Nir Rosen - Aftermath

By late June most of the Palestinian refugees from Nahr al-Barid had fled to the nearby Bedawi refugee camp. In a schoolyard there I was stopped by Abu Hadi, born in Haifa in 1946. “I am a person without an address,” he told me. “I wish I was a donkey or a horse so I would have doctors and lawyers for my rights.” He pulled out a notebook. “My office is my pocket,” he said. He showed me a plastic bag with a sponge and a towel. “My bathroom is in my hand.” A peaceful demonstration of hundreds of civilians, including women and children, marched from Bedawi toward their former homes, asking for the right to return there. Lebanese soldiers opened fire at close range, killing two demonstrators and wounding at least twenty. As the demonstrators fled they were attacked by Sunni civilians from the region, beaten and stabbed. Palestinian families seeking to recover the corpses of their relatives killed by the army’s indiscriminate shelling were told to sign statements affirming that the men had been with Fatah al-Islam or were killed by the group. At the Interior Ministry’s Qibba base near Nahr al-Barid, where many Palestinians were interrogated, at least one of the officers had graduated from an American military program in interrogation described as “debriefing, interviewing, and elicitation.” Numerous Palestinian men reported being detained and tortured for many days. Palestinians throughout Lebanon were beaten at checkpoints.

A SENSE OF FOREBODING united people in Lebanon and throughout the region in response to the destabilizing occupation of Iraq. It also made Sunnis feel vulnerable. North of Tripoli, by the village of Qubat Shamra, where a boy was selling watermelons off the side of the road the day I visited, there was a stretch of broken wall with two lines of graffiti. “We tell you, oh rulers, of treachery and tyranny, the blood of the martyr Hariri is not to be forgotten,” said one. The other listed the successors of the Prophet Muhammad whom Sunnis revere and warned that “the blood of Sunnis is boiling.” It was signed by an unknown group called the Mujahideen Battalions of Tel Hayat, in reference to a nearby village. Further up the road toward the Syrian border, past tall pine and eucalyptus trees, one side of an apartment building was covered with a large painting of Rafiq al-Hariri. “They feared you so they killed you,” it said. “Truly they are pigs.” It quoted from the Koran as well, an example of the strange juxtaposition of Islamism and the Hariri cult. I stopped at Kusha and met a twenty-three-year-old third-year law student called Muhamad, who had learned English from listening to rap music. Muhamad had joined the Interior Ministry’s new Information Branch earlier that year as a volunteer “because of the Shiite campaign against this government,” he said. “You have to do something.” His responsibility was to “keep an eye open for anything strange in town.”

According to Muhamad, Lebanon’s Sunnis had finally come to believe that Lebanon was their country. “After they killed Hariri we woke up,” he said. “Shiites hate us. After Hariri’s death I started feeling hatred of Shiites. I hate Shiites after they thanked Syria in the demonstration.” He also hated Shiites for reacting positively to Saddam Hussein’s execution. “At the end Saddam was a Sunni,” he said. “I love Saddam. He subjugated Shiites. He was a leader in every sense of the word.” Muhamad believed he was helping to defend Lebanon from the “Shiite crescent.” “They’re trying to extend their principles through all of Lebanon. The biggest danger is coming from Shiites, not Israel. The priority is Shiites, to confront their project. I would take a gun and face Shiites, not only me but many people here.”

In the village of Masha I drove by the main mosque, which had a large picture of Hariri on one wall. Above the mosque a large blue sign said, “Palestine and Iraq are calling you, boycott American products.” Elsewhere in town a small shop had the obligatory picture of Saddam with his two sons at his side. A local sheikh had praised Fatah al-Islam as mujahideen.

