‘Let Them Fight Elsewhere’ : Shias Try to Drive Out PLO to Avert Israeli Retaliation

Hassan Alsayi was buried in this southern Lebanese town Monday, the day after he was killed trying to drive Palestinian guerrillas out of Beirut.

The death of the 24-year-old Islamic fundamentalist was well worth the price, his friends and relatives said, because he was really fighting to protect his village and the entire Shia Muslim population of southern Lebanon.

Alsayi was a member of Amal, the Shia militia organization that badly harassed the Israeli occupiers of Lebanon and, for more than a week now, has been killing Palestinians in refugee camps in Beirut in an effort to destroy elements of the Palestine Liberation Organization and other Palestinian guerrilla groups.

“Amal wants to stop the PLO because they know they’ll pay the price” if the Palestinians resume attacks on Israel from bases in Lebanon, a Western diplomat said in explaining why Amal is trying to keep Palestinians from returning to southern Lebanon.

“The Israelis will retaliate against this area and these people,” said the diplomat, who has regular close contact with Amal and other contending groups in southern Lebanon.

“So in this sense, the battle for the south is being fought in Beirut,” he added.

Aabbassiye is in the center of Amal and Shia country, its normal population of 7,000 swollen to 12,000 as people flock to the region’s towns and cities in anticipation of what some feel will be an extension of the Amal-Palestinian fight into this area or the return of Israeli troops.

Since the Israelis withdrew in late April from the region around Aabbassiye and the larger city of Tyre, about eight miles to the southwest, Amal has taken over.

Amal militiamen control the roads, most importantly the coastal highway from Tyre southward nearly to the Israeli frontier, and the organization is determined not to give the Israelis any excuse to delay their promised withdrawal from all of Lebanon, expected within the next 10 days.

So not only has this region seemed quiet during recent weeks, but Amal, which led a successful campaign of harassment that speeded the Israeli decision to withdraw, has also stopped major attacks on the Israeli troops that remain in a narrow strip of the country and who also want to eliminate the remnants of the PLO in this region.

Although the Western diplomat calls this “a tacit arrangement and an unholy alliance,” Dr. Ali Jaber, one of Amal’s top leaders, said in an interview here that “we don’t have any agreement or contact with Israel. We consider Israel our enemy.”

Jaber, a physician trained in Britain, spent much of Israel’s three-year occupation of southern Lebanon fighting from the caves that pockmark the low mountains of this area.

Despite these activities, his professed hatred for the Israelis and his stated desire “to liberate Palestine,” Jaber adds vehemently “that is not our job alone.”

‘Let PLO Fight Elsewhere’

“Let the PLO fight their battles elsewhere, not on our land,” added Hussein Hamoud, one of the local Amal chiefs.

Jaber criticized the Arab world for a lack of unity and for what he said was its silence when the Lebanese Shias were victims of both the Israelis and the PLO.

“When the PLO was here (before the 1982 Israeli invasion), they were not trying to liberate Palestine. They treated the people here badly, collecting money as if trying to make southern Lebanon their land.”

So, while Israel remains the great enemy, Amal seems willing to let the Jewish state alone if it does indeed withdraw from Lebanon altogether.

“As we said before when the Israelis were here,” Jaber went on, “we’re going to liberate our country and live in peace and not let anyone interfere. . . . We will fight any interference, Israeli and others.”

Although Jaber and other Amal leaders say they do not expect the PLO to survive in Beirut and thus doubt that there will be any fighting in the south, there are ominous signs that Amal may be ready to attack Palestinian refugee settlements in and around Tyre, of which there are several.

Amal fighters are stationed outside the camps and prevent any males from entering or leaving. Cars are constantly checked in the streets and surrounding roads, and anyone without a Lebanese identity card is arrested.

Hamoud says that the camps will be left alone as long as the residents don’t hold any arms and don’t challenge Amal’s control of the area.

He and Jaber both said there is rifle fire from the refugee camps toward the Amal checkpoints every night and that this will not be permitted to go on.

“The Palestinians are here as our guests,” Jaber said. “They can live inside the camps . . . but they can’t hold arms.

“We know the people and names of the Palestinians who are holding the weapons,” said Jaber. “We are holding meetings with (camp leaders) every day and asking them to collect the arms.”

But if this doesn’t work, he said, “then we are taking all the arms from the camps, and we will defend ourselves. We told them when one of us is killed we will send them out.”

The well-connected diplomat said after hearing this that he doubts Amal would attack the camps but qualified his opinion with the assessment that a destruction of the Palestinian camps in Beirut might prompt local Amal fighters to copy that effort.

Although their attention seems concentrated on the PLO, Amal’s leaders say they have not forgotten Israel.

“We won’t fight them in their land,” said Hamoud. “We will leave them alone as long as the Israelis truly withdraw and don’t return.”

However, he and Jaber both expressed concern about the so-called security zone that Israel has created just north of the border.

This is a strip of land that ranges from 10 to 25 miles wide and is guarded by the Israeli-supplied South Lebanon Army and local civilian militias.

Jaber said, “This security zone is part of Lebanon, and we’re not going to stop until they (the Israelis and their allies) are gone. “I am a Lebanese and I have to fight to give control of Lebanon to the Lebanese government.”

This is not a promising sign for peace in the area, since the Israelis have said publicly that they will maintain “a presence” in the security zone.

“There is tremendous pressure on Amal,” said an official with the U.N. peacekeeping forces in southern Lebanon. “It has to deliver on its promise to drive the Israelis all of the way out of Lebanon.”

If they can’t keep that pledge, he said, it will be difficult to maintain control of the area. “So, Amal has to have something in return from Israel” for holding off attacks over the last few weeks, the official said.

What he indicated might be enough could be little more than a discreet silence on the part of the Jerusalem government and some restraint in how the Israelis operate in the security zone.

“As long as Israel doesn’t talk about it (its presence north of the border), Amal can accept” some Israelis in their southernmost part of Lebanon, he added.