South Lebanon Showing Withdrawal Symptoms

Before she dies, 70-year-old Beirut slum dweller Raiyyeh Nasreddine wants to move back to the southern Lebanese land she fled 18 years ago.

But her village has been destroyed, even down to the graves of her ancestors, and the green fields she once loved are now seeded with land mines.

Living in southern Lebanon, Georges Khouri would like to go back to his work as a car mechanic.

But these days, he must stay at home to protect his property from marauding gangs of Muslim militia fighters who seem to feel that they have a right to loot homes in the Christian villages there.

The Israeli pullout from the region last month was a turning point for the Middle East, the calming of the last active front in the Arab-Israeli wars that stretch back 52 years to the creation of Israel in 1948.

On balance, it seemed that both sides had won when the last troops left before dawn May 24. Israel managed to extricate itself from the Vietnam-like burden of defending an occupation zone that its citizens no longer believed was worth keeping. And after decades of being on the losing side of battles, Arabs across the Middle East could say with pride that their fighters had managed to recover at least a small piece of territory for an Arab nation.

For Lebanon, however, the peace promises to be complicated.

Just as the reunification of Germany was more costly and took longer than anticipated, already problems and hurdles have emerged for Lebanon as it tries to pull itself back together:

* Many families displaced after the Israeli invasions in 1978 and 1982 say they want to move to the south and start over but need help from the government to rebuild their homes, clear away land mines and obtain basic services. For example, electricity, telephone and water systems that were connected to Israel must now be rebuilt. The government estimates that it will need to spend $3 billion over five years to rehabilitate the south. In the near term, $127 million has been pledged by Gulf Arab states.

* Despite assurances of their safety from government officials and leaders of the militant Muslim group Hezbollah, Christian villagers in southern Lebanon have complained of being harassed and robbed by their “liberators.” In one incident, a Christian was killed in an argument with a Muslim that grew out of the legacy of distrust left over from the nation’s 1975-90 civil war.

* The prosecution of former fighters in the Israeli-backed militia, the South Lebanon Army, promises to be a long and divisive ordeal that will require confronting some uncomfortable questions about Lebanon’s recent history.

* There is no word yet on whether Syria, the main power broker here, will allow the Lebanese army to deploy in southern Lebanon. But without an army presence, the security and stability of the region could well remain in doubt.

“This is opening a new chapter in the long, painful march of our history,” said Simon Karam, Lebanon’s former ambassador to Washington, who advocates a process of truth and reconciliation for the country.

The taking down of the “last barricade of the civil war,” as he called it, will require the Lebanese to be honest and forgiving of one another and will require the government to take a more assertive role in the south, he said.

“There is security and stability in the south,” former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri said in an interview. “But it is fragile because of small but important things that might blow up the situation.”

Nevertheless, compared with the bloodshed that some in Lebanon had predicted and feared, the withdrawal took place without major problems. Although seven Lebanese civilians were reportedly killed on the eve of the pullout, there was no climactic shootout between Israeli forces and the Hezbollah guerrillas who had spearheaded the resistance to them. Panicked, the South Lebanon Army, or SLA, Israel’s proxy militia, simply collapsed and abandoned its weapons rather than put up a fight.

During a dramatic 48 hours, residents of Khiam broke the locks and freed the inmates at the SLA’s notorious prison in the town. Members of militia groups rushed helter-skelter into the area, grabbing what they could at now-empty Israeli and SLA bases, but not a single former SLA soldier was killed.

Peace prevailed even near the Fatima Gate crossing into Israel, where heavily armed Hezbollah fighters and Israeli soldiers suddenly found themselves facing one another only a few dozen yards apart.

Looking back, U.N. special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen noted the relative absence of violence and called it his “best-case scenario.” And analysts agreed that it augurs well.

“The reunification of Lebanon is going to be relatively easy if the present calm continues,” predicted Tewfik Mishlawi, editor of the Middle East Reporter. “But nobody can be sure about how long it can last.

“The most difficult thing is to reabsorb and re-integrate people in one society,” he said.

