions: Use in Lebanon Has Killed and Maimed Civilians

voices — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 19:37:50 -0600

Excerpt

Human Rights Watch
August 11, 2006

The United States should reject any request by Israel to transfer cluster munitions for use against targets in Lebanon, Human Rights Watch wrote in a letter to National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley today. Civilians in Lebanon have already died from Israel’s use of similar weapons, which blanket a wide area with deadly submunitions.

According to the August 11 edition of the New York Times, Israel has requested delivery of surface-launched M26 artillery rockets for use against locations in Lebanon where it believes Hezbollah fighters are launching Katyusha rockets into Israel. The wide dispersal pattern of submunitions from M26 rockets makes it very difficult to avoid civilian casualties if civilians are in the area. Moreover, because so many of the submunitions initially fail to detonate, M26 rockets leave behind large numbers of hazardous explosive “duds” that are akin to landmines, injuring and killing civilians long after the attack.

Body

Human Rights Watch
August 11, 2006

“Harm to civilians is inevitable if Israel uses M26 rockets in Lebanon,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “These weapons killed or wounded hundreds of civilians in Iraq in 2003. Washington has a duty not to assist in replicating that death toll in southern Lebanon.”

The United States approved a license with a value of $615,496 for the commercial sale of 1,300 M26 rockets to Israel in Fiscal Year 2005, according to State Department records. The State Department is reported to be weighing Israel’s request for expedited delivery.

The M26 rocket is launched from the Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) to ranges of 32 to 38 kilometers and it creates a wide-area effect by dispensing 644 M77 submunitions. A typical volley of six rockets would release 3,864 submunitions over an area with a 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) radius.

U.S. testing data puts the initial failure rate of M77 submunitions at anywhere between 5 percent and 23 percent. British military testing indicates an initial failure rate of between 5 percent and 10 percent. Both governments note that initial failure rates largely depend on ground conditions, range and other operational factors.

“The M26 rocket epitomizes a retreat from precision targeting,” said Roth. “It kills civilians across wide areas and leaves volatile submunitions scattered across the countryside that can kill civilians for years to come. This deadly weapon should never be used anywhere near civilians.”

In the current conflict, Israel has already used artillery-fired cluster munitions against populated areas, causing civilian casualties. According to eyewitnesses and survivors of an attack interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Israel fired several artillery-based cluster munitions at the village of Blida around 3:00 p.m. on July 19. Three witnesses described how the artillery shells dropped hundreds of cluster submunitions on the village.

The attack killed 60-year-old Maryam Ibrahim inside her home. At least two submunitions entered the basement that the Ali family was using as a shelter, wounding 12 people, including seven children.

The New York Times quoted an Israeli embassy spokesman in Washington, David Siegel, as denying this use in Blida, but his summary denial is simply false.

To encourage delivery of the cluster munitions, Israel has vowed not to use them in populated areas, but its actions to date make that vow unreliable. As Human Rights Watch demonstrated in its recent report, “Fatal Strikes: Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon,” the Israeli military has repeatedly launched indiscriminate attacks in populated areas, targeting civilian vehicles and houses as if there were no civilians left in southern Lebanon. In fact, despite Israeli warnings to evacuate, an estimated 100,000 civilians remain in southern Lebanon because of infirmity, inability to afford exorbitant taxi fares to leave, or fear of becoming yet another roadside casualty of Israeli attacks.

“Israel’s persistent failure to recognize the reality that many civilians remain in southern Lebanon makes its promise not to use cluster munitions in civilian areas unreliable,” said Roth.

Background

In July 1982, the Reagan administration announced that it would prohibit new exports of cluster munitions to Israel. The United States found that by using U.S.-supplied cluster munitions against civilian targets during its military operations in Lebanon and the siege of Beirut, Israel may have violated its 1952 Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement with the United States. In November 1988, the United States quietly lifted the ban.

The United States stockpiles 369,576 M26 rockets in its active inventory. The Netherlands announced in 2005 plans to destroy its stockpile of 16,000 M26 rockets, citing concerns about the potential to create disproportionate collateral damage. M26 rockets are also stockpiled by Bahrain, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Turkey and the United Kingdom. France is considering replacing its M26 rockets, which have unreliable submunitions, with a unitary warhead rocket. Germany does not envisage using M26 rockets until it has been provided with a mechanism to limit its operational life.

The United States caused hundreds of civilian casualties in 2003 when it used M26 rockets in widely populated areas in Iraq, including Hilla, Najaf and Karbala. The strikes were deadly because they covered a broad area and because they scattered a large number of initially unexploded submunitions.