Peace of Mind Still Elusive in Southern Lebanon Towns

Ali Kameel Yaaqoub stood in his bare feet, his eyes shut tight, his heart pounding, his children’s screams still in the air. Someone had just blown up his car, showering his sons with glass and shrapnel as they slept in their first-floor bedroom.

Yaaqoub knew that such an attack was only a matter of time, because he was suspected of having collaborated with the Israeli forces that had occupied this area for 22 years. Beneath a rock near the smoldering wreck of his vehicle, he found a note threatening him with death.

“It was miraculous we all survived the explosion,” Yaaqoub said a few days later as he planted tobacco shoots on a patch of rented land. “I have lived here all my life. I cannot leave this region.”

So Yaaqoub tries to act as if nothing happened. He spends each day working the rich, brown farmland, but his calm demeanor, like the calm that has settled over most of southern Lebanon, goes no deeper than the roots of his fragile seedlings.

Last May 24, Israeli forces left this region, more than two decades after they blasted their way across the border. Liberated southern Lebanon remains a troubled land, its people’s dreams of economic, social and political resurrection unrealized. If anything, living standards have worsened. Many villages still have to truck in water. There is still no telephone network, and electricity is often sporadic. Raw sewage runs into streams and rivers. Health care and jobs are limited, in some places nonexistent. The ground itself is dangerous, with 130,000 land mines still active.

Under such conditions, it is hardly surprising that few of those who fled the occupation have returned.

On top of all that, southern Lebanon faces the release from prison of hundreds of local residents who once served in the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army or the Israeli-appointed civil administration. There is a growing fear that their return could be the spark that sets off a new wave of violence. Already, leaflets distributed in the streets promise “the most cruel kind of revenge.”

“Collaborators, traitors, baboons and pigs, you must leave our land,” reads a flier circulated by a group that calls itself Revolutionary Cells for Justice Against Collaborators. “You have no place among us. The enemy still flows in your veins.” More than a dozen cars and at least one store have been blown up since the beginning of the year.

The escalation, downplayed by the central government in Beirut, has sent a chill through the local population, because almost everyone has at least one relative who worked for the Israelis. “We dreamed of the liberation so we could stop worrying about explosions,” said Mohammed Rizk, 45, director of the agricultural cooperative in this village. “We are so afraid.”

Houla is a stronghold of the Islamic militia Hezbollah, or Party of God. At the entrance to the village, a larger-than-life cutout of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late supreme leader of Iran, sits atop a rusty tank. Flags declaring “Hezbollah will be victorious” line the dusty street.

Before Israel occupied the village, there were more than 12,000 residents; today, about 1,500 live here. There is no doctor, so when 76-year-old Zeinab Mustafa fell down and broke her right arm, the villager who works on sheep and cows set it. When she tripped and broke her left arm, the pain was so great that she asked a neighbor to drive her to see a real doctor an hour away. “Nothing has really changed here,” she said.

Jobs are few. The village supports itself by growing tobacco and olives. But the low price for tobacco has made it difficult for farmers even to cover their costs.

Stretching from the Mediterranean to the foothills of Mt. Hermon, southern Lebanon was a poor, multiethnic agricultural region with a population of about 300,000 when the Palestine Liberation Organization set up shop in the 1970s. “Back then it was little Palestine,” said Timur Goksel, a senior advisor to U.N. forces in the south. “There was no south Lebanon. The PLO controlled everything.”

The PLO took advantage of Lebanon’s open frontier to attack Israel, and the Jewish state crossed the border in 1978, leaving homes destroyed and refugees fleeing before it withdrew. Israel returned in 1982 and stayed put, determined to liquidate the PLO in Lebanon.

More than two-thirds of the population departed, leaving just 77,000 people in the occupied zone where Israel had captured 114 villages. The Jewish state created what it called a security buffer and established a new militia and civil administration, pressuring locals to join. They were later branded as collaborators with a brutal regime that often subjected the Lebanese to humiliating searches and interrogations.

With the backing of Syria and Iran, Hezbollah waged a guerrilla war that eventually forced Israel to withdraw. Although there were concerns at the time of the retreat that Hezbollah would attack Christian villages, the overall mood was joyous, and the attacks never materialized. “The whole withdrawal went so smoothly,” said the U.N.’s Goksel. “There was no bloodshed. It was anticlimactic. These villages have become just like any other Lebanese village.”

Local people and government leaders expected the international community to come up with redevelopment aid for the occupation zone, in which 2,700 homes were destroyed, 12,047 were seriously damaged and 9,730 were partially damaged, according to a recent study commissioned by the Netherlands.

Kuwait is now rebuilding three villages from the ground up, and the government says it has received limited aid from Arab countries. But donations have fallen far short of the rosy expectations of a year ago.

And Lebanon itself is so burdened with debt that it has no money of its own to invest in the south.

“If you look technically, the economic situation of people of the south was better off [under Israeli occupation] than now,” said Mohammed Mokalled, coordinator of the U.N. Development Program in the south, one of the few agencies bringing money and projects to the region.

Even where money is available, no local government officials are in place to help administer programs. The Israeli-appointed administrators have either fled or gone to prison. There have not been elections in the south in 35 years, nor are there plans to have any. The only established group is Hezbollah, torn between loyalty to Lebanon and to its benefactors, Syria and Iran.

“It’s not going as well as we want,” said Goksel, who has been in the region since 1979. “I hate to say this, but the area became too quiet and calm too fast” and is no longer a priority for the international community.

Still, the pending return of those sent to prison has sparked the most immediate concern. When Israeli forces withdrew, the most notorious collaborators fled Lebanon. Courts have sentenced 35 former South Lebanon Army, or SLA, members to death in absentia.

But hundreds of others simply turned themselves in to the authorities. After a national debate over how to treat those who worked for the occupiers, most of the 1,800 who were convicted received prison terms of six months to a year. The relatively light punishment has caused resentment among those who held out for more than two decades and refused to take money from the occupying forces.

Khattar Azmat, 55, was paid $450 a month to cook for the SLA. “There was no work. What were we supposed to do?” he said recently as he sat with his wife and four children in a cramped two-room apartment in Marjayoun. “You either worked for the SLA or went to work in Israel.”

Azmat was found guilty of collaboration and spent several months in prison.

Recently, he stepped onto his balcony to watch as nervous Lebanese soldiers and intelligence agents fanned out across the town square, searching cars and questioning pedestrians. A day earlier, the square had been littered with leaflets threatening collaborators and their families with violence if they didn’t leave.

The leaflets said, in part: “All collaborators who come out of [prison] should not return to their villages. . . . In case they return, the doors of hell will open in their faces.”

Azmat carried the paper folded and tucked in his back pocket. “Of course I am scared,” he said.

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Slackman was recently on assignment in Lebanon.