Rather than vengeance, the prevailing mood those first days was joy. Hezbollah fighters in the former occupation zone were showered with rice and flower petals as they arrived. Inexperienced guerrillas climbed into the tanks abandoned by the SLA and tried to learn to drive them, sometimes with comic results.

Those who had lived under Israeli rule said they could not believe the occupation was really over. Curious residents from the north poured in to see the restored parts of their country, many taking back soda cans, ice cream wrappers or cigarette packs with Hebrew lettering as souvenirs.

It took Nasreddine, who lives in the working-class slum of Ouzai on the outskirts of Beirut, only two days after the pullout to get into her family’s blue Volkswagen and head back to Sejoud, the village that she was ordered to leave in 1982 when Israel decided to commandeer it to create a military position.

What she found stunned her.

“Our village was completely flattened. There were not two stones left piled up together,” she recalled. The only landmark she could recognize was the burned stump of a tree that had once been at her doorstep. No water was available and, during her three-hour visit, she and accompanying relatives had to stay on the road because, they were informed, the SLA had put land mines around to defend the military outpost.

Nonetheless, Nasreddine, a widow with a finely wrinkled face, wants to move back permanently with her five grown daughters and five grown sons and their families, a total of 70 people.

“Life there is better,” she explained. Already, the family has erected a tent on its former land.

Now that the south is free, thousands of her neighbors in Ouzai are contemplating the same move back. Their community today is simply a sprawling shanty district that sprang up on the empty beach near the Beirut airport after the flight of Shiite Muslims from the south that followed Israel’s 1982 invasion.

In the south, however, the influx of people from the north has not been entirely benign. Residents of Christian villages around Marjayoun, the former headquarters of the occupation forces and the SLA, have complained of being battered and robbed by gunmen claiming affiliation with Hezbollah or other militia groups.

“It’s really happening,” said Nimer Hamzeh, a 29-year-old Christian in Borj el Moulak who had worked as an interpreter for the United Nations. “They are threatening, stealing cars, entering houses. They don’t care if the people were in the SLA or if they are civilians. They are only coming to loot and steal and rob. . . . Nobody dares leave their house.”

The crimes have been serious enough that the Lebanese government opted last week to restrict access to the south, but even that did not satisfy Khouri, the car mechanic, who was forced to turn over the keys of his Peugeot to men he called “armed animals.”

Like others in Marjayoun, Khouri would like the Lebanese army to deploy there and ensure order.

But the government continues to dawdle over sending troops to the south to take overall control from the current amalgam of police, Hezbollah, assorted militia groups, armed freelancers and a scattering of U.N. peacekeepers and observers. In the opinion of most analysts, Lebanon is not independent enough to make such a decision without Syrian approval.

Syria so far is withholding that green light. Instead, it is waiting for the United Nations to verify that Israel has pulled out of every inch of Lebanese territory and perhaps calculating whether an unstable situation in the south is useful in its campaign to win the Golan Heights back from Israel.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese government still must decide how to treat the 1,800 SLA fighters who have surrendered. They are scheduled to be tried before military tribunals, but some lawyers, including Karam, the former ambassador, say it would be more just to bring them before ordinary civilian courts, where the accused have more rights and where punishments tend to be less harsh.

“Certainly, there were criminals in the SLA, but these have already vanished,” Karam said. “Now all you have left are ordinary villagers who were forced to cooperate with the occupiers to conduct their lives.”

To Karam, one key is whether Lebanon is ready to face up to its recent history.

“It will take a committee of truth to start from south Lebanon and then extend its reach and its scope to the rest of the country,” he suggested.

Such a committee, he said, should address the fate of the 17,000 people missing since the civil war and also whether the SLA fighters were indeed traitors, considering that the SLA was born during a civil war at a time when the central government was essentially nonexistent.

If the government does take the lead, he said, it will be amid encouraging signs of national reconciliation.

“The attitude of the people is quite encouraging.”

* ISRAELI CRISIS

The Israeli parliament gave preliminary approval to a call for early elections. A13