Throughout Sunni towns in the north and Sunni neighborhoods in Tripoli and Beirut one finds images of Saddam and graffiti praising the executed former Iraqi leader. “The nation that gave birth to Saddam Hussein will not bow,” said one in the Beqaa. In Beirut’s Sunni stronghold of Tariq al-Jadida I found posters of “the martyred leader” Saddam with the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem behind him. On the road to Mishmish, a small mountain town in Akkar, I passed a wall where someone had written “Long live the hero Saddam Hussein.” Entering the town I drove under many banners honoring the army. “Only your pure blood draws the red line,” said one, in reference to Nasrallah’s recent speech. When I visited in late July 2007, the all-Sunni town had already lost three of its men to Fatah al-Islam; eight other soldiers from Mishmish were wounded. “People are very angry at the Palestinians,” mayor Hanzar Amr Din told me. He did not believe the anger would subside after the fighting. “If they think of coming back to the camp, people will destroy it,” he said. “People here were very upset at Nasrallah’s words about red lines,” he said. “Last summer people were happy with Nasrallah for fighting Israel, but saying that the camp is a red line means he is backing Palestinians against the army.”

That summer I found similar sentiments in the Sunni town of Bibnine. A laborer in a sandwich shop compared the situation to the 1970 Black September fighting, when the Jordanians had gotten rid of Palestinians. “I swear on the Koran,” he told me, “if I see a Palestinian I would slaughter him and drink his blood.” I asked him what he thought of Hizballah. “I hope they get rid of them too,” he said. The walls of Bibnine were plastered with pictures of the ten soldiers killed in the fighting, and I was reminded of the similar pictures festooning Shiite towns a year before in honor of the Hizballah soldiers who had died. On a wall near children playing on a road, someone had written with chalk, “Saddam Hussein is the martyr of the nation.” Khuzaimi, a twelve-year-old boy, told me that “we all want to grow up to join the army to destroy this infidel al-Absi.” But since Fatah al-Islam would be destroyed by then, he said, “then we will all go fight Israel.”

Most of the townsmen had taken their weapons to Nahr al-Barid in the first days of the fighting to “help the army,” I was told by Qais, a member of the Internal Security Forces from the town. “Anybody above sixteen went down,” he said—122 soldiers in all. “There is no family in Bibnine without somebody down there,” he said, adding that his family had fifteen men there. “There is a big anger at the Palestinians,” he said. “We consider them responsible for this.” When I visited Bibnine on July 31 the shelling of Nahr al-Barid echoed up to the town. Many of the townsmen worked as fishermen off the coast of Tripoli, but since the fighting had begun they had been forced to stay at home.

“They should be put on the border in the south so they can smell Palestine soil and remember it,” said Abu Muhamad, whose son Osama, a twenty-six-year-old soldier, had died in Nahr al-Barid. He blamed Syria for sending Fatah al-Islam to Lebanon. “My son the martyr, from childhood he wanted to be in the army. He grew up in a military house. I am a retired soldier. I am proud of him. He was brave, not a coward.” Abu Muhamad had two other sons in the army, one of whom was wounded in the battle. “Our first martyr was Rafiq al-Hariri,” he told me. “He was a martyr to the nation, and we all want to be martyrs to the nation.”

From his balcony Abu Muhamad could view the camp smoldering down on the coast. His face was lined and weathered. He looked tired but tried to smile. “The people won’t allow the camp to be rebuilt,” he said. “As soon as the fighting stops, people will go down to prevent it from being rebuilt.” Another guest, the father of a soldier still fighting in the camp, repeated an oft-heard slander that the Palestinians had sold Palestine to the Jews in 1948 and now had sold Nahr al-Barid to the jihadists. “That gang bought their camp,” the man said. He had been among the first armed men to descend on the camp, he told me. “All towns around the camp went down and took the arms of soldiers who were killed,” he said. “Now there is a blood feud between Lebanese and Palestinians,” said Abu Muhamad. “The big problem is not with the Palestinians.” The real problem was not the Nahr al-Barid camp but the one in downtown Beirut, he said, meaning the Shiite protesters. Like most Sunnis in the north, he had been angered by Nasrallah’s “red lines” speech in May. “Call it red lines or green lines or whatever you want,” he said. “Your lines won’t stop us.”