© 2006. Used by permission
LOUISVILLE – Melham Farhad is talking as he drives from his village, called Alma Ashaab, in southern Lebanon, to his restaurant in nearby Marjouran.
He can’t hurry. The road, still battered by the shelling it took last spring from Israeli fighter jets, won’t allow it. Nor is he in a hurry. He has customers. But he is hoping the Spanish soldiers deployed as United Nations peacekeepers last week will like his menu. That would boost business.
So he talks. As the car stops and starts, and stops again. He talks as he waits, which is the only thing most people can do now. Wait. To see what happens next. To see what hostilities may interrupt their lives or whether nothing happens at all.
What farmers here know for certain is that they have no control whatsoever over what happens or what doesn’t. Other forces are in control. Israel, Iran, or the United States may have known what was coming last summer, but they didn’t.
It is not a very optimistic situation,” Farhad — a former teacher and a Presbyterian — says in flawless English. “They’re still afraid something will happen. I mean, the problem isn’t settled completely between Hezbollah and Israel.
“There’s no solution (yet).”
Farhad is 65. Two of his sons live now in Canada, in a safer world. So far, in his adult life, he’s built three houses. “How many homes do you have to build in a lifetime? I’ve built three. And they keep being destroyed,” he says, matter-of-factly. During Israeli air raids in 1982, his wife and son were inside when the bomb hit the house directly. This time, he was lucky.
“Thank God, no, this time,” he says, grateful that the house is intact.
Just as he says, without emotion, that the United Nations troops are on hand to detonate unexploded cluster bombs farmers are finding in and around their olive trees. Some bombs are trapped amongst tree branches; those that came to rest on the ground need to be retrieved before the winter rains bury them in mud.
The Israeli army fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing more than 1.2 million bomblets, according to a Sept. 9 story issued by the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz. The United Nations estimates that more than 500,000 such tiny explosives are still on the ground in Lebanon, many of them in civilian areas.
Like in Alma Ashaab, which is still reeling from what international organizations like Human Rights Watch are calling indiscriminate bombing.
Alma Ashaab is a 100 percent Christian town about five miles from the Israeli border. Hezbollah wasn’t firing rockets from there, its residents say. Yet, about 85 houses were damaged in roughly 33 days of shelling; 12 of those were owned by Presbyterians. One woman died. Twelve others were wounded, according to the mayor, Jamil Zorab, a member of the Presbyterian Church, which is formally called the Evangelical Church in Syria and Lebanon.
After about 16 days of shelling, a convoy left the town as its residents gave up on safety in the sanctuary of the local Catholic church; others crawled out of underground at-home bomb shelters.
Back at home, those residents are re-painting, replacing windows, keeping an eye out for orange-sized cluster bombs and listening to the news 24-7, while they ready for winter.
No one feels safe yet.
Along this strip of earth, which has been mined, bombed, and rebuilt over and over again since 1948, there are a million reasons why waiting can be crazy-making. What is legitimate anxiety and what is paranoia is hard to tell, given the history.
“There’s always this fear,” says Zorab, whose telephone connection failed twice in a 40-minute interview, an electrical glitch, he says, that doesn’t work well even on good days. “Plus, the situation is not yet stable, so, you’re always wondering, ‘What’s coming next?’
We spend most of our time in front of the T.V., listening to the news, wondering what is going on.”
Lebanon’s recent political history is catastrophic. All the latest worries sound eerily like the same old ones. Peace is elusive in a state divided within itself and engulfed by enemies apparently eager to overrun it.
Although none of the distinctions are tidy, Lebanon’s politics run along two lines, according to regional experts.
The first, an alliance known as the March 14 movement, is focused on establishing Lebanese sovereignty, rather than being the stage for regional conflicts that repeatedly swallow up the society. It emerged when thousands of Lebanese protested Syria’s meddling in 2005. The Syrian government withdrew its troops later that spring, ending a de facto occupation and ushering a reformist Lebanese government into power in the elections.
Hezbollah and other pro-Syrian groups comprise the second track. A legitimate political party in Lebanon, Hezbollah attained status when its military arm forced an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. Not all Shia support Hezbollah nor are all Sunnis or Christians opposed to it.
Lebanese analysts say that Lebanon is a foil for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it is where Syria and Iran foist their agendas on the region.
Such complex nuances only worry the residents of Alma Ashaab all the more.
Since Hezbollah is still holding the two kidnapped Israeli soldiers (the incident that supposedly sparked the recent bombing), will there be a prisoner swap? Or another invasion? Hezbollah fighters have easy access to munitions stashed throughout the region; what if they resume firing rockets? Or, with no unity government in Beirut, what if Sunnis — composing much of the March 14 alliance — angered by the wrath Hezbollah drew out of Israel, opt to confront Hezbollah militarily, unleashing civil war all over again? Rumor has it that such a battle might ignite after Ramadan, which ends Oct. 24. The Muslim holy days mark Allah’s first revelation of the Quran.
The nuances are endless.
Which is why 42-year-old Presbyterian Nabila Farrah is patching up her house, while she hopes that she doesn’t have to make identical — or even worse — repairs in a few weeks or months.
We want to live in peace. We want our children to live in peace,” says Farrah, a Presbyterian and a mother of two who returned home to Lebanon after war erupted in Kuwait in 1990. “Just before I answered the phone, my eight-year-old son asked, ‘Is there going to be another war after Ramadan is over?’
Because we’ve lived through this experience, he’s very afraid he’ll have to live it again,” she says, her voice just on the edge of shrill.
Farrah says that one quarter of her brother’s olive crop is shot, literally — burned and mangled by exploding shells. Her father’s olives and his sesame crop, too, are damaged by bombs. Her sister found an unexploded cluster bomblet in her garden and called U.N. soldiers to remove it. Farrah has replaced all the windows in her house, but she can’t erase the pockmarks of exploding shrapnel along the outside walls.
It is one thing after another, but now there is nothing to do but wait.
“We have no plans,” Farrah says, her voice climbing a few octaves. “What shall we do? Nothing. Where else are we to go? Where could we go?